This illustration, by A. C. Michael, is from T. Donovan Bayley's 'When the sea failed her' which appeared in Pall Mall Magazine in May 1909. It's subtitled 'The story of a war between England and the allies, and the terrible way it ended'. It's that terrible ending which makes this story stand out for me.

It takes place during an invasion of Britain by European powers. Britain is losing. The fleet has been defeated off the Nore and London is under siege and is being shelled. But it unknowingly has a secret weapon, thanks to the Tesla-like scientist Angus Grant. He works on top of a hill in a laboratory filled with electrical apparatus which occasionally crackles purple lightning into the sky. One of the rooms inside has some unusual equipment:

One side of it was occupied by a large frame, stretched tightly across which was a transparent sheet of tracing cloth, lighted from behind, and marked with dark lines forming tiny squares. Every tenth line was numbered, and a red arrow pointed to the north, Across the chart was a thin blue line, leading east-north-east, and along this a speck of iron was slowly moving, watched by a young man [...] In front of the luminous screen was an arrangement similar to the keyboard of a typewriter, but containing only ten levers. These were attached to electric leads, and each one, when depressed, established contact with one of the ten copper rods immediately underneath, which stood in a row projecting through a vulcanite slab.¹

The screen is a map of Europe, and the 'thin blue line' shows the path of Grant's 'aero-torpedo' which is on its way to Berlin. What's an aero-torpedo, you ask?

"It carries things in the air, and he directs it from his laboratory."

"The keyboard and the lighted screen?" she asked.

"That's it. That and the moving dot."

"But how?"

"No one but the master knows that. He presses levers and they alter the wireless somehow. Then the aero-torpedo shifts accordingly. It's something to do with ether waves, whatever they are, or so I've heard."

"Are there men up in it?"

"No; that's what makes it so wonderful. It gets its power from our dynamos, and that's how it's steered too. That's why it can carry so much green powder."²

I'll come back to this green powder in a moment.

Two hours later Grant locked down five of the ten keys. The moving dot no longer crept forward, but rotated slowly on its axis. He went across to the wall, unlocked a framed switchboard, and pulled the vulcanite handle down. On the roof another "spark" waked to fury. He took his watch out and counted the minutes by it.

"The cylinder seal is fused," he whispered, reversing the switch, and the "spark" on the roof died away. "It's half-past six in Berlin," he thought; "they're celebrating their victory, and the streets are full. I've timed it well."³

He did too. Unter den Linden is full of cheering crowds. At first there is just a sound, lasting over an hour, a 'steady, sibilant humming, persistent and penetrating, and indefinably terrifying'. Then the aero-torpedo itself becomes visible, 'a tiny spot in shape like a dragon-fly, dimly glinting brassily'. It is suddenly blotted out by a mist which slowly grows larger in size: the green powder has been released. The sun is eclipsed and birds fall from the sky.

Few could bear the horror of the phenomenon any longer, and there was a rush of panic-stricken men and women to get beneath a roof, but before the crowds could unlock and disperse death came down.

A clammy green rain, gently persistent, fell, and wherever it settled it corroded.

The stone-work of the city seethed as the mist wet it, and screams of pain broke from the lips of those whom it touched. Their eyeballs were seared and blinded; the skin on their faces shrivelled and cracked and peeled, and their hands were rotted down to the raw sinews.

Every breath was a misery. Within a minute not a soul who remained in the streets was left alive. Their lungs were perforated, and the dying wretches were mercifully choked by their gushing blood. By noon nothing remained in the streets of Berlin but a green sludge, out of which protruded fragments of the larger bones of the dead.⁴

After Berlin, Paris and then 'the large industrial towns of Europe' are destroyed. Only those who flee to the countryside survive.

As each report of fresh ruin was spread abroad, the clamour for an end to the war grew more insistent.⁵

The allies soon sue for peace and so, even though 'the sea failed her', Britain has won after all.

What I love about this story is its extreme nature. The struggle for national existence is all. The prospect of a British defeat at the hands of a foreign invader is blithely seen to justify the extermination of millions of enemy civilians. There is an implicit acknowledgement that this might be immoral in Grant's decision to destroy the aero-torpedo at the end of the story, but as he doesn't even show the slightest remorse it in no way invalidates his prior actions.

This sort of thing is partly why I doubt Sven Lindqvist's argument, in A History of Bombing (2002), that the idea of bombing civilians was racist and genocidal in origin, that is, to ensure white supremacy by destroying the other. As evidence he cites stories like Jack London's 'The unparalleled invasion' (1910), in which the Chinese race is wiped out by biological weapons dropped from the air. But in fact the knock-out blow was rarely employed against non-Europeans in speculative fiction: it was about nationalism, not imperialism. In Bayley's story, the millions of Europeans aren't even depicted in any way inferior to the British, who would turn into green sludge just as surely as the Germans and French if the green powder were to be used against them.

