he various messes at which we lunched was for
the most part a keen discussion of every detail and every possibility
of the offensive machine; every French officer's mess seems a little
council upon the one supreme question in France, _how to do it best._
M. Reinach has made certain suggestions about the co-operation of the
French and British that I will discuss elsewhere, but one great theme
was the constitution of "the ideal battery." For years French military
thought has been acutely attentive to the best number of guns for
effective common action, and has tended rather to the small battery
theory. My two companies were playing with the idea that the ideal
battery was a battery of one big gun, with its own aeroplane and kite
balloon marking for it.

The British seem to be associated with the adventurous self-reliance
needed in the air. The British aeroplanes do not simply fight the
Germans out of the sky; they also make themselves an abominable nuisance
by bombing the enemy trenches. For every German bomb that is dropped by
aeroplane on or behind the British lines, about twenty go down on
the heads of the Germans. British air bombs upon guns, stores and
communications do some of the work that the French effect by their
systematic demolition fire.

And the British aviator has discovered and is rapidly developing an
altogether fresh branch of air activity in the machine-gun attack at a
very low altitude. Originally I believe this was tried in western Egypt,
but now it is being increasingly used upon the British front in France.
An aeroplane which comes down suddenly, travelling very rapidly, to
a few hundred feet, is quite hard to hit, even if it is not squirting
bullets from a machine gun as it advances. Against infantry in the open
this sort of thing is extremely demoralising. It is a method of attack
still in its infancy, but there are great possibilities for it in the
future, when the bending and cracking German line gives, as ultimately
it must give if this offensive does not relax. If the Allies persist in
their pressure upon the western front, if there is no relaxation in the
supply of munitions from Britain and no lapse into tactical stupidity, a
German retreat eastward is inevitable.

Now a cavalry pursuit alone may easily come upon disaster, cavalry can
be so easily held up by wire and a few machine guns. I think the Germans
have reckoned on that and on automobiles, probably only the decay of
their _morale_