y walk about in them; in addition
to guns and men they carry a very considerable weight of bombs beneath.
They cannot of course beget up with the speed nor soar to the height
of our smaller aeroplanes; it is as carriers in raids behind a force of
fighting machines that they should find their use.

The British establishment I visited was a very refreshing and reassuring
piece of practical organisation. The air force of Great Britain has
had the good fortune to develop with considerable freedom from old army
tradition; many of its officers are ex-civil engineers and so forth;
Headquarters is a little shy of technical direction; and all this in
a service that is still necessarily experimental and plastic is to the
good. There is little doubt that, given a release from prejudice,
bad associations and the equestrian tradition, British technical
intelligence and energy can do just as well as the French. Our problem
with our army is not to create intelligence, there is an abundance of
it, but to release it from a dreary social and official pressure. The
air service ransacks the army for men with technical training and sees
that it gets them, there is a real keenness upon the work, and the men
in these great mobile hangars talk shop readily and clearly.

I have already mentioned and the newspapers have told abundantly of
the pluck, daring, and admirable work of our aviators; what is still
untellable in any detail is the energy and ability of the constructive
and repairing branch upon whose efficiency their feats depend. Perhaps
the most interesting thing I saw in connection with the air work was
the hospital for damaged machines and the dump to which those hopelessly
injured are taken, in order that they may be disarticulated and all that
is sound in them used for reconstruction. How excellently this work
is being done may be judged from the fact that our offensive in July
started with a certain number of aeroplanes, a number that would
have seemed fantastic in a story a year before the war began. These
aeroplanes were in constant action; they fought, they were shot down,
they had their share of accidents. Not only did the repair department
make good every loss, but after three weeks of the offensive the army
was fighting with fifty more machines than at the outset. One goes
through a vast Rembrandtesque shed opening upon a great sunny field, in
whose cool shadows rest a number of interesting patients; captured and
slightly da