'When the sea failed her' is of course also interesting for its early anticipation of, not just aerial bombardment, but chemical warfare too. Discussions of this are fairly rare before 1914. But perhaps most interesting is the portrayal of an unmanned aerial vehicle. Bayley has put some thought into how you might actually control one using contemporary technology, with his typewriter-like keyboard, luminous cloth screens and cylinder seal fuses. The radiant power source is straight out of Tesla.

As for who T. Donovan Bayley was, I sadly have no idea. He did write a few other science fiction stories for British periodicals around this time, at least one of which also deals with a superweapon ('The frozen death'), but otherwise seems to be unknown to history. I suspect an alias.

1. T. Donovan Bayley, 'When the sea failed her', Pall Mall Magazine 9 (May 1909), 541.
2. Ibid., 544.
3. Ibid., 546.
4. Ibid.
5. Ibid., 547.

The article's author, B., sketches the part played by Barchester in the last war and the present one:

In the past Barchester has always fought its wars by proxy. The dignitaries of its historic past, the Proudies, the Arabins, and the Grantleys, followed the fortunes of the Army in the newspapers with a highly vociferous but none the less detached regard. Their successors of 1914 have not yet found a chronicler, but they too, though they wrought manfully in the work of caring for the thousands of troops round about and though most of them suffered the loss of a son, regarded wars as highly distressing events which happened somewhere else. The serene security of Barchester itself remained unquestioned and undisturbed even through that ordeal.

To-day it is undisturbed no longer, and if Bishop Proudie and his redoubtable wife and chaplain were living now they would hardly believe themselves to be in the same world. The Bishop would be required to take himself to shelter on an average twice a day. His wife would make his life even more of a burden, for her temper, never very equable, would not survive the strain of continually interrupted meals. Mr. Slope, like his successor of to-day, would be drafted firmly into the A.F.S., be forced to put on a scratchy uniform at a most undignified speed, and then to work under the firm and fluent direction of one of the cathedral vergers. ¹

It's very dryly done, and I doubt I would have picked it up except that I've read Framley Parsonage. I'm sure that many more people were familiar with Trollope then than now, but even so some Guardian readers were probably left wondering why they should care about this town they'd never heard of where, which seemed no different than any other, and where nothing much was happening. Perhaps that was the point, that as a nowhere it stood for everywhere:

That is the limit of our excitement so far. [Barchester] is an oasis in a desert of alarm signals which have become so frequent and so uneventful that most of us now carry a book about us to read during the next raid.²

I can't help but wonder what happened to other non-existent British places during the war. Was 221B Baker Street blitzed? Did Totleigh Towers get taken over as a rehabilitation hospital for wounded airmen? Was Avalon tilled by the Women's Land Army? Much research remains to be done.

1. Manchester Guardian, 28 August 1940, 3.
2. Ibid.

This photograph of Australian soldiers was taken during the First World War. It's not particularly unusual: just a group of mates getting together to record a memento, perhaps after a weekend's carousing in the fleshpots of Cairo or Paris.

Mateship is a important concept in Australian culture. The OED defines it as 'The condition of being a mate; companionship, fellowship, comradeship' and notes that it is 'Now chiefly Austral. and N.Z.' The Australian National Dictionary gives several more specifically Australian shades of meaning, from 'An acquaintance; a person engaged in the same activity', to 'One with whom the bonds of close friendship are acknowledged, a "sworn friend"', to 'A mode of address implying equality and goodwill; freq. used to a casual acquaintance and, esp. in recent use [...], ironic'. Suffice it to say that pretty much any bloke can have occasion to call another cobber a mate, whether they are good friends or bitter enemies. (Sheilas are another question, of course.)

Mateship is a positive virtue. As C. E. W. Bean wrote in 1921, in the first volume (page 6) of his official history of Australia in the Great War:

The typical Australian [...] was seldom religious in the sense in which the word is generally used. So far as he held a prevailing creed, it was a romantic one inherited from the gold-miner and the bush-man, of which the chief article was that a man should at all times and at any cost stand by his mate. This was and is the one law which the good Australian must never break. It is bred in the child and stays with him through life.

Mateship also has strong military resonances, as Bean's interest in it might suggest. An Army News article on the unveiling of a war memorial in Papua New Guinea commemorating the Kokoda Track, the site of bitter fighting between Australians and Japanese in 1942, notes that the words courage, mateship, endurance and sacrifice are inscribed on its pillars. It further adds that these are 'words that today's Australian Army has built its foundations on'. So mateship is both an expression of Australia's egalitarian spirit and its martial one, as former Prime Minister John Howard explained in a speech given at Australia House in London in 2003:

The two world wars exacted a terrible price from us -- the full magnitude of that lost potential, of those unlived lives can never be measured. And yet, some of the most admirable aspects of Australia's national character were, if not conceived, then more fully ingrained within us by the searing experiences of those conflicts.

