The motor-car work was daily gaining in importance; what was needed was a stronger force and armoured cars. Two of the cars were fitted with improvised armour made of boiler-plate at the _Forges et Chantiers de France_, the big shipbuilding firm of Dunkirk, and application was made to the home authorities for a larger force of marines and specially designed armoured cars. The First Lord of the Admiralty (Mr. Winston Churchill) and the Director of the Air Department (Captain Murray Sueter) were quick to support any enterprise that showed life and promise; on the 8th of September there arrived a reinforcement of 250 marines under Major Armstrong, most of them reservists and pensioners, but stout men when it came to a fight. Further, Wing Commander Samson got into touch with Captain Goldsmith, of the General Headquarters Intelligence Department, and, by his efforts, was put in control of the gendarmes in the villages of the zone where he was operating. The aeroplanes daily watched the movements of German troops along the roads, and the motor-cars, assisted sometimes by the infantry, carried out sweeps and drives, to surround parties of German horsemen or cyclists. There were some fights. On the 13th of September there was a brush with some German cavalry patrols, on the Albert road, just outside the town of Doullens. 'We got out of the cars', says Air Commodore Samson, 'and opened fire with rifles at about five hundred yards range. We hit five of them. Three were killed, and one was picked up severely wounded. We took him to a hospital in Doullens, where he died without recovering consciousness. It rather made me feel a brute seeing this poor fellow dying, and War seemed a beastly business. He was a rather half-starved looking fellow, and looked as if he had been on short rations for a long time. It was rather a repugnant job searching him whilst he was passing away from this life, but it had to be done. Goldsmith, who could read German, found from his papers that he belonged to the First Squadron of the 26th Dragoons, Wurtemberg. He had a little child's atlas with which to find his way about the country, and the map of France was about three inches square, with only the names of half a dozen towns on it.'