There is nothing, I think, that need prevent me from pointing out, what there is no hint of in the letter itself—that the writer of it was in one of the Tanks, and was severely wounded.
In the last actions of the war, even the semblance of a Tank was sometimes enough! "Supply Tanks"—writes my informant—"were then being used, which looked like the real thing, but were only very slightly armoured. They were intended to carry material, sometimes munitions, and even food. Three of these pseudo-tanks were carrying up material to rebuild a bridge which had been destroyed. They discovered, when they neared the place, that the enemy were holding it in some strength, and our infantry could not advance. Moreover directly the Tanks appeared, they began to draw fire—which they were not meant to face—and the situation was threatening. But, with great pluck and resource, the Tanks decided just to go on, and trust to their looks, which were like those of the fighting Tanks, to drive the enemy from the position.... One Tank became a casualty; but the other two went straight for the German lines; and the Germans, under the impression that they were being attacked by fighting Tanks, either put up their hands or fled."
Thus, in its last moments of resistance, the German Army, now but the ghost of itself, was scattered by the ghost of a Tank! What was being prepared for it, had the struggle gone on, is told in a memorandum on Tanks organisation which has come my way, and makes one alternately shudder at the war that might have been, and rejoice in the peace that is. In the last weeks of the war, Tank organisation was going rapidly forward. A new Tank Board, consisting of Naval, Military, and Industrial members, was concentrating all its stored knowledge on "the application of naval tactics to land warfare," in other words, on the development of Tanks, and had the war continued, the complete destruction of the German Armies would have been brought about in 1919 by "a Tank programme of some six thousand machines." When one considers that for the whole of the three last victorious months in which Tanks played such an astonishing part, the British Armies never possessed more than four hundred of them, who travelled like a circus from army to army, the significance of this figure will be understood. Nor could Germany, by any possibility, have produced either the labour or the material necessary, whereby to meet Tank with Tank. The game was played out and the stakes lost.
But of fresh headings in this last tremendous chapter of England's Effort, there might be no end. I can only glance at one or two of them.
The Air Force? Ah, that, indeed, is another story—and so great a one, that all I can attempt here is to put together[[12] ] a few facts and figures, in one of those comparisons of the "beginning," with the "end," of time with time, by which alone some deposit from the stream of history in which we are all bathed filters into the mind, and—with good luck: stays there. Here, in Hertfordshire, in the first summer of the war, how great an event was still the passage of an aeroplane over these quiet woods! How the accidents of the first two years appalled us, heart-broken spectators, and the inexorable military comment upon them: "Accidents or no accidents, we have got to master this thing, and master the Germans in it." And, accidents or no accidents, the young men of Britain and France steadily made their way to the aviation schools, having no illusions at all, in those early days, as to the special and deadly risks to be run, yet determined to run them, partly from clear-eyed patriotism, partly from that natural call of the blood which makes an Englishman or a Frenchman delight in danger and the untried for their own sakes. Thenceforward, the wonderful tale ran, mounting to its climax. At the beginning of the war the military wing of the British Air Service consisted of 1,844 officers and men. At the conclusion of the war there were, in round numbers, 28,000 officers and 264,000 other ranks employed under the Air Board. From under 2,000 to nearly 300,000!—and in four years! And the uses to which this new Army of the Winds was put, grew perpetually with its growth. Let us remember that, while aeroplane reconnaissance was of immense service in the earliest actions of the war, there was no artillery observation by aeroplane till after the first Battle of the Marne. There is the landmark. Artillery observation was used for the first time at the Battle of the Aisne, in the German retreat from the Marne. Thenceforward, month by month, the men in the clouds became increasingly the indispensable guides and allies of the men on the ground, searching out and signalling the guns of the enemy, while preventing his fliers from searching out and signalling our own. Next came the marvellous development of aerial photography, by which the whole trench world, the artillery positions and hinterland of the hostile army could be mapped day by day for the information of those attacking it; the development of the bombing squadrons, which began by harassing the enemy's communications immediately behind the fighting line, and developed into those formidable expeditions of the Independent Force into Germany itself, which so largely influenced the later months of the war. Finally, the airman, not content with his own perpetual and deadly fighting in the air, fighting in which the combatants of all nations developed a daring beyond the dreams of any earlier world, began to take part in the actual land-battle itself, swooping on reserves, firing into troops on the march, or bringing up ammunition.
And while the flying Army of the Winds was there developing, the flying Army of the Seas, its twin brother, was not a whit behind. The record of the Naval Air Service, as the scouts for the Fleet, the perpetual foe of, and ceaseless spy upon, the submarine, will stir the instincts for song and story in our race while song and story remain. It was the naval airmen who protected and made possible the safe withdrawal of the troops from Suvla and Helles; it was they who discovered and destroyed the mines along our coasts; who fought the enemy seaplanes man to man, and gun to gun; who gave the pirate nests of Zeebrugge and Ostend no rest by day or night, who watched over the ceaseless coming and going of the British, Dominion, and American troops across the Channel; who were the eyes of our coasts as the ships, laden with the men, food, and munitions, which were the life-blood of the Allied Cause, drew homeward to our ports, with the submarines on their track, and the protecting destroyers at their side.
Nor did we only manufacture planes and train men for ourselves. "The Government of the United States," says the Air Service Report, "has paid a striking tribute to the British Air Service by adopting our system of training. The first 500 American officer cadets to be trained went through the School of Military Aeronautics at Oxford, afterwards graduating at various aerodromes in England. These officers formed the nucleus of American schools, which were eventually started both in the United States and in France.... In all about 700 American pilots have passed through our schools.... And when the question of producing a standardised engine was considered every facility was given and all our experience placed at the disposal of the American Government, with the result that the Liberty engine was evolved."
Meanwhile the constant adaptation to new conditions required in the force stimulated the wits of everybody concerned. Take aerial photography. The first successful photograph was taken in November, 1914, of the village of Neuve Chapelle. The photographic section then consisted of two officers and three men, with two cameras and a portable box of chemicals. At the present day it contains 250 officers and 3,000 men—with a large training school; and its prints have been issued by the million.
Meanwhile the development of our aircraft fire had driven the aerial photographer from a height of 3,000 feet up to a height of 22,000, where, but for invention, he might have perished with cold, or found it impossible to breathe. But intelligence pursued him, providing him with oxygen and with electric heating apparatus in the upper air. And when, on the other hand, he or his comrade swooped down to within a few hundred feet of the earth, in order to co-operate in attack with infantry or Tanks, again intelligence came into play, inventing a special armoured machine for the protection of the new tactics.