s, mostly howitzers, with the long-muzzled
sixty-pounders terrible in their long range and destructiveness. Our
aircraft had grown fast, squadron upon squadron, and our aviators had
been trained in the school of General Trenchard, who sent them out over
the German lines to learn how to fight, and how to scout, and how to die
like little gentlemen.

For a time our flying-men had gone out on old-fashioned
"buses"--primitive machines which were an easy prey to the fast-flying
Fokkers who waited for them behind a screen of cloud and then "stooped"
on them like hawks sure of their prey. But to the airdrome near St.-Omer
came later models, out of date a few weeks after their delivery,
replaced by still more powerful types more perfectly equipped for
fighting. Our knights-errant of the air were challenging the German
champions on equal terms, and beating them back from the lines unless
they flew in clusters. There were times when our flying-men gained an
absolute supremacy by greater daring--there was nothing they did not
dare--and by equal skill. As a caution, not wasting their strength in
unequal contests. It was a sound policy, and enabled them to come back
again in force and hold the field for a time by powerful concentrations.
But in the battles of the Somme our airmen, at a heavy cost of life,
kept the enemy down a while and blinded his eyes.

The planting of new airdromes between Albert and Amiens, the long
trail down the roads of lorries packed with wings and the furniture of
aircraft factories, gave the hint, to those who had eyes to see, that in
this direction a merry hell was being prepared.

There were plain signs of massacre at hand all the way from the coast to
the lines. At Etaples and other places near Boulogne hospital huts and
tents were growing like mushrooms in the night. From casualty clearing
stations near the front the wounded--the human wreckage of routine
warfare--were being evacuated "in a hurry" to the base, and from the
base to England. They were to be cleared out of the way so that all the
wards might be empty for a new population of broken men, in enormous
numbers. I went down to see this clearance, this tidying up. There was a
sinister suggestion in the solitude that was being made for a multitude
that was coming.

"We shall be very busy," said the doctors.

"We must get all the rest we can now," said the nurses.

"In a little while every bed will be filled," said the matrons.

Outside on