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animals were foisted off on the military,
and that an inspector could determine the age by noting that the vertebral
spaces should be at least a quarter inch wide. When he took a look and found no
visible spaces at all, he decided that the animal was too old and so rejected
it.
    Which meant that the garrison had no meat that
day. When the commanding officer was served his vegetarian meal, he glowered at
Dowding “in a most unchristian temper,” as Dowding recalled, telling him that
the next time he held the duty, to mind his own bloody business.
    This lesson was reinforced when he held the
duty of range officer. His job was to take the artillery’s target out to sea,
to a distance of roughly three miles. At that point a flag flying from a hill
beside the station would be lowered, and he was then to drop the target, move
comfortably away, and record the accuracy with which the cannons bombarded the
target.
    Since it was Dowding’s first time as range
officer, the Colonel of the Regiment accompanied him. They sailed away the
requisite three miles, and Dowding proposed to stop and drop the target. But
the Colonel pointed out that the flag had not yet dropped, and ordered him to
keep going. And going, and going . . .
    Despite Dowding’s protestations that the cannon
had a range of only five miles, they kept going. Finally, when they were close
to fifteen miles out at sea, the flag dropped. Dowding stopped the launch,
released the target, and watched as the cannon fire didn’t come close to
reaching it.
    As they returned, Dowding remarked that he
expected to catch hell for
this. The Colonel didn’t see why, since Dowding had followed his orders
perfectly, but agreed to test the situation. When they reached headquarters,
the Colonel waited outside while Dowding went in alone. Immediately, the sound
of loud shouts was heard, asking why he had sailed so totally out of range, if
his entire family were imbeciles or was it only him, did he have any idea what
the range of a cannon was, and, if he did, did he care or did he think he had
been dispatched on the launch to enjoy a leisurely sea voyage?
    Whereupon the Colonel made his entrance.
    Dowding was beginning to realize that following
the manual, obeying instructions as they were written, wasn’t all that it was
cracked up to be.
     
    After six years in India, he got back to
England to attend the Staff College at Camberley, a necessary step in a
military career. There he discovered that the military tendency to walk about
with blinkers on and to keep a rigid mind was not confined to the lower rank of
officers. In current terminology, the staff talked the talk but didn’t walk the
walk. “I was always hurt by the lip service the staff paid to freedom of
thought,” he later said, “contrasted with an actual tendency to repress all but
conventional ideas.”
    This lack of imagination and initiative was
exemplified at the college. Every student took turns being commanding officer
of a military exercise, but since he was the youngest and most junior, Dowding
was the last one. It was 1913 when he got his chance. When he did, he found that
he had six aircraft, or aeroplanes, as they were then called, at his disposal.
No one ever made any use of these aircraft, because no one had the slightest
idea what to do with them.
    It had been only a few years previously, in
1907, when the Wright brothers, rebuffed by the United States, had offered
their invention to the British. Lord Tweedsmuir replied on behalf of their
Lordships: “I have consulted my expert advisers with regard to your suggestion as to the employment of
aeroplanes. I regret to have to tell you, after the careful consideration of my
Board, that the Admiralty, while thanking you for so kindly bringing the
proposals to their notice, are of opinion that they would not be of any
practical value to the Naval Service.”
    The army was no more impressed. A member of its
council, on being urged to consider airplanes as suitable