Our experts, then, are collecting every item of information regarding fightingaeroplanes and their armament, and this collection is to be constantly kept up to the minute. The speediest and deadliest machine is the master of the air. To produce this masterpiece, guns, mountings, engine and aeroplane must all be considered, designed and built together, in one fighting unit, with due regard to surpassing the best European models.

Those German machines that fight and succeed in running away may live to fight another day. The ultimate victory in the air will be given to the side producing the swiftest and most destructive single-seater.

What would an American fleet of two thousand superior fighting-planes accomplish along the great barrier?

Picture the "front" as it appears on a fresh, clear morning. Stretched from Verdun west to St.-Quentin, its parallel lines of trenches wind in and out of valleys and mountains, cross plains, swamps, cities and forests. The great barrier lies between!

Observation-balloons begin to pop up and lurch heavily in the breeze. At least two score are in sight up and down the barrier, straining at their tethers some four or five miles back of No Man's Land.

Artillery quiets down while the gunners sip their coffee. Sentries are relieved. Long files of sleepy men pass through communication trenches to the rear, while the adjoining alleys are filled with the day shift advancing to the firstline defenses. Though no factorywhistles announce it, the day's work is begun.

Suddenly a distant hum strikes the ear. It grows in volume like the oncoming of a tornado. Friend and foe alike pause and survey the southern sky. the southern sky. A stupendous sight! There, far up in the heavens, advances northward a long line of roaring aeroplanes, flying swiftly onward, wing and wing, covering the arc of the horizon as far as the eye can reach! A quick estimate is made as they pass overhead. They are at an altitude between ten thousand and twelve thousand feet. Twenty aeroplanes to a squadron. A slight break in the line, then twenty more. They are

flying in squadron formation, twenty machines to a mile. Two thousand fighting-machines are passing over the barrier into the German camp between Verdun and St.-Quentin!

Behind the swift raiders comes a line of heavier, slower aeroplanes. They do not fly so high and are readily distinguished as bomb-droppers. Each carries half a ton of high-explosive bombs fastened in a rack underneath the fusilage. The pilot releases each bomb separately, or all together, by a turn of his wrist. One machine in this group carries pilot and observer. The observer is the officer in charge of the little fleet. He carries a wireless radio outfit on his machine. Also one or two carrier-pigeons to send back with any imperative messages should his wireless instruments fail.

He watches the ground below for changes in the enemy's position since yesterday. Any alterations discovered he jots down on the roller map board in front of him. An automatic telescopic. camera catches the scene below in response to the pressure of his thumb on the button.

The officer frequently searches the neighboring heavens to detect the approach of enemy aircraft. The advanceguard of scouts, however, has swept away all loitering enemies. Only those ascending in his rear from enemy flyingfields need be apprehended.

White puffs of smoke ahead indicate that the anti-aircraft batteries have his altitude. With a gesture to his pilot behind him, he turns sharply to the right and climbs to a higher level. The entire squadron follows his lead.

A mile to the east of him he sees a sister squadron of bomb-droppers. On beyond them, still another group is winging its way into the enemy's territory. Each is led by its officer-observer. Each is surrounded by smoke - wreaths of bursting shrapnel.

All three of these squadrons have for their common objective a single railroad center and important German supplystation, lying almost forty miles back of the front. Strongly fortified and defended as it is, tremendous losses can be inflicted by these thirty machines dropping their fifteen tons of high explosives upon supply-depots, railway bridges and

stations, barracks and ammunitiondumps.

Other bombing squadrons have other objectives. No matter where the Germans choose to consolidate their defending aeroplanes, many of the raiding squadrons will attain their goal.

Hazardous spy service and frequent aeroplane sorties have located very definitely the exact position of these objectives.

Outnumbered and taken by surprise, the enemy aircraft do not take the defensive. Our bombs are dropped and our machines return in safety to their aerodromes.

And now our artillery spotters fly over the enemy's positions, again guarded overhead by the squadrons of our chasermachines. The "target" is soon located and quickly destroyed.

Here at last come the enemy aircraft. Having collected all their available fighting-aeroplanes, they are ascending to annihilate our squadrons separately!

Our spotting machines scurry off home, snapping out wireless messages for more fighting-machines to the rescue.

And now the battle royal is on! From every point in the heavens dart in the gleaming planes, some bearing the black Maltese cross of the Kaiser, some the red, white, and blue star-our own. Below, jaded men stand up in their trenches and gaze, white-faced, into the crowded sky. The decisive conflict of the war is begun!

