The breech
closes like a safe door, and hides the shell from the visitor. It is
"good-bye." He receives exaggerated warning of the danger to his ears,
stuffs his fingers into them, and opens his mouth as instructed, hears a
loud but by no means deafening report, and sees a spit of flame near the
breech. Regulations of a severe character prevent his watching from an
aeroplane the delivery of the goods upon the customers opposite.
I have already described the method of locating enemy guns and so forth
by photography. Many of the men at this work are like dentists rather
than soldiers; they are busy in carefully lit rooms, they wear white
overalls, they have clean hands and laboratory manners. The only really
romantic figure in the whole of this process, the only figure that has
anything of the old soldierly swagger about him still, is the aviator.
And, as one friend remarked to me when I visited the work of the
British flying corps, "The real essential strength of this arm is the
organisation of its repairs. Here is one of the repair vans through
which our machine guns go. It is a motor workshop on wheels. But at any
time all this park, everything, can pack up and move forward like
Barnum and Bailey's Circus. The machine guns come through this shop in
rotation; they go out again, cleaned, repaired, made new again.
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