To sum up, I think it is certainly true to say that in the domain of the air the Allies have established and can maintain a definite superiority over the enemy. That they have established it is plain; that they can maintain it is, I think, equally plain, because they have the larger resources, and because successful aerial work calls for the exercise of qualities which both the French and the English possess in a far more marked degree than do the Germans. Our air raids have been far more destructive from the military point of view than anything the enemy has been able to accomplish; they have been better devised and more capably carried out by men who were better fitted for the task they had in hand. It remains to be seen whether the German superiority in the lighter-than-air machines will give them any real advantage.
At present all the arguments point to the greater value of the aeroplane upon which the Allies have pinned their faith. In any case, it is too late, probably, for us to take up the question of airship construction with any hope of making effective use of it during the present War, and we must do the best we can with what we believe to be the superior weapon. My own view is that on the whole the superiority of the Allies is fully assured, and that now and to the end the credit of winning the War in the air will and must remain with us.
Chapter Five.
Britain’s Unshakable Resolve.
This War has brought many changes, and will bring many more. But it has brought one for which we cannot be too grateful, one which we may even think in the days to come was the justification and the reward for all the lives and all the treasure which the great struggle has demanded and will yet demand from us.
It has made of us one people. And when I say one people, I am not referring merely to the inhabitants of these small islands, which Britons all the world over will ever regard, as they have ever regarded, as “home.” I include the great dominions over the seas—Australia, Canada, South Africa, New Zealand, and India, with their many races and many people who live and enjoy their lives under the benign shelter of the British flag.
Nothing the world has ever seen is equal in grandeur, and in the lesson it has taught us, to the majestic uprising of the British peoples when the first shock of war burst upon a startled world in those early days—how long ago they seem to-day!—of August, 1914. From the Tropics to the Poles not a dissentient voice was heard. It is not too much to say that the entire British Empire, which many of us had perhaps come to regard as somewhat a shadowy entity, leaped to arms with a unanimity which not only surprised us, but, as we have every reason to know, startled and bewildered our enemies.
Of our own people here at home we were always sure, provided they could be induced to realise the magnitude of the great struggle before them. Of that, from the earliest days of the violation of Belgium, there was never the slightest doubt. The British people are, and have always been, peculiarly sensitive to the sanctity of their pledged word; not for nothing have we earned the reputation that the Englishman’s word is as good as his bond. And when our people realised that Germany, with a cynical disregard of international honour and good faith to which history happily offers few parallels, had deliberately attacked Belgium, there was at once an explosion of cold rage which, could the Germans but have understood it, would have convinced them that the British Empire was in this War, for good or ill, until a final settlement had been reached which would mean either absolute triumph or absolute annihilation.