How I wish the mailbase had been operating when I tried to annotate the
story! The expertise is most impressive. When Kipling comes out of
copyright in 2006, I hope a new generation of editors will take advantage
of this superb resource.
As to the lack of clarity in Mary's reference to the tanks of the
crashing aircraft (if there was one), we've already been warned not to
trust her when she's repeating technicalities given her by Wynn: 'who had
finished "rolling" (whatever that may be) and had gone on from a "taxi" to
a machine more or less his own.' Raleigh's passage in The War in the Air
about the training of pilots has the process and the jargon much as it was
ten years ago when my nephew learned to fly: first rolling or taxi-ing on
the ground with an instructor, then flying with one, and then a solo
flight. Raleigh says they were very short of aircraft in early 1915,
which would make it pretty unlikely that Wynn had 'a machine more or less
his own'. Presumably contemporary readers, or at least well-informed
ones, would have understood that Mary is pretty clueless in these matters.
So it is a vague sentence about the tanks, but it's (dare I suggest?)
meant to be. Wonderful writer. Brilliant story. Lisa Lewis
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