Before the offensive new aerodromes began to appear along the front at the same time that new roads were building. An army that had lacked both planes and guns at the start now had both. Every aviator knew that he was expected to gain and hold the mastery; his part was set no less than that of the infantry. Where should "the spirit that quickeneth" dwell if not with the aviators? No weary legs hamper him; he does not have to crawl over the dead or hide in shell-craters or stand up to his knees in mire. He is the pampered aristocrat of war, the golden youth of adventure.
He leaves a comfortable bed, with bath, a good breakfast, the comradeship of a pleasant mess, the care of servants, to mount his steed. When he returns he has only to step out of his seat. Mechanics look after his plane and refreshment and shade in summer and warmth in winter await alike the spoiled child of the favored, adventurous corps who has not the gift and never quite dares the great hazards as well as the one who dares them to his certain end. All depends on the man.
Rising ten or fifteen thousand feet, slipping in and out of clouds, the aviator breathes pure ozone on a dustless roadway, the world a carpet under him; and though death is at his elbow it is no grimy companion like death in the trenches. He is up or he is down, and when he is up the thrill that holds his faculties permits of no apprehensions. There is no halfway business of ghastly wounds which foredoom survival as a cripple. Alive, he is nearer immortality than any other living man can be; dead, his spirit leaves him while he is in the heavens. Death comes splendidly, quickly, and until the last moment he is trying to keep control of his machine. It is not for him to envy the days of cavalry charges. He does not depend upon the companionship of other men to carry him on, but is the autocrat of his own fate, the ruler of his own dreams. All hours of daylight are the same to him. At any time he may be called to flight and perhaps to die. The glories of sunset and sunrise are his between the sun and the earth.
You expect the British to be cool aviators, but with their phlegm, as we have seen, goes that singular love of risk, of adventure, which sends them to shoot tigers and climb mountains. Indeed, the Englishman's phlegm is a sort of leash holding in check a certain recklessness which his seeming casualness conceals. After it had become almost a law that no aviator should descend lower than twelve thousand feet, British aviators on the Somme descended to three hundred, emptied their machine guns into the enemy, and escaped the patter of rifle fire which the surprised German soldiers had hardly begun before the plane at two miles a minute or more was out of range.
When Lord Kitchener was inspecting an aerodrome in France in 1914 he said: "One day you will be flying and evoluting in squadrons like the navy;" and the aviators, then feeling their way step by step, smiled doubtfully, convinced that "K" had an imagination. A few months later the prophecy had come true and the types of planes had increased until they were as numerous as the types of guns.
The swift falcon waiting fifteen thousand feet up for his prey to add another to his list in the communiqué is as distinct from the one in which I crossed the channel as the destroyer is from the cruiser and from some still bigger types as is the cruiser from a battleship. While the enemy was being fought down, bombs were dropped not by pounds but by tons on villages and billets, on ammunition dumps and rail-heads, adding their destruction to that of the shells.
There was more value in mastery than in destruction or in freedom of observation, for it affected the enemy's morale. A soldier likes to see his own planes in the air and the enemy's being driven away. The aerial influence on his psychology is enormous, for he can watch the planes as he lies in a shell-crater with his machine gun or stands guard in the trench; he has glimpses of passing wings overhead between the bursts of shells. To know that his guns are not replying adequately and that every time one of his planes appears it is driven to cover takes the edge off initiative, courage and discipline, in the resentment that he is handicapped.
German prisoners used to say on the Somme that their aviators were "funks," though the Allied aviators knew that it was not their opponents' lack of courage which was the principal fault, even if they had lost morale from being the under dog and lacked British and French initiative, but numbers and material. It was resource against resource again; a fight in the delicate business of the manufacture of the fragile framework, of the wonderful engines with their short lives, and of the skilled battalions of workers in factories. The Germans had to bring more planes from another front in order to restore the balance. The Allies foreseeing this brought still more themselves, till the numbers were so immense that when a battle between a score of planes on either side took place no one dared venture the opinion that the limit had been reached—not while there was so much room in the air and volunteers for the aviation corps were so plentiful.