Their principal duties may be summed up as follows:
Keep their Chief informed before, during, and after an operation.
Their office work ought to be limited to the writing of orders and reports concerning the operations. This is easy of accomplishment when the commander has a comprehensive grasp of the situation, and gives his staff clear and concise orders, which they have only to put into effect in due form.
The staff-officer must also act as an intelligence officer. As close to the General’s headquarters as possible, a staff-officer must establish a centre of information, where he will keep a force of men and all the equipment that will enable him to keep in constant communication with his General, with the infantry, the artillery, the captive balloons, all the services of the aviation, etc. When a reconnoitring aviator returns with some important information, unless he has been able to communicate it by wireless, he lands as near as possible to the intelligence bureau, gives to the staff-officer in charge an account of what he has seen, and flies off. The staff-officer transmits immediately to the proper quarter the information he has just received, and it is his duty in all important cases to make sure that his message has reached its proper destination. If telephonic communication has been interrupted by any accident of battle, he must despatch some of the estafettes, dispatch-runners, or carrier-pigeons at his disposal.
CHAPTER II
AVIATION
1. Its military beginnings. Its increasing importance.
2. Its use and scope.
3. Different kinds of aircraft. Battle-planes. Bombing-planes. Observation—or scout-planes. Employment of scout-planes for the direction of artillery-fire and the movements of infantry. Aviation during a battle.
4. Hydroplanes.
5. Balloons, Zeppelins.
1. Its military beginnings, its increasing importance. At the beginning of the war, Germany alone possessed a military flying corps. She was the only nation who desired war. She was the only one prepared, in this as in other respects. Her foresight was duly rewarded.
Though still few, her aviators found themselves the masters of the air. They made themselves very useful to the German Command by observations that enabled them to locate the principal French forces. They rendered also great services to their artillery during the actual fighting. A German machine, while clumsily flying some 3000 feet above the French batteries, would send up a rocket, and a few minutes afterwards 150 mm. shells would begin to fall on the spot thus indicated.
If, at the time, the Germans had been as expert as they are now in pointing their guns, these air-directed bombardments would have had more efficacious results, but even as it was, they invariably produced a deplorable impression on the morale of the troops who felt themselves at the mercy of a shell-fire which the French artillery could not return for want of howitzers.