None more so than the concept of mateship -- regarded as a particularly Australian virtue -- a concept that encompasses unconditional acceptance, mutual and self respect, sharing whatever is available no matter how meagre, a concept based on trust and selflessness and absolute interdependence. In combat, men did live and die by its creed. 'Sticking by your mates' was sometimes the only reason for continuing on when all seemed hopeless.

I was moved by an account written by Hugh Clarke, who, like thousands of other Australian and British servicemen, endured years of senseless cruelty as a prisoner of the Japanese after the fall of Singapore. He couldn't recall a single Australian dying alone without someone being there to look after him in some way. That's mateship.

Contemporary Australia takes great pride in its egalitarian attitudes. Mud and fear and enemy fire are no respecters of class, rank or parentage and from both wars, our veterans brought back to Australian society a renewed conviction that an individual's worth should be judged -- not by those things -- but by their own talent, courage and personal virtue.

Howard was particularly fond of the concept of mateship; in 1999 he even tried to get it inserted into the preamble of the Australian constitution. It was in fact one of the sites of conflict in Australia's culture wars of the late 1990s and early 2000s: Marilyn Lake has criticised it as reinforcing white solidarity. She has a point; and it's not like Australia is the only country in the world to value mateship, even if it isn't called that. (Although one of the more charming aspects of the word 'mate' is the way it's quickly picked up and used by new arrivals to these shores.) Gender critiques are even more pointed: while women can and do use the word, and can be mates with men and and with each other, it still has a blokey feel. Idealising mateship as an inherently Australian trait is exclusionary, as Martin Ball has argued for the related concept of the 'Anzac spirit':

The Anzac tradition holds many values for us all to celebrate, but the myth also suppresses parts of Australian history that are difficult to deal with. Anzac is a means of forgetting the origins of Australia. The Aboriginal population is conveniently absent. The convict stain is wiped clean. Postwar immigration is yet to broaden the cultural identity of the population. [...] The problem with the simple patriotism of Anzac is that it runs the risk of making some of us are more Australian than others.

Which brings me back to the photograph at the start of the post. It actually isn't as straightforward as it seems. The men pictured are actually all deserters; and the reason they posed for the photograph was to taunt the military authorities they had escaped from. For it was sent to the Australian Assistant Provost Marshal in Le Havre, along with the following letter:

Sir,
With all due respect we send you this P. C. [post card] as a souvenir trusting that you will keep it as a mark of esteem from those who know you well. At the same time trusting that Nous jamais regardez vous encore [we will never see you again]. Au revoir.
Nous

The deserters -- who were apparently never caught -- are displaying mateship, humour, larrikinism and all those good things which are supposedly part of the Australian essence, but deployed in a way that cuts against the celebration of the Anzac spirit. For whatever reason, these men who had all volunteered for war decided to have nothing more to do with it, and so could be considered to be some of the first war resisters in Australian history.

NB. The photograph comes ultimately from the Australian War Memorial, but I found it in Ashley Ekins, ed., 1918 Year of Victory: The End of the Great War and the Shaping of History (Titirangi and Wollombi: Exisle Publishing, 2010). Ekins' own essay in that book on 'morale, discipline and combat effectiveness' has much to say on this topic, though unfortunately doesn't specifically discuss our ten mates above.

ACCORDING to a telegram from Port Elizabeth [South Africa] to the "African World," bombing aeroplanes are to be used to exterminate "rogue" elephants in the Bush.

North-China Herald, 6 September 1919, 642.

Thanks to Jess Nevins for the tip.

In lieu of a more substantial post, here are some flying aeroplanes. Clicking the above picture will take you to a British Pathé newsreel issued on 7 July 1938, showing 'Britain's latest air fighter', also known as the Supermarine Spitfire Mk I. Unfortunately the narration is missing, but I think this is the first production Spitfire, K9787 (at least, I can make out a -87 serial number in places), which first flew in May 1938. That looks like Jeffrey Quill in the cockpit about a third of the way through. A photo on page 18 of the 28 June issue of The Times shows a Spitfire in flight, noting that it was 'undergoing acceptance trials', and the newsreel footage was presumably part of the same Air Ministry propaganda exercise. Other newsreel companies produced similar items.

This was the British public's introduction to the Spitfire, at least on a large scale. The prototype, K5054, was on display at the 1936 RAF Pageant, but it took two years to get into production, and in those years biplanes still formed the air defence of Britain. I'm surprised that the British government didn't make more of their fast new fighters (the Hurricane debuted only a little earlier) in propaganda terms in late 1938. Of course, there weren't very many of them yet. But just the sight of them cavorting across cinema screens might have increased public confidence in Fighter Command, and weakened support for appeasement. On second thoughts, perhaps I shouldn't be surprised after all.

