as fighting craft.

The French pinned their faith mainly to the Farman, the Caudron, the
Voisin, and the Moraine-Saulnier machines. The Bleriot and the
Nieuport, which were for some reason ruled out at the beginning of
the war, were afterwards re-adopted and employed in great numbers.

It would be gratifying to an American author to be able to describe,
or at least to mention, the favourite machine of the American
aviators who flocked to France immediately upon the declaration of
war, but the mortifying fact is that having no airplanes of our own,
our gallant volunteer soldiers of the air had to be equipped
throughout by the French with machines of their favourite types.
After we entered the war we adopted a 'plane of American design to
which was given the name "Liberty plane."

It may be worth while to revert for a moment to the distinction
drawn in a preceding paragraph between the pusher propeller and the
tractor which revolved in front of the aviator and of his machine
gun. It would seem almost incredible that two heavy blades of hard
wood revolving at a speed not less that twelve hundred times a
minute, a speed so rapid that their passage in front of the eyes of
the aviator interfered in no way with his vision, should not have
blocked a stream of bullets falling from a gun at the rate of more
than six hundred a minute. Nevertheless it was claimed during the
earlier days of the war that these bullets were not appreciably
diverted by the whirling propellers nor were the latter apparently
injured by the missiles. The latter assertion, however, must have
been to some extent disproved because it came about that the
propellers of the later machines were rimmed with a thin coating of
steel lest the blades be cut by the bullets. But the amazing ability
of modern science to cope with what seemed to be an insoluble
problem was demonstrated by the invention of a device light and
compact enough to be carried in an airplane, which applied to the
machine gun and timed in accordance with the revolutions of the
propeller so synchronized the shots with those revolutions that the
stream of lead passed between the whirling blades never once
striking. The machine was entirely automatic, requiring no attention
on the part of the operator after the gun was once started on its
discharge. This device was originally used by the Germans who
applied it to their Fokker machines. It was claimed for it that by
doing away with the wastage ca