The staccato rap-rap-rapping of the aeroplane machine-guns melts into a continuous roar. Here and there flaming and crippled aeroplanes poise and flutter helplessly downward. Frequent collisions occur, some by accident, some deliberately contrived.

Darting, diving, circling, and swooping, the combatants separate and mingle again. At the outskirts of the tumult individual duels are in progress. Here and there escaping Fokkers are being rapidly overhauled by the speedier Nieuports. On another side a Spad is surrounded by a circle of Albatros machines and the death stroke is about to

fall. Suddenly the Spad leaps up and over in a quick loop-the-loop and comes out behind his pursuers, pouring into them a stream of bullets as he flattens out his course. Here another, surrounded and apparently doomed, suddenly drops into a tail-spin and sinks rapidly down from the swirling pack of

enemies.

Manoeuvering for position, two enemies fly side by side. Suddenly out of the blue comes a darting Sopwith; the leaden hail pierces the top plane and crumples up the German pilot in his

seat.

Propellers are broken, wings are shot away, engines are struck and disabled. Machine after machine separates from the revolving mass and glides or tumbles to earth.

No account of the score can be estimated by either side. No means of communication exist between friends or enemies in this hellish roar. Reckless of formation or position, the air-fighters. dive and shoot, . then climb back again to the center of the gigantic whirlpool, standing on tail to pour in another volley through the floor of the enemy aeroplane overhead.

Outnumbered, outclassed, and outfought, the Germans remaining volplane down to escape. Some are driven into French territory. Some voluntarily surrender, some are able to get away.

Now the barrier is no longer insurmountable even to our infantry. Enemy artillery is silenced and their troops confined to dugouts by our aeroplane-directed shells. Their rear communications have been cut. Their supplies of food, munitions and men have ceased.

From St.-Quentin to Arras, from Arras to the North Sea, the aeroplane fleet repeats its gigantic manoeuver. Six months are required to permit Germany to rebuild her air squadrons.

But six months will see the last vestiges of the great barrier swept clean. Six months will see another American fleet, double its former size, produced from the home of Darius Green and his Flying Machine.

HE younger man hated the older with a passion which sometimes showed in a deep suffusion of his smooth, apple red cheeks, although he would never have recognized it as hatred because of his innocence, his incredible and appalling west-of-Canada sinlessness. He never marveled. To the pure all things, even the river jungles of British Guiana, are as God intends-that is to say, matter of fact.

Then, too, Pawling believed in the brotherhood of man.

Clymer did not believe in the brotherhood of man. He may have had notions once upon a time, for he, too, had been reared in the west of Canada (where the cocoa estate of Holy Trinity was owned, and by most respectable people). But now he had been out here for upward of eleven years, a long time for a white man to be in the bush. If he had any faith left him, it was his one abiding belief, fed from time to time by premonitions, that the bats would get him-that is to say, when his hour struck. It would be some night when he should be too drunk to let down the bed-nets, and when Tung, the Chinese house-boy, should forget. He was growing stouter of late and quite purple, and his left leg would not always behave, but this did not worry him much, for the reason he knew it was to be the vampire bats. He could hear them flitting in the room every night.

Sometimes he hated his new subaltern and sometimes he didn't. He could not be depended upon in an emotional way. Lying in his hammock on the veranda of an evening, after he had swallowed his tenth or his twelfth swizzle, he would break out in a thick, meaty passion:

"Why, in the name of God? That's all I ask why? When I've been so good all these years. I've sweat blood.

I've made 'em all rich up there, Pawling, rotten rich, the whole of 'em. And then to pay me, what do they send me? Eh? They send me out a mewling, puling, white-livered son of a prayer-meeting rat like you. You! God! Say, listen. I give you my word of honor, Pawling, you make me sick. Sick! D'y' hear? Sick! Damn it! Why couldn't they go the whole job and send me down a woman and be done with it? A white woman! Eh? That's the question I want you to answer me. For God's sake, Pawling, open your mouth once! Say something!"

Sometimes, veering as far toward the other pole, he would lurch from his hammock with tears in his eyes to slap Pawling on the back.

"You're a white man, Pawling! A white man, by God! A white man. . . . I'm a white man. We're two white men, d'y' understand, Pawling, old fellow? Like brothers! And devil take all the niggers and coolies and Chinamen on the river-we hold 'em in our hand! White men, d'y' understand, Pawling? Shoulder to shoulder, eh?"

