An early example of this sort of thing was when Mr. G. B. Cockburn, who had taught the navy to fly, kindly sent us his reminiscences. “The reminiscences of G. B. Cockburn matter so much that I am rewriting the whole of Eastchurch and Larkhill. It is a nuisance, but I suppose is bound to happen again.” He was so considerate for his readers. “I can’t say to readers, ‘You all know what an air-raid is like, so I shall only tell you how many they were and what weight of bombs was dropped,’ they must be helped a little to see the thing!” So passed the summer vacation and then Oxford filled up again and engulfed him. The prospect of 4,000 students in Oxford, although it was not what he expected when he undertook to write the history, was a prospect which pleased him. His research into the history stimulated him. When he came to lecture to his new students he was better than ever. His lectures were inspiring. “Oxford is full of the best lot of men we have ever had, mostly back from the war, and when they want my services I can’t refuse them, so I have no time. But I shall shut the door in mid-March.” In mid-March he shut the door and prepared for a visit to town. “I am always cheered by a visit to the factory of air history,” he wrote, and further, “the weak point of this show is the Old Historian.” By the summer of 1920 the pre-war period of the history was finished and he was working on the war period, and the war period offered different problems. Sir Walter looked upon himself as holding a special brief for those members of the air services who did their duty and were content to do their duty without any sort of publicity or reward. He was no believer in star-turns. He believed, with the officers who commanded the air services, as he says in his Introduction, in a high tableland of duty and efficiency and not a low range of achievement rising now and again into sharp fantastic peaks. “The humblest flier,” he wrote in a letter discussing this subject, “who went and strafed a Boche and got done in is not going to be sacrificed or even subordinated to the star performers. Every V.C. shall be clearly told that men who deserved as well or better than he did are forgotten, in large numbers, because they faced certain death without witnesses. The hero of the book is chosen and is the Air, not the stars.” And this is how he tells them in his book. “No history can be expected to furnish a full record of all the acts of prowess that were performed in the air during the long course of the war. Many of the best of them can never be known; the Victoria Cross has surely been earned, over and over again, by pilots and observers who went east, and lie in unvisited graves. The public dearly loves a hero; but the men who have been both heroic and lucky must share their honours, as they are the first to insist, with others whose courage was not less, though luck failed them.”