The world's first operational fighter aircraft armed with a fixed machine-gun firing directly forward through the disc of rotation of a tractor airscrew was the Morane-Saulnier Type L that was flown as a single-seater by the great French pioneer pilot Roland Garros. The aircraft was a parasol monoplane, its armament a single Hotchkiss gun firing straight ahead, the airscrew protected by the channel-shaped steel wedges developed by Garros* mechanic, Jules Hue, from the original. albeit admittedly expedient, idea of Robert Saulnier. That well-known apophthegm e'est brusque; e'est brutal, mais ca marche is, after all, French.