He found from bitter experience that
nothing afforded the Anglo-French military aviators such keen
delight as to lie in wait for a "rover," and then to swoop into
the air to round him up.
The proportion of these individual scouts who were either brought
down, or only just succeeded in reaching safety within their own
lines, and who were able to exhibit serious wounds as evidence of
the severity of the aerial tussle, or the narrowness of the
escape, has unnerved the Teuton airmen as a body to a very
considerable extent. Often, even when an aeroplane descended
within the German lines, it was found that the roving airman had
paid the penalty for his rashness with his life, so that his
journey had proved in vain, because all the intelligence he had
gained had died with him, or, if committed to paper, was so
unintelligible as to prove useless.
It was the success of the British airmen in this particular field
of duty which was responsible for the momentous declaration in
Field-Marshal Sir John French's famous despatch:--"The British
Flying Corps has succeeded in establishing an individual
ascendancy, which is as serviceable to us as it is damaging to
the enemy .
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