at home. He suggested that the entire output of
the Avro factory, and all the Vickers fighters, should be placed at the
disposal of the War Office; that four Maurice Farmans under construction
in Paris for the Admiralty should be delivered direct to the
headquarters of the Royal Flying Corps in France; and that any number up
to twenty good pilots, and the same number of wireless operators, should
be lent by the Admiralty to the War Office. The Admiralty replied at
once that they were willing to hand over to the Army Council twelve
Vickers fighters and six Maurice Farman machines, and that they were
preparing a squadron of eight Avro machines and four Sopwith scouts
under Squadron Commander Longmore, to proceed overseas about the middle
of January, and to work under the orders of the officer commanding the
Military Wing. On the 1st of January 1915 the War Office, after
consulting Sir David Henderson, refused this offer of a naval squadron.
'It has been decided', wrote Lieutenant-Colonel Brancker, 'to send no
further new aeroplane squadrons to join the Expeditionary Force until
the winter is over; the bad weather renders aerial reconnaissance
difficult, and we find that owing to the impossibility of protecting the
machine from deterioration it will be better to keep our new units at
home until conditions improve.' In the event about a hundred machines,
and as many more American Curtiss machines, built and building, were
turned over by the Admiralty to the War Office during the first year of
the war, but no further suggestion for the use of naval squadrons on the
western front was made until March 1916; and it was not until October of
that year that the first complete naval squadron got to work as a
self-contained unit under military command.

Service men will understand better than civilians the difficulties of a
mixed service. Each of the great services has always been willing to
help the other so long as it is allowed to preserve its own traditions
intact. Their quarrels are lovers' quarrels, springing from a jealous
maintenance of separate individualities. Moreover, the war, during its
early course, was regarded by most civilians and most service men as
likely to be a short war. The attention of soldiers late in 1914 was
concentrated on the decision that was expected in the following spring.
Lord Kitchener's famous prediction of a three years' war was regarded as
a wise insurance against foolish over-confidence, but was