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to his everlasting regret, for in 1815, the balloons could have
reversed the final decision at Waterloo.
    Let’s reconstruct the situation. After
returning from Elba, Napoleon has roused the French people to his side and is
now ensconced in Paris. Here comes the Duke of Wellington and the Prussian
general, Gebhard Leberecht von Blucher, leading two prongs of armies. Blucher
is defeated by one of Napoleon’s lieutenants and retreats. Wellington sets up
on a hill near the village of Waterloo.
    What should Napoleon do? He can remain in Paris
and await siege, or he can attack Wellington. Two questions arise: First, how
strong is Wellington? His forces are visible on the slope of the hill, but he
has a reputation for hiding more forces on the back slope. Second, where is
Blucher? Is he retreating back to Prussia, or has he regrouped and headed to
Waterloo to help Wellington?
    Napoleon feels that Wellington is bluffing, that
he hopes Napoleon will think he has more troops behind the hill since he’s done
that before, and so Napoleon will hide in Paris. Then, when more British troops
arise, Wellington will attack. Also, Napoleon’s intuition and understanding of
psychology lead him to believe that Blucher doesn’t have the heart for more war
and is on his way back to Prussia.
    So he attacks the British troops on the hill at
Waterloo. But Wellington did have more troops hidden, and as they arise from
the back slope of the hill, Blucher suddenly emerges from the woods with his
Prussian army to roll up Napoleon’s flank, and Waterloo is lost.
    Balloons would have been able to look over the
hill and find the hidden British troops, and would also have seen Blucher long
before he made his disastrous appearance. The course of history would have been
quite different. But now, in
the early years of the twentieth century, Napoleon is long gone and so is the
idea of any military use of the air, despite the success of the Wright
brothers. The British army has bought a few of these flimsy airplanes, but it
cannot find any use for them.
    Until, that is, a young staff officer steps
outside the constricting box of military thinking . . .
     
     
    Four
     
    We don’t know very much about Dowding’s
early life, except that it seems to have been a normal one for a soldier of his
generation. But, of course, what was normal for his generation is not quite
that for ours.
    Though the two world wars brought us into the
modern era, their roots lay far back in the dim mists of Victorian times.
Dowding, who like most of the war’s commanders was born at the height of Queen
Victoria’s reign, grew up in that mixture of naive credulity and scientific
optimism that characterized the times. During the thirty-two years from his birth
to the outbreak of the First World War, the world was an exciting place to a
person of inquisitive mind. Science had broken out of its bottle like a wild
genie, and the universe had become, incredibly, both more understandable and
more mystifying. Nothing, it seemed, was beyond the promise of science to
understand and control—but not quite yet. Radio waves had sprung out of the
aether—indeed, Dowding was the first person in the world to communicate
directly from an airplane to a ground station—and X-rays had appeared out of
nowhere, leading to the even more mysterious emanations of radioactivity.
Einstein proclaimed that space and time did not absolutely exist, and the world
was shown to be immeasurably older than the biblical term of six thousand years.
    But other scientific investigations led to
mysteries as yet unfathomable. Television was promised but proved elusive.
N-rays were discovered and then lost again. Evolution went off on myriad tracks
that dwindled to dead ends. Malthus showed that the world could not survive the
next hundred years; Marconi received radio messages from Mars; Matthews
invented the death ray; and Sir William Crookes, president of the most
respected organization of scientists in the world,