That the deceased died from suffocation and burns, having been murdered by some agent of a hostile force.¹

That was about as far as they could go in assigning blame, as they had no direct evidence as to who the murderer was. But everyone present knew that, as the coroner said,

these two people, man and wife, who were civilians and peaceful inhabitants, had died from shock, suffocation, and burns on May 31 owing to an explosion and consequent fires created by bombs no doubt dropped by a hostile airship. They might say that some unknown agent of the hostile German Army murdered these persons, and beyond that he did not think they could go.

This was the first air raid London ever experienced, ninety-five years ago today. The coronial inquest was therefore one of the first held into air-raid deaths. (At least one other was held in London the same day, and others had taken place after the first Zeppelin attacks in January.) To hold judicial inquiries into civilian deaths due to enemy action now seems like a slightly odd practice, and indeed the practice was not continued in the Second World War (or at least was not reported). But coronial inquests into air raid deaths were common features in the British press in the First World War.

The format allowed for the airing of plenty of tragic details:

A doctor who was called to the scene stated that he found Mr. and Mrs. Good in a back room on the first floor. Both were kneeling beside the bed and were naked. All the man's hair had been burnt off. The room was in ruins. Apart from a smell of burning, there was no smell of any chemical. The woman had a large piece of hair in her right hand.

The CORONER.--Perhaps she had snatched at her own hair in pain?--Yes.

And touching, pathetic details, too:

The witness added that the man's arm was around the woman's waist.

It was also a chance to get a look at the new warfare -- quite literally so, in this case:

The coroner, the jury, and all in the Court leant forward eagerly when, stooping down, the constable picked up two incendiary bombs found in the basement of the house. One, he explained, had fallen through the roof and through the front rooms. The other had dropped through the roof and on to the staircase and had set fire to the stairs. The constable added that both were very heavy.

The CORONER remarked that they did not seem to be very finely finished, but apparently they were very effective. They contained an explosive called "thermit," which was invented some years ago. It gave off enormous heat, as much as 5,000deg., and set everything on fire that it touched. It was a barbarous weapon.

Coroners were well aware that the eyes of the nation were upon them, and that they and their juries has a responsibility to avoid damaging morale:

It is not desirable, he added, to make much commotion about this matter. We do not want alarm to spread around the Metropolis, which has, up to the present, taken these acts very quietly and cooly, although we all stand in danger. It does not seem desirable to go into these matters very deeply, for the simple reason that it can do no possible good. In a case of this sort where it is impossible to get hold of the culprits, there is no good purpose to be served by it.

But equally, coroners knew that they had a unique opportunity to mould public opinion and even official policy. They could express popular outrage at the barbaric Huns:

The aeroplanes and Zeppelin airships of the Germans had created a new sphere for military genius to act in defence and attack. While armed airships, it was an entirely new and barbarous practice to use them as weapons of aggression against defenceless civilians in their beds in the undefended suburbs of our cities, seaside and health resorts, and country villages. Apparently there was a great deal of danger in attacking fortified places, so the German airships did not go to them.

And they could make recommendations on how best to thwart the air raiders:

The CORONER said there seemed to be only one argument that was of any avail. The more men that could be got to enlist the better it would be for the country.

Mapping the coronial inquests into the deaths of air raid victims over the course of the war would tell us much about how the British people learned about and responded to this 'new and barbarous practice'.

1. The Times, 3 June 1915, 3. All quotes taken from this source.

So it does sound a lot like Le Péril Bleu. But before I could cry 'J'accuse!' I noticed the following disclaimer on the first page of Raphael's version:

The central idea and some of the details of this story have been borrowed by permission from "Le Péril Bleu," by Maurice Renaud [sic].²

With that, all my dreams of making a major historical discovery -- the literary fraud of the Edwardian age! -- vanished. I'll have to win fame and fortune some other way.

But there's still some interesting stuff in Raphael's story. For a start, while it's not about aerial warfare as such, it does recapitulate some familiar themes. Most generally, there is the idea of a threat from above. This is so even though humanity itself is itself starting to conquer the sky:

Since, in 1913, the airman, O'Farrell, revolutionised aeroplaning by his invention of the perfect stabilisator, aeroplanes of all kinds, and hydro-aeroplanes had been enabled to hover over a fixed point exactly as a seagull hovers.³

One of the unfortunate victims of the Sky Folk, Mr Verulam, became ill when he was picked up, different to 'the ordinary air sickness which I remember feeling on my first trip to Paris in an aeroplane', which suggests that international air travel is now somewhat common, at least for the well-off.⁴ There's the symbolic demonstration of Britain's aerial weakness, in a scene when a sub-aerine has an accident and crashes onto Trafalgar Square, knocking over Nelson's Column. There's the predictable reaction of the mob to danger:

Then, more quickly than I can tell you, further catastrophe followed. I heard the roar and crash of falling masonry. I heard the screams and shrieks of women, the shouts of men, the hoarse cries of police ordering people to stand back, the yells and confusion of a panic-stricken crowd fighting in semi-darkness to escape from a danger which they only half understood, and trampling one another down to certain death in their efforts to avoid the uncertain death which they feared.⁵

