BOELCKE'S LAND OF PROMISE.

On the 28th of October, six Halberstadters and Aviatiks attacked two English aviators in the neighbourhood of PoziÈres. During the fight six fresh enemy machines came to the assistance of their friends. At the end of five minutes of furious fighting two German machines collided. Pieces of the machines fell, and one of them descended toward the East. The fight lasted 15 minutes, at the end of which time all the enemy machines were driven off.

It is probable that it was during this fight that Captain Boelcke was killed. It was, in fact, at this date that the German wireless stated that Boelcke had been killed owing to a collision in the air.

In a letter which he wrote to a friend a few days before his tragic and still unaccountable death, Boelcke, the best-known and most successful of the German aviators, said:

"The Somme front is a positive land of promise. The sky is filled with English airmen."

Boelcke expressed, under the guise of a kind of sporting self-congratulation, the astonishment of his fellows at the way in which the British flying service had developed.

A large number of documents found upon German prisoners give evidence of a no less striking kind upon the same point.

"Our air service," says one of them, "practically ceased to exist during the Battle of the Somme. At times the sky seemed black with enemy machines."

Another says:

"We are so inferior to our opponents in our air service that when hostile machines fly over our own lines we have no recourse but to hide ourselves in the earth. Now and then a few of our machines attempt to go up, but it is only a drop in the bucket."

Behind the lines I went to see numerous aviation camps, instruction camps, depÔts of munitions, etc. They were like so many beehives, models of organisation, order and method. The pilots, the observers, the mechanics, everyone, seen at close quarters, gave me an impression of a very unusual power and intelligence, and inspired me with the same confidence with which their own mastery of the air has so long filled them, ever since, indeed, they wrested it from the enemy.

Perhaps it may not be labour lost if, in order to get a right understanding of the present very satisfactory and praiseworthy position, we review shortly the history of British military aviation since the beginning of the war.

England had not wished for war, nor had she prepared for it, and while aviation seemed to her a marvellous achievement of the human brain, she was far from thinking that she was bound to make use of it in order to injure mankind. This is why her military air service, like her whole Army, was in no more than an embryonic condition when she found herself faced with the grim reality of this war.

Far more than the exigencies of the campaign on the continent, it was the repeated raids of the Zeppelins over England which caused her to devote herself to the development of her aviation.

The undertaking bristled with difficulties. We should be wrong, were we in France, to suppose that we are the only people the story of whose aviation has been marked by crises. Our Allies, though their practical nature is proverbial among us, were forced to experiment and grope their way for a long time before they could arrive at a solution of the many knotty problems of aerial defence.

A complete lack of any central authority, a division or responsibility between the various staffs, nobody to decide as to how machines should be employed or how built, waste of every kind—the English have experienced all these troubles. But how admirably they have surmounted them! The proof is that now the only resource of the Germans is a servile imitation.

This spirit of imitation among the Germans has shown itself most markedly in these last weeks, during the process of the Battle of the Ancre. The Germans set out by collecting a large number of aeroplanes on a very narrow front. Then they began to show some signs of taking the initiative with a daring to which we were little accustomed.

Did they really hope to wrest the mastery of the air from the English? I do not know. In any case their attempt began badly; for when, 40 in number, they met 30 of the British machines, they could discover no better way of saving themselves than by flight, after a quarter of their number had been put out of action.

It was about this time that General von Groener, a man of energy and resolution, called upon the German aeroplane factories to increase their output; and that Mr. Lloyd George in England, while giving publicity to this new effort of Germany, exhorted his fellow-countrymen not to allow themselves to be overtaken by their enemy.

Boelcke may rest in peace. His land of promise can only grow greater and breed birds more rapidly.

After this, what need one say more of the technical skill and the often heroic courage of the British aviator?

The French and British airmen form, indeed, one great family of heroes, and our men have, in King George's Army, cousins who are as like them as brothers.

At this point I will do no more than offer for your consideration a document and a story.

The document is a letter, sent from Germany to his friends by an English aviator, Lieutenant Tudor-Hart, on the 25th of this July. I should blame myself were I to alter one word of it.

"I was," he writes, "with Captain Webb at between 12,000 and 15,000 feet above the German lines, when we saw eight German machines coming towards us from the South-west. They were higher than we were, and we went towards them to attack them. Two of them passed about 300 yards above our heads. I opened fire on one and they replied together.

"I signed to Webb to turn so that I might fire at the other machine, behind us; but he made a spurt forward with the machine. I looked round to see what had happened, but Webb pointed to his stomach and fell forward upon the controls. I fancy he must have died almost immediately. His last thought had been to save the machine.

"It at once began to swing in the direction of the German lines, and I was compelled to return to my machine-gun, in order to fire on a plane which was getting too close. The other machines never stopped firing at us. My only hope was to make for our lines, but I could not manage to push Webb out of the pilot's seat, and I was obliged to manoeuvre above the hood.

"I had to fire so often that it became impossible for me to guide the machine. At last, constantly under fire, I planed down towards a field near by and tried to land. I saw a number of men with rifles, and I thought that I might be killed before being able to set the machine on fire.

"One wing having struck the earth, the machine was smashed, and I was thrown out. I got off with one side paralysed, one ankle and one rib broken. I was very well treated, and the German flying men behaved towards me like sportsmen and gentlemen."

It is in this way that the paladins of this war both conduct and express themselves.

And now for the story.

There was once in England a rich man who interested himself in Art and Politics. His name was Lord Lucas. Life had always smiled upon him, and he had returned her smile. Had he wished it, he might have spent his life in slippered ease and lived from day to day without a care.

Choosing, rather, to become a soldier, he joined the Expeditionary Forces during the South African War. He was wounded and lost a leg, but this in no way deterred him from being of service to his country.

When the European War broke out, Lord Lucas was the Minister for Agriculture in the Asquith Cabinet.

He felt shame to be engaged in such a vapid business as Politics now appeared, and he resigned. Next we find him volunteering for the British air service. In spite of his artificial leg, he went through his training, was hurt, got cured, and returned to his work and never rested until he had flown over the German lines. One day Lord Lucas, millionaire, artist, ex-Cabinet Minister, and, above all, soldier, failed to return to his squadron. The Boches alone know whether he is dead or a prisoner.

The man who told me the story of this splendid life was the best friend of Lord Lucas, and he was worthy to be it. I asked this soldier, a peer himself and himself wounded, if in England, as in France, commissions in the air service were much sought after. In reply, he pointed to two great birds, and said: "We admire them, Monsieur, as you do, and, like you, we envy them."