“With the coming of the new element—–­the fighting planes, which went out with the sole idea of individual combat—–­came the necessity for swifter planes, for the man on the fastest machine has the great advantage in the air.  The latest development is along the line of team-work in attack.  So it goes on changing.  I think the smaller, speedier aeroplanes are becoming harder to manage, but we do things now we never dreamed of doing a year ago.  All of us can fly now as we never thought before the war it would be possible to fly.

“Instead of rifles and pistols in the hands of the aviators every plane now has at least one rapid-fire gun, and some have two and even three.  The position of the rapid-fire gun on an aeroplane has a lot to do with the success or failure of a fight in the air.  All of you want to study that question carefully.

“But most fascinating of all to the new airman at the front is the actual handling of the machines when fighting.  There lies the greatest progress of all.  Construction has made big strides, but fliers have made bigger ones.  Wait till you get up front and see.”

CHAPTER V

JIMMY HILL STARTLES THE VETERANS

The Brighton boys lived every hour at that big base airdrome.  Jimmy Hill was sent up on his first practice flight on an English machine.  Joe Little got his chance at the end of a week.  He was sent up one morning in a late-type bombing machine, a huge three-seated biplane with great spreading wings and a powerful engine.  This was a most formidable looking machine in which one passenger sat out in front mounted in a sort of machine-gun turret.  The big biplane was fast, in spite of the heavy armament it carried, its three passengers and its arrangement for carrying hundreds of pounds of bombs as well.

Harry Corwin was in the air at the same time on an artillery machine, the car or fuselage of which projected far in front of the two planes.  There, well in front of the pilot, the observer sat in a turret with a machine-gun.  Machine-guns were also mounted on the wings, and a second passenger rode in the tail with another rapid-fire gun.

As Bob Haines had been on a rather long flight that day on a Nieuport, a fast French biplane, and his observer had told Bob of a new French dreadnought machine carrying two machine gunners and five machine-guns, the boys talked armament long into the night.

Every day they learned some new points.  One afternoon a pilot from the front line told of a captured German Albatros, which he spun yarns about for an hour.  A single-seater, armed with three machine-guns which, being controlled by the motor, or engine, shot automatically and at the same time through the propeller in front of the pilot, with the highest speed of any aeroplane then evolved on the fighting front, with a reputation of being able to climb to an altitude of fifteen thousand feet in less than fifteen minutes—–­some said in so short a time as ten minutes—–­the crack German machine had attracted much attention.