And of course there's also the need for Britain to arm in the air. Having worked out pretty much what's going on, the Professor -- there's always one in these kind of stories -- writes a letter to The Times declaring that it was 'the absolute duty of England to equip an air expedition immediately', for the purposes of vengeance against the Sky Folk.⁶

But there's another possible connection to one of my interests, namely phantom airships. In an article published in Magonia in 1991, the sceptical ufologist Martin Kottmeyer looked for possible connections between the American mystery airship waves of 1896 and 1897 and later UFO sightings:

It is actually easier to trace the development of the UFO mythos to the British airship scare of 1912-13. These flaps were clearly paranoid in character, involving as the did the belief that German Zeppelin airships were secretly visiting Britain for spying out the land in preparation for war. There seems to be no compelling reason to doubt it inspired John N. Raphael to pen "Up above: The story of the sky folk" for the British Pearson's Magazine.

He goes on to suggest (following science fiction historian Sam Moskowitz) that the American anomalist Charles Fort likely read Raphael's story and that it influenced his later suggestion (belief is usually too strong a word for Fort) that extraterrestrials are watching and sometimes interacting with us, and not always to our benefit. When the modern UFO era began in 1947, early ufologists picked up on Fort's -- and hence Raphael's -- idea, and there went the neighbourhood.

I won't deal here with Kottmeyer's argument about Fort being influenced by Raphael, and ufologists being influenced by Fort. But what about the suggestion that Raphael was 'inspired' by the phantom airship wave of 1912-3?

The first problem with this is that, as I've already noted, Raphael quite openly acknowledged his literary debt to Renard's Le Péril Bleu. Given this, and the close similarity in outline between the two stories, there's no need to search for a real-world inspiration. However, I gather that Renard's version of the story was less paranoid than Raphael's. While noting the similarity with Fort's later idea that 'we are property', according to Wikipedia Le Péril Bleu 'retains a humanistic and tolerant rather than fearful and xenophobic philosophy'. 'Up above' is certainly fearful and xenophobic: the fall of red rain noted above is actually blood, which the Sky Folk dump overboard after vivisecting their human specimens. Mr Verulam's body was similarly dumped overboard, partially skinned. In true Lovecraftian fashion he had kept a diary of the terrifying things he had seen and heard:

The boy next to me has gone. I saw what was done to him before he disappeared. It is too awful. I dare not even attempt to describe it. I lay in the farthest corner of my cell shivering and screaming aloud as those awful invisible knives worked and worked on that naked body. I suppose it will be my own turn before long.⁷

So perhaps this hints at a darker relationship between the British and the air above than the French had, and the fearful realisation that England was no longer an island worked its way into Raphael's retelling of Renard as a morbid spin. But again, this is not necessary. The French had their own fears, and anyway The War of the Worlds is a perfectly adequate British precedent for how a technologically-superior 'them' might treat an unjustifiably-complacent 'us' (though arguably vivisection is a step down even from genocide: the Sky Folk don't recognise humans as being intelligent at all. At least Wells's Martians had to fight us.)

Moving from the general to the specific, there's a problem with timing. 'Up above' was published in the December 1912 issue of Pearson's Magazine, which means it was out by the first of the month (the issue is reviewed in The Times, 2 December 1912, 10). But the phantom airship scare of 1912-3 really did not get going until January 1913; while there were some sightings in October, November and December, with one exception they received little or no press attention. Even if Raphael banged his story out in short order, it would still take some time to go to press. What's more, 'Up above' is accompanied by five full pages of (I think) colour illustrations and twelve small line drawings which were clearly specially commissioned and can't have been produced in too much of a hurry. So figuring a month (at least) for all of that and Raphael can't have begun work later than the start of November, say.

Which makes it just possible that the Sheerness incident was an inspiration for Raphael. This took place on 14 October, but again was not widely reported until about a month later, when questions were asked in Parliament. However The Aeroplane reported 31 October on rumours that something -- a Zeppelin or perhaps a naval aviator -- had been flying over Sheerness at night. It's interesting that the Sheerness thing was heard but not seen; this is true also of the invisible sub-aerine in 'Up above', which is notable for the strange sounds it makes, like countless slate pencils grating and squeaking over countless greasy slates'.⁸ Maybe Raphael knew of this rumour and incorporated it into his story, but that's about all the influence I am able to allow for the phantom airship-Raphael connection.

NB. There's very little about 'Up above' on the web, aside from an Australian review of the subsequent novel. But I must go back in time and take this course.

1. John N. Raphael, 'Up above', Pearson's Magazine 34 (December 1912), 710-60.
2. Ibid., 710.
3. Ibid., 754.
4. Ibid., 738. I was going to say that this must be an early use of the phrase 'air sickness'; in fact the OED has three earlier cites, the first being Horace Walpole in 1784!
5. Ibid., 753-4.
6. Ibid., 733.
7. Ibid., 750.
8. Ibid., 720.

