“See that in the paper this morning about the new German Fokker monoplane?” I asked him as we both smoked and rested, our machines standing side by side outside.
“Of course, my dear old Claude,” was his reply.
“It would be one of the jokes of the war if it wasn’t such a grim jest. Remember what they said recently in Parliament—that we held the supremacy of the air, and that it is maintained.”
“All humbug,” I declared bluntly. “Sad though it is to admit it.”
“Of course it is!” cried Teddy very emphatically.
“The fact is that the public haven’t yet realised that the joke is against our Government ‘experts’ who now see all their science set at nought by a rule-of-the-thumb Dutchman who, by the simple process of putting a big engine into a copy of an obsolete French monoplane, has given his own country’s chief enemy the freedom of the air.”
I agreed with him; and his words, I confess, set me thinking. The papers had been full of the Fokker aeroplane, of its great superiority over anything we possessed, and of it as a real peril to our pilots in Flanders.
“The real fact is,” declared Teddy, in the intervals of a deal of hammering, “that there’s nothing extraordinary about the Fokker except that it is built sensibly for a definite job and does it, while our own ‘experts’ have tangled themselves and the British aircraft industry in a web of pseudo-science and political scheming which has resulted in our lack of the proper machines and engines to fight the Zeppelins.”
“Yes,” I answered with a sigh. “You’re quite right, Teddy. But something must be done. We must find some means by which to fight the enemy’s dirigibles. We have a few good aeroplanes, I admit, but, as you say, those are not the product of the Government factories, but have been produced by private firms. Why? Because airmen have been so badly let down by their experts.”
At that moment a shadow was cast before the door of the shed, and a bright musical feminine voice cried: