all suitable for any present purpose upon the Italian front, but at
a later stage, when the German is retiring and Archibald no longer
searches the air, they would be invaluable on the western front because
of their enormous bomb or machine gun carrying capacity. "But sufficient
for the day is the swat thereof," as the British public schoolboy says,
and no doubt we shall get them when we have sufficiently felt the need
for them. The big Caproni machines which the Italians possess are of 300
h.p. and will presently be of 500 h.p. One gets up a gangway into them
was one gets into a yacht; they wave a main deck, a forward machine gun
deck and an aft machine gun; one may walk about in them; in addition
to guns and men they carry a very considerable weight of bombs beneath.
They cannot of course beget up with the speed nor soar to the height
of our smaller aeroplanes; it is as carriers in raids behind a force of
fighting machines that they should find their use.

The British establishment I visited was a very refreshing and reassuring
piece of practical organisation. The air force of Great Britain has
had the good fortune to develop with considerable freedom from old army
tradition; many of its officers are ex-civil engineers and so forth;
Headquarters is a little shy of technical direction; and all this in
a service that is still necessarily experimental and plastic is to the
good. There is little doubt that, given a release from prejudice,
bad associations and the equestrian tradition, British technical
intelligence and energy can do just as well as the French. Our problem
with our army is not to create intelligence, there is an abundance of
it, but to release it from a dreary social and official pressure. The
air service ransacks the army for men with technical training and sees
that it gets them, there is a real keenness upon the work, and the men
in these great mobile hangars talk shop readily and clearly.