The Boer War of 1899-1902 doesn't often appear in airpower history. This may have something to do with the fact that it took place before the invention of the aeroplane, which I suppose is reasonable. But there are still interesting and even important connections and influences to be traced. Here are a baker's half-dozen.

1. Airpower was actually used during the war, in the form of British observation balloons. The Royal Engineers deployed three balloon sections to South Africa; one was part of the besieged forces at Ladysmith while the others took part in many of the operations from Modder River to the advance on Pretoria, observing enemy troop movements and directing artillery fire. (In the photo above, British infantry are crossing the Zand while a balloon keeps an eye out for Boers.) The balloon sections seem to have been quite useful in the early part of the war, but less so in the later guerrilla phases, where the British tried to hem in the remaining Boer forces against their system of blockhouses and wire fences. It seems it was possible to make the balloons mobile by simply hitching them to a wagon, but obviously they had no independence of action and had to stick to where the main body of the troops were, which was usually where the Boer commandos weren't. Still, I wonder if anybody on the British side thought about bringing in lots of balloons to give the counterinsurgent forces eyes in the sky.
2. The Boer War was, briefly, also a phantom airship, or rather phantom balloon scare. The Boers were initially quite worried about the British balloons, for which they had no counter. It was thought they might be used to float over Boer cities to drop bombs. In October 1899 the following telegraph message was sent from (actually, the source says received by, but that makes little sense) the Transvaal headquarters:
   

   Balloons -- Yesterday evening two balloons were seen at Irene, proceeding in the direction of Springs. Official telegraphists instructed to inform the Commander in Chief about any objects seen in the sky.

Here's an example of the sort of response that was received, in this case from Vryheid:

Airship with powerful light plainly visible from here in far off distance towards Dundee. Telegraphist at Paulpietersburg also spied one, and at Amsterdam three in the direction of Zambaansland to the south east.

Shots were fired at these supposed balloons or airships, and Transvaal apparently bought powerful searchlights from Germany to sweep the skies for them (although if that's true, it must have been done before the outbreak of war, because the British imposed an effective blockade on the Boer republics). The British balloons were nowhere near the Transvaal, so the Boers were seeing what they didn't want to see, so to speak. But lest it be thought that Tommy Atkins was too sober and rational to be afflicted with such visions, General Buller's men thought they were being followed by a light which appeared at dusk, which they called the 'Boer signal'. It was probably Venus. (Source: Nigel Watson, The Scareship Mystery: A Survey of Worldwide Phantom Airship Scares (1909-1918) (Corby: Domra Publications, 2000), 109-10.)

