August 14, 1915. 
LAND AND WATER. 
industry, while Germanising it, and lowered the rates of 
interest. The Allies might imitate what was good in 
this method and eliminate the bad. Britain and France 
through their banks of issue and joint stock banlvs might 
do a large lucrative business even in the poorer friendly 
States while benefiting local trade there. In Bulgaria 
and Sardinia the rate of discoimt was as high as 12 per 
cent, before the war. London and Paris might lower it 
considerably and make a good profit. 
Again, no neutral State, if it takes up arms in 
our cause and its own, will escape a loss of 20 per cent, 
on its paper money at the close of hostilities. During 
the campaign we have a countervailing arrangement. 
iVVhy not make it permanent for, say, twenty vears ? 
Lastly, it might be found highly advantageous to go a 
step further and promise to aid certain of the neutrals — 
if. they speedily join our ranks — to systematise their 
national debts and reduce the rate of interest on them. 
The lines on which this could be attempted would be 
similar — mutatis mutandis — to those on which the 
Egyptian debt was unified. A special institution for the 
purpose — an International Debt Office — might be created 
for the purpose of gauging the guarantees. This idea 
may strike withstanders of all things new as unpre- 
cedented and therefore unacceptable. But when France 
and Britain lent Greece sums amounting to about 
thirty - three millions sterling at 4 per cent, they 
adopted the principle without utilising it politically. All 
that I ask for is that the principle should be adopted by 
the Governments, systematised, and extended. 
System is the Alpha and Omega of success. The moral 
and martial energy which the present appalling danger 
has touched to life and thrown into various lielpful 
shapes has yet to assimie more complex forms than any 
which can be devised in instructive impulse quickened 
by the pressure of transitory needs. Fitfulness and in- 
completeness are the ruin of the most fruitful ideas. We 
have heard it affirmed over and over again tliat this is a 
war that will be decided by the exhaustion of our 
enemies. But have we striven systematically to reduce 
their resources? If we had, we would have forestalled 
the Germans and bought up this year's harvest of cereals 
in Roumania, which is already sold to our enemies, and 
which, if statisticians among my friends are right, will 
just enable them to tide over the months between May, 
1916, and the ensuing harvest, during which they ivould 
otherivise have been without corn. 
In the ideas put forward in this article there is no- 
thing really new. New would be their adoption by the 
Allied Governments and their speedy reduction to a 
workable system. And an International Commission 
would soon find the ways and means of effecting this. 
WINGS: A GLIMPSE OF WAR. 
By W. L. George. 
FLIGHT-LIEUTEN'AN'T VERWOOD stared. 
His blue eyes, filled with the tense wonder of 
the sailor's gaze, seemed to seek in the warm 
grey sky something that could not be there. Six 
thousand feet below lay a toy land. He had 
forgotten it for a moment and sat as if hypnotised by the 
broad, whizzing shadow, like a swirl of air upon a hot 
road, that the propeller made in front. The screw's con- 
tented beat seemed the usual accompaniment of his life. 
He thought : " Hang it ! 1 promised Mabel to get 
photographed in full kit. T-t ... I forgot." And 
then smiled, thinking it was a pity. For who knew? — 
in another ten seconds he might be past photographing. 
For a moment he was melancholic, wondered if it were 
worth it; he blasphemed his gods. " Spy work, after 
all." he reflected. .\nd abruptly, as he heard the rudder- 
bar rasp, he remembered his mission. Raising his field- 
glasses, he stared down. 
There lay the toy land of Belgium — square brown 
fields that looked black beside the meadows ; roads, 
white as on a plan, in places little specks that must be 
cattle; spires like Noah's arks, and, far away, two 
threads of silver on which careered a minute train. 
Flight-Lieutenant V'erwood thought of the Christmas 
fair on Ludgate Hill and penny steam engines. That 
was all. Belgium in the grey morning looked unmilitary. 
He strained his eyes at the field-glasses : there was 
nothing, no animation, not the glitter of a bayonet, not 
a scatter of tents. Immeasurably grey and emptv lav the 
plain, as the immeasurable pale sky above. He was 
alone. Not yet old enough as an airman to be dulled, 
he exulted. The air stung his cheek, the pilot was forgot ; 
he was alone as a gull between sky and sea. 
The propeller beat on as a heart. He saw rushing 
towards him a cloud-bank, grey and fleecy as the rump 
of a swan, and above, where touched it the sun, rosy 
and golden. He shrank. Already a moisture was in 
the air. He hated clouds. They were more blinding 
than the night. Still, they had to go througli. 
And almost at once they were in the cloud, in a 
new world, clinging, humid, which had blotted out the 
old. They lumg alive and winged, as soaring skylarks, 
shrouded above, shrouded below, their wake obscured, 
their way uncertain, in the thick whitish body of the 
cloud that was cold and moist, half solid, half yielding, 
13 
as a woman's veil, or more tenuous, of the substance of 
ghosts. Fliglit-Lieutenant \'erwood stared, wiping his 
goggles with a wet glove. It seemed interminable, this 
sojourn in a Laputan fairyland. His hair was soaked 
and rivulets of water began to creep down his breast. 
Then, little by little, the fleece grew thinner, from 
feather turned to down, and he could see a space of air 
that in contrast seemed translucent as a pearl. The end ? 
Or a rift ? 
Verwood sat with hands clenched. He had 
seen. For less than a second, as he spanned the 
rift, he had seen in the light air. a little above, 
the incredible, the almost impossible, a vast object 
greyer than the cloud. He had seen it all, its slender 
nose, its broad belly, a whirring couple of propellers, 
and long cars that hung, and now it was gone, for the 
rift was narrow, and again he flew within the cloud. 
" Did I dream it? " he thought. But no; for above 
the familiar sound of his own motor he heard the over- 
powering roar of other engines, as the snore of a giant. 
Flight-Lieutenant \'erwood found himself trembling all 
over. Where was it? Whence came this immense 
voice? He heard it upon the right and upon the left, 
everywhere, and yet invisible in the thickening snowy 
cloud. He heard the pilot shout : " Zeppelin ! " 
Energy returned to Verwood's body and he was 
filled with an intoxication : " Good God ! What a 
chance ! " He heard the elevator-flaps rise, gripped the 
rail as the tail fell and. nose upwards, the biplane bored 
into the upper air. He glanced at the barometer : 7,000 
feet. .And wondered: " Did they see us?" As they 
rose the cloud grew thinner. A golden tint came into it, 
the sun was not far. Suddenly, as if drawn from a deep 
sea. the biplane emerged. Just above lay the great air- 
ship, unhurried on its way to the Sputh. In that moment 
Verwood thought only of speed. Could they rise quickly 
enough and then as a falcon swoop ? 
There was an agitation upon the airship. As if 
minded to fight, its speed slackened ; with the roar of its 
motors blended a familiar sound, the long rasp of a 
machine-gun. Two or three bullets passed like whispers 
between the planes. The pilot hesitated, pulled down the 
right aileron. Verwood could feel his enemies adjusting 
the machine-gun. Well done ! As the second volley came 
the pilot pulled down the left aileron, returning un- 
