h aeroplane engines.
I don't know how much is known at home about what the French and
British flying corps have done out here, but to get a fair idea
of what they have accomplished one has to know something of the way
both France and England were caught napping. I think it is fair to
say that there was not one firm in all Great Britain at the outbreak
of hostilities which had proven that it could turn out a successful
aeroplane engine.

"The English War Department had what they called the Royal Aircraft
Factory, where some experimental work was done, but the day war was
declared the British Army had less than one hundred serviceable
flying machines of all types. What proved to be the most useful
plane used by the British for the first year of the war was only
a blueprint when the fighting started. France was better off.
She had factories that could make aero engines. But as to actual
planes, three hundred would be an outside figure of the number with
which France went to war.

"The use of the aeroplane in war was a subject which gave much
discussion, but few people, even in the army, thought that the
aeroplane would be of great service except for scouting. At the
airdrome where I learned to fly we used to practice dropping
bombs---imaginary ones, of course---but we were so inaccurate at it
that none of us imagined we would be of much use in that direction
in actual warfare. I have heard it said that the Germans directed
their artillery by signals dropped from aircraft at the very
beginning. They did so before they had fought many weeks, anyway.
Boche fliers, English gunners have told me, used to hover over
battery positions and drop long colored streamers and odd showers
of colored lights. It was some time before the Allied airman
contributed much to the value of the Allied gunfire. When they got
at it, they beat the Huns at their own game, for the war had not
been on many months before British planes were flying over Boche
batteries and sending back wireless messages from wireless
telegraph installations on the machines themselves.

"The Boches had lots more machines than the Allies, and their army
command had apparently worked out plans about using them which were
new to our side. I saw some of the early war-work of the British
fliers, for I got into the Army Service Corps, the transport service,
and came out to the front early in 1915. I did not get transferred
into the flying part of the business unt