3. A very high proportion of senior figures in the early RFC fought in the Boer War: David Henderson (who was in fact in charge of military intelligence in the guerrilla phase of the war), Hugh Trenchard, Frederick Sykes, for example. P. R. C. Groves and L. E. O. Charlton, two early RFC officers who later became well-known airpower pundits, also fought in South Africa (Charlton was wounded and received the DSO). I'm sure there would be others. I've noted a similar geographical funnel before, mostly for the same men as it happens, and the same explanations probably apply: they actively sought out opportunity and adventure (Groves and Charlton, at least, were both volunteers), which is the sort of person most likely to try their hand at a new (and dangerous, possibly career-ending) service. Also, flying was a young man's game, but the decade's span between the end of the Boer War and the formation of the RFC meant that men who had volunteered for South Africa while young (Sykes was 22 when he volunteered for the Imperial Yeomanry) and had remained in the Army were beginning to reach ranks where they could be entrusted with serious responsibility. The other aspect to that is that the Army had expanded massively (relative to Victorian norms) to meet the needs of the war and then contracted again afterwards. Those who did hang around were likely to find themselves underemployed at various times and without prospects for promotion, and a new challenge like flying might appeal (Trenchard's biography bears this out). There are other possible effects of the Boer War which I'll come to presently.
4. From the Boer side, Jan Smuts also fought in the war, as the leader of a commando which raided deep into the Cape Colony. His connection with airpower history is, of course, as that he was asked by David Lloyd George to formulate the Imperial War Cabinet's response to the Gotha raids in 1917. The resulting eponymous reports led to the formation of the RAF in 1918 (though Henderson helped with the writing too). Someone with Smuts' many talents probably would have risen to great prominence anyway (he was already Attorney General of the Transvaal Republic at the outbreak of war) but I think the combination of the military feats he performed during the war and the political leadership he displayed during the negotiations over the peace treaty and then the Union Treaty and made him something special in British eyes. So if not for the Boer War, Smuts might not have been present at the birth of the RAF.
5. Getting into more speculative territory, I wonder if the economic warfare carried out by the British army against the Boers -- burning farms, removing livestock, imprisoning civilians, in order to cut off the commandos from their sources of supply -- influenced later airpower thinkers? Most of the theorising about economic warfare before 1914 came from navalists like Corbett, and there are definite continuities with airpower theory there. But a throwaway comment by Beau Grosscup in Strategic Terror: The Politics and Ethics of Aerial Bombardment (London and New York: Zed Books, 2006), 22, that 'Trenchard was trained in the British military tradition of offensive economic warfare' (i.e. which informed his later advocacy of strategic bombing) got me thinking. My first thought was what tradition?? and as Grosscup has a fair bit of questionable history that's still my considered opinion. But if the Army did have experience with economic warfare which might influence its strategic thought, it would have to have beeen in South Africa, the only time it had fought something like a European economy since the Crimea. And, as noted above, Henderson et al all experienced the war against the Boers at first hand. Having said that, the economic strangulation of the Boers was only part of the answer: their morale remained strong and they kept fighting until well after their military position was hopeless. And the knock-out blow is all about breaking morale. Which leads me to the next point.
6. The Boers engaged in terror warfare against the towns they besieged, Ladysmith, Mafeking and Kimberley, by way of artillery bombardment. (I'm not making a moral judgement by using the word 'terror', and anyway the British killed far more civilians through neglect in the concentration camps.) Boer artillery was few in number, but they did have some heavy pieces, including the famous 'Long Toms'. These would periodically shell the besieged towns, generally causing few casualties but sometimes causing a great deal of fear. The bombardments had the greatest effect in Kimberley where it seems (I don't have figures, unfortunately) that a number of women and children were killed in the shelling. The defenders dug shelters, hid in the diamond mines, built their own artillery piece for counter-battery fire and even improvised a warning system (a lookout on a tower would wave a flag when he saw a puff of smoke from the Long Tom, then buglers would sound the alarm, giving civilians about 15 seconds to take cover). But Cecil Rhodes, who was in Kimberley during the siege, was not at all happy. He continually pestered military authorities about raising the siege, used his newspaper to spew venom at them for doing nothing, and even had to be restrained from physically assaulting the commander of the town's defences for delaying dispatch of yet another plea/threat to Kitchener. He had just been prevented from holding a town meeting criticising military inaction, essentially proclaiming that the town's morale was on the verge of collapse, when the relief column finally arrived. Of course, the food shortages were more important than the bombardment (Kimberley was under siege for 124 days). Still it seems to me that we have here a small-scale model of how, in some of its more genteel versions at least, the knock-out blow was supposed to lead demoralised citizens to force their government to do whatever it took to end the war.
7. Finally, was NATO's air campaign against Serbia in 1999 a vindication of the victory-through-airpower theory? The Boer War says no! At least, that's the conclusion of Kieran Webb, 'Strategic bombardment and Kosovo: evidence from the Boer War', Defense & Security Analysis 24 (2008): 303-15. Here are the concluding two paragraphs:
   

   Keegan’s argument that Kosovo was a turning point is not only countered by its rarity but also by the fact that similar circumstances had happened previously. Analysis from the Boer War found evidence of bombardment having a strategic effect at the Battle of Paardeberg in 1900. Here the leadership was susceptible to domestic pressure, and bombardment managed to minimise human casualties while it destroyed items of economic and personal value. The result was that the besieged Boers rejected the chance to escape when it was available to them and surrendered to the British even though they had not run out of food or ammunition.

   Other battles fought during the Boer War could not be won by bombardment alone. Both Boers and the British managed to find ways to withstand enemy artillery and could be defeated only through the use of ground troops. Just as Kosovo was exceptional in its era, so was Paardeberg in its time.

   Intriguing, but outside my area!

For an excellent overview of the Boer War which isn't unbalanced by an obsession with airpower, I recommend Denis Judd and Keith Surridge, The Boer War (London: John Murray, 2003).

Image source: Library of Congress.

In the summer of 1940, strange patterns like these began to appear in the sky over southern England. Today they wouldn't be thought so unusual (except that they are on the twisty side), for contrails are a common sight now, especially over London. Seventy years ago, however, they were a little mysterious, even to those in the aviation community, and even though similar phenomena had sometimes been seen before. Flight reported in July that year:

Some readers may have observed lately what they at first thought to be sky-writing, and a member of the staff of Flight saw a particularly good example on Sunday afternoon, July 7, over London. The same sort of thing had been seen previously, but this was the best example to date and exhibited some features not observed on other occasions. For the benefit of those who have not seen the phenomenon it consists of a thin line of what looks like white cloud, or perhaps of very white smoke made by a sky-writing aeroplane.

