Barnet was not a very good aviator, he confesses he was always a little
afraid of his machine--there was excellent reason for every one to
be afraid of those clumsy early types--and he never attempted steep
descents or very high flying. He also, he records, owned one of those
oil-driven motor-bicycles whose clumsy complexity and extravagant
filthiness still astonish the visitors to the museum of machinery at
South Kensington. He mentions running over a dog and complains of the
ruinous price of 'spatchcocks' in Surrey. 'Spatchcocks,' it seems, was a
slang term for crushed hens.
He passed the examinations necessary to reduce his military service to
a minimum, and his want of any special scientific or technical
qualification and a certain precocious corpulence that handicapped his
aviation indicated the infantry of the line as his sphere of training.
That was the most generalised form of soldiering. The development of
the theory of war had been for some decades but little assisted by any
practical experience. What fighting had occurred in recent years, had
been fighting in minor or uncivilised states, with peasant or barbaric
soldiers and with but a small equipment of modern contrivances, and the
great powers of the world were content for the most part to maintain
armies that sustained in their broader organisation the traditions
of the European wars of thirty and forty years before.
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