The first phase, then, of the highest grade offensive, the ultimate development of war regardless of expense, is the clearance of the air.Such German machines as are up are put down by fighting aviators.These last fly high; in the clear blue of the early morning they look exactly like gnats; some trail a little smoke in the sunshine; they take their machine guns in pursuit over the German lines, and the German anti-aircraft guns, the Archibalds, begin to pattern the sky about them with little balls of black smoke.From below one does not see men nor feel that men are there; it is as if it were an affair of midges.Close after the fighting machines come the photographic aeroplanes, with cameras as long as a man is high, flying low--at four or five thousand feet that is--over the enemy trenches.The Archibald leaves these latter alone; it cannot fire a shell to explode safely so soon after firing; but they are shot at with rifles and machine guns.They do not mind being shot at; only the petrol tank and the head and thorax of the pilot are to be considered vital.They will come back with forty or fifty bullet holes in the fabric.They will go under this fire along the length of the German positions exposing plate after plate; one machine will get a continuous panorama of many miles and then come back straight to the aerodrome to develop its plates.
There is no waste of time about the business, the photographs are developed as rapidly as possible.Within an hour and a half after the photographs were taken the first prints are going back into the bureau for the examination of the photographs.Both British and French air photographs are thoroughly scrutinised and marked.
An air photograph to an inexperienced eye is not a very illuminating thing; one makes our roads, blurs of wood, and rather vague buildings.But the examiner has an eye that has been in training; he is a picked man; he has at hand yesterday's photographs and last week's photographs, marked maps and all sorts of aids and records.If he is a Frenchman he is only too happy to explain his ideas and methods.Here, he will point out, is a little difference between the German trench beyond the wood since yesterday.For a number of reasons he thinks that will be a new machine gun emplacement; here at the centre of the farm wall they have been making another.This battery here--isn't it plain? Well, it's a dummy.The grass in front of it hasn't been scorched, and there's been no serious wear on the road here for a week.Presently the Germans will send one or two waggons up and down that road and instruct them to make figures of eight to imitate scorching on the grass in front of the gun.We know all about that.The real wear on the road, compare this and this and this, ends here at this spot.It turns off into the wood.
There's a sort of track in the trees.Now look where the trees are just a little displaced! (This lens is rather better for that.) /That's/ one gun.You see? Here, I will show you another....
That process goes on two or three miles behind the front line.
Very clean young men in white overalls do it as if it were a labour of love.And the Germans in the trenches, the German gunners, /know it is going on./ They know that in the quickest possible way these observations of the aeroplane that was over them just now will go to the gunners.The careful gunner, firing by the map and marking by aeroplane, kite balloon or direct observation, will be getting onto the located guns and machine guns in another couple of hours.The French claim that they have located new batteries, got their /tir de demolition/ upon them in and destroyed them within five hours.The British I told of that found it incredible.Every day the French print special maps showing the guns, sham guns, trenches, everything of significance behind the German lines, showing everything that has happened in the last four-and-twenty hours.It is pitiless.It is indecent.The map-making and printing goes on in the room next and most convenient to the examination of the photographs.And, as I say, the German army knows of this, and knows that it cannot prevent it because of its aerial weakness.That knowledge is not the last among the forces that is crumpling up the German resistance upon the Somme.
I visited some French guns during the /tir de demolition/ phase.I counted nine aeroplanes and twenty-six kite balloons in the air at the same time.There was nothing German visible in the air at all.
It is a case of eyes and no eyes.