While it was allowed that the clouds might be caused by 'the discharge of white smoke from a military aeroplane for some purpose connected with the war', the explanation ultimately plumped for was pretty close to the mark: so-called 'visible vortices':

The explanation which has been given before as a possible reason for visibility of these vortices is that there is condensation of moisture. Such condensation might perhaps be caused in regions of low pressure which may be those parts of the vortex where the velocity is highest. Perhaps there is significance in the fact that it is at the tip of the airscrew (where the blade velocity is greatest) that the visible ring occurs. A fog formed by reduction of pressure can be seen in tunnelling work under the earth when, in order to keep out water, compressed air is supplied to the working face. The men, to get out, have to go into a chamber where the pressure is reduced before they can go into atmospheric pressure. During this decompression, the whole chamber may be filled with fog.

In the case of the trail behind an aeroplane, the condensation theory might be correct as there is plenty of water vapour in the products of combustion in the exhaust gas. If the atmospheric conditions are right, the condensation would certainly cause a visible trail.

But even though (as we now know) this explanation was essentially correct, there was as yet no proof, and there followed considerable correspondence from readers. (Some helpfully suggested that that the visible vortices might be used to track enemy aircraft, either by fighters underneath during the day, or by searchlights at night.) By September Flight felt it had enough information to tentatively confirm its earlier hypothesis, and also to note that there were two types of visible vortices: long-lived helical ones from engine exhaust ('slipstream trails'), and short-lived ones from wingtips ('wing tip trails'). In 1942 de Havilland published a similar but more technical explanation of both types of contrail, so it seems that Flight's theory had become widely accepted. A mathematical theory of contrail formation was independently formulated in Germany in 1941 and in the United States in 1953.

Science aside, the contrails quickly became part of the Battle of Britain and its memory, tracing out the deadly dogfights overhead, as suggested by Paul Nash's 1941 painting Battle of Britain (IWM ART LD1550):

Image sources: Flight, 5 September 1940, e; BBC.

It's not clear exactly what the League was proposing; it seems to have been a moratorium on military aircraft. The arguments it gave display a curious mixture of insight and naivety:

There are many who believe that aerial warfare, by reason of its sheer horror, must prove a blessing in disguise, frightening men from war. To those we say: Civilisation does not sanction the ravages of a new and arrestable form of disease, in order that men through horror may be the more eager to join hands in stamping out all forms of sickness. And further, you under-rate the fortitude and adaptability of human nature, which has long proved that it can endure all forms of terror.

There are some who insist that the art of flying will never reach full development without the stimulus of war. To such we suggest that the story of mankind does not leave us without hope that where there is demand, even when only for the purposes of peaceful life, there will also be supply. If the art of flying be delayed a few years by the resolve of men to use that art for mutual help, and not for mutual destruction, the world will be no loser.

There are many who argue that because men fight on earth and water, they may just as well fight in the air. To these we answer: There has never yet been a moment when it was practically possible to ban the war machines of earth or water. There is a moment when it is practically possible to ban those of the air. That moment is now -- before the use of these machines is proved; before great vested interests have formed.¹

Some two hundred British intellectuals -- artists, writers, clergy, scientists (all men, I might add) -- signed up to the memorial, including Wilfred Scawen Blunt, J. B. Bury, Walter Crane, Arthur Conan Doyle, Edward Elgar, John Galsworthy, H. Rider Haggard, Thomas Hardy, Frederic Harrison, H. H. Henson, J. A. Hobson, Jerome K. Jerome, Ray Lankester, Lord Lister (who died only a few days later), Oliver Lodge, John Masefield, Gilbert Murray, William Osler, Arthur Pinero, A. F. Pollard, Arthur Quiller-Couch, Joseph Rowntree, Seebohm Rowntree, William Rossetti, William Temple, Alfred Russel Wallace and (of course) H. G. Wells.

An impressive list. In response, Flight had only an anonymous prehistoric skeleton recently unearthed in Norfolk, about which it spun a tale of wise elders begging the inventor of the stone ax to destroy his new weapon 'in the name of humanity'. The point was that the International Arbitration League and the two hundred intellectuals had not taken human nature into account.

Without going quite so far as to say that man's natural instincts lead him to murder, and the appropriation of those things which are not his, whether we regard man as an individual or as a community, the real cause is not very far removed from this. Until all this is changed -- until, that is, human nature has undergone a complete change -- "memorials of protest" against armaments at large and the components of which they consist, are merely in the nature of pious resolutions which do no one any harm if they achieve little good.²

'A Memorial Against the Use of Armed Airships' seems to have had little effect; even the Manchester Guardian, which as a Radical newspaper ought to have been sympathetic, thought the International Arbitration League was on a hiding to nothing.³ Its best chance came twenty years later, when the World Disarmament Conference did consider banning bombers or limiting their use, but the various proposals collapsed as each delegation guarded its own national interest. In other words, because of human nature writ large. The skeleton from Norfolk was right.

1. Manchester Guardian, 7 February 1912, 8.
2. Flight, 10 February 1912, 118.
3. Manchester Guardian, 7 February 1912, 6.