And whether it was the one or the other, the younger man's cheeks and forehead grew dark with blood. Dim lusts surged through his brain-an impulse to kick Clymer's stomach-the desire to sink his nails in the plumcolored pulp beneath Clymer's eyelids. His mouth filled with saliva, and he had to spit several times into the poinsettias beyond the railing. Never by any chance did he reply. He kept his hands in his pockets and his eyes on the river.

The river exercised a peculiar fascination over his mind, a fascination which he would not have owned. By night, sliding soundlessly under the mists that swallowed the farther jungle, one cool, sulphurous pencil-mark of the moon perhaps showing where the surface lay; by day a vast, amber-colored, moving floor, marred only by the arrowing ripple

of a tapir, or a crocodile asleep, or by a gold-boat far out on the flood, passing down to the faint, barbaric chant of the black paddlers-by day or by night, as he watched the river, Pawling fell prey to an illusion. It seemed no longer the broad plain of water that moved; it was rather he himself that moved, he and the front compound and the cocoasheds and the thatched roofs of the East-Indians, drawn slowly, by some occult and irresistible power, upward and upward, hour by hour, effortless, helpless, away from the clean salt waters of the earth into the maw of the equator, full of fevers and creepers and hanging serpents.

He had a horror of snakes. It was his one weakness. Each night he looked under his bed, and he was always seeing big fellows in the dark, hanging head down from the branches of the cocoatrees. Once or twice, unable to resist the shivering desire, he discharged his shot-gun at one of those heads, and brought down a ripe cocoa-pod for his powder. He made nothing of this spiritual malady.

As for his queer feeling about the river, he did for that by telling himself that he liked the river. He liked it, he said, because it knew where it was going and went there, and nothing could stop it or swerve it from its course. He liked the same thing about himself. He hated sham, and he could see through it with a pitiless eye. He knew that when men went to pieces in the tropics it was simply because the tropics was an accepted excuse for going to pieces. Bush fever, as a rule, was a matter of too much gin in swizzles. He had many theories, wholesome, and informed by an austere optimism. One of his theories was that, viewed from the other end of eternity, Badhoor, the seller of Indian hemp in the coolie range, was as good a man as Clymer or as himself.

He sat on a green-sap log beside the street of the coolie range and stared at the river. It was full of the sunset sky, gold, with streaks of lilac. Unfamiliar odors attacked his nostrils-curry and sandalwood, goat dung, the aroma of strange supper-pots. Liquid syllables came to his ears: "Salaam, sahib! Yes, sahib!" as Clymer moved grum

bling among the huts of mud and wattles on his business of the fortnightly inspection. He might have been struck with a certain wonder at finding the East here in the West, had he not been so suspicious of the emotion of wonder. His spirit stayed in its house. Men and women passed in a blur across his vision -bearded Mohammedans, brown women carrying brown babies; Hindu men, stooping, silent-footed, emaciated, like shadows cast by a candelabrum. From the blacks' range, down by the water's edge, there came the sound of a drum, boomboom-boom-boom! Pawling thought

about himself and his work. Three years in the bush. Two years, nine months, and five days more, and then he would be going back home to Canada, to Toronto and the fat berth in the Office.

A coolie girl, standing a few yards away on the other side of the road, made a silhouette on the golden mat of the river. Pawling's gaze included her, as it included the pale little zebu cow grazing to the left, and Tung, the house-boy, to the right, sitting cross-legged under a platform of bamboo and playing tricks with a green cocoanut. She was very young, fourteen, perhaps. Her ankles and legs were plump, as were her brown arms, naked to the shoulders and laden with crude bracelets and bangles of silver. Her head-cloth, sweeping in a pure curve down her back, across her thigh, and up again to the wrist of her left arm, lent her an illusion of buoyancy, a readiness for flight. Her face, in profile, was modeled in the soft, yielding contours of her race, the lips parted slightly to the breath which lifted her bosom in visible and uneven pulsations.

He

She was watching Tung at his elaborate play. He was a handsome fellow, sinuous, well muscled, with fine, ardent eyes under his slanting brows. ignored the girl, and yet he did not ignore her. From time to time he shot a sidelong glance, making her lower her eyes. Once, laying down the cocoanut, he placed one hand on his hip and the other, flat-palmed, on the crown of his head. Then he turned slowly to face her, his eyes half closed. Her hand fluttered to her young breast and she seemed unable to look away.