(b) Aircraft can discover the movement of troops in large bodies more accurately and successfully than had been imagined.
(c) That body of aircraft which is used to a rougher climate, and to working in heavier winds, will have an immense advantage not only in bad weather but in all weather. It is this, coupled with a very fine and already established tradition of adventure, which has made the English airmen easily the superior of their Allies and enemies.
(d) The aeroplane is neither as invulnerable at a great height as one school imagined it, nor as vulnerable as the opposite school maintained. The casualties are not as high in proportion to the numbers engaged as they would be in any other arm—at least so far—but they exist. And it would seem that the impossibility of telling whether an aeroplane belongs to friend or foe is a serious addition to the risk.
Many questions connected with aircraft still remain to be solved; by far the most important of which to this country are connected with the efficiency of the dirigible balloon.
(4) The amount of attention that should be given to good rifle firing and the importance that should be attached to the bayonet seem both to have been answered hitherto by the war.
Superior rifle fire, especially under the conditions of a difficult defensive, was the saving of the British force during the retreat from Mons, and, during the whole battle of the Marne, French accounts agree that the bayonet was the deciding factor in action after action. But even if it be true, in the words of a French officer, that “all actions end with the bayonet,” the actual number of troops thus engaged and the casualties connected with them, are not in a very high proportion to the whole.
It almost seems as though the bayonet had replaced the old shock action of cavalry in some degree, and that it was to be used only when the opposing troops were shaken or were occupied in too precipitate a retirement. Of successful bayonet work against other conditions we have at least had no examples recorded.
(5) On the two chief points in connexion with field artillery, records hitherto received tell us little. We shall not know until more detailed accounts are available whether the vastly superior rapidity of fire enjoyed by the French 75 millimetre gun has given it a corresponding superiority over its opponent, the German 77. That it has a superiority is fairly clear. The degree of that superiority we shall not learn until we have the story of the war from the German side.
Neither are we established upon the question of weight. General Langlois’ theory, which convinced the French that the light gun was essential, has not so far been proved absolutely certain, and there have been occasions when the English heavier gun (notably at Meaux) was of vast importance to our Allies. But I suggest that this question will be better answered now the weather has changed. In dry weather, that is, over hard ground, the difference between the heavier and the lighter gun is not so noticeable; once the ground is heavy it becomes very noticeable indeed.
(6) With the next question, that of the materials and their supply, we enter a region of the utmost interest to this country in particular, because it is the superiority of this country at sea, and the almost complete blockade of the Germanic Powers, that is here concerned. Roughly speaking, we find (a) That a blockade of enemy ports from a great distance is easy; (b) of enemy supply through neutrals very difficult indeed; (c) That certain special products which modern science has made necessary in war are most affected. For example: