corps of an army has one of these escadrilles or teams of
aeroplanes, and the army as a whole has an extra one, so that, if an
army consists of eight corps, it possesses fifty-four aeroplanes. I am
speaking now of the particular type of aeroplane employed for
regulating artillery fire. It was a young non-commissioned officer with
a marked Southern accent who explained to us the secret nature of
things. He was wearing both the Military Medal and the Legion of
Honour, for he had done wondrous feats in the way of shooting the
occupants of Taubes in mid-air. He got out one of the machines,
and exhibited its tricks and its wireless apparatus, and invited us to
sit in the seat of the flier. The weather was quite unsuitable for flying,
but, setting four men to hold the machine in place, he started the
Gnome motor and ran it up to two thousand revolutions a minute,
creating a draught which bowed the fluttered wheat for many yards
behind and blew hats off. And in the middle of this pother he
continued to offer lucid and surprising explanations to deafened
ears until his superior officer, excessively smart and looking like a
cross between a cavalryman and a yachtsman, arrived on the
scene swinging a cane.

It was natural that after this we should visit some auto-cannons
expressly constructed for bringing down aeroplanes. In front of
these marvels it was suggested to us that we should neither take
photographs nor write down exact descriptions. As regards the
latter, the Staff officers had reason to be reassured. No living
journalist could have reproduced the scientific account of the
sighting arrangements given to us in an esoteric yet quite
comprehensible language by the high priest of these guns, who was
a middle-aged artillery Captain. It lasted about twenty minutes. It
was complete, final, unchallengeable. At intervals the artillery