their share of accidents.  Not only did the repair department make good every loss, but after three weeks of the offensive the army was fighting with fifty more machines than at the outset.  One goes through a vast Rembrandtesque shed opening upon a great sunny field, in whose cool shadows rest a number of interesting patients; captured and slightly damaged German machines, machines of our own with scars of battle upon them, one or two cases of bad landing.  The star case came over from Peronne.  It had come in two days ago.

I examined this machine and I will tell the state it was in, but I perceive that what I have to tell will read not like a sober statement of truth but like strained and silly lying.  The machine had had a direct hit from an Archibald shell.  The propeller had been clean blown away; so had the machine gun and all its fittings.  The engines had been stripped naked and a good deal bent about.  The timber stay over the aviator had been broken, so that it is marvellous the wings of the machine did not just up at once like the wings of a butterfly.  The solitary aviator had been wounded in the face.  He had then come down in a long glide into the British lines, and made a tolerable landing....

2

One consequence of the growing importance of the aeroplane in warfare is the development of a new military art, the art of camouflage.  Camouflage is humbugging disguise, it is making things—­and especially in this connection, military things—­seem not what they are, but something peaceful and rural, something harmless and quite uninteresting to aeroplane observers.  It is the art of making big guns look like haystacks and tents like level patches of field.

Also it includes the art of making attractive models of guns, camps, trenches and the like that are not bona-fide guns, camps, or trenches at all, so that the aeroplane bomb-dropper and the aeroplane observer may waste his time and energies and the enemy gunfire be misdirected.  In Italy I saw dummy guns so made as to deceive the very elect at a distance of a few thousand feet.  The camouflage of concealment aims either at invisibility or imitation; I have seen a supply train look like a row of cottages, its smoke-stack a chimney, with the tops of sham palings running along the back of the engine and creepers painted up its sides.  But that was a flight of the imagination; the commonest camouflage is merely to conceal.  Trees are brought up and planted near the object to be hidden, it is painted in the same tones as its background, it is covered with an awning painted to look like grass or earth.  I suppose it is only a matter of development before a dummy cow or so is put up to chew the cud on the awning.