great relief, began speaking to me. It was monsieur the mayor. As best I could, I explained that I had lost my way and had found it necessary to come down for the purpose of making inquiries. I knew that it was awful French, but hoped that it would be intelligible, in part at least. However, the mayor understood not a word, and I knew by the curious expression in his eyes that he must be wondering from what weird province I hailed. After a moment's thought he said, 'Vous êtes Anglais, monsieur?' with a smile of very real pleasure. I said, 'Non, monsieur, Américain.'

That magic word! What potency it has in France the more so at that time, perhaps, for America had placed herself definitely on the side of the Allies only a very short time before. Frankly, I did enjoy that moment. I might have had the village for the asking. I willingly accepted the rôle of ambassador of the American people. Had it not been for the language barrier, I think I would have made a speech, for I felt the generous spirit of Uncle Sam prompting me to give those fathers and mothers, whose husbands and sons were at the front, the promise of our unqualified support. I wanted to tell them that we were with them now, not only in sympathy, but with all our resources in men and guns and ships and aircraft. Alas! this was impossible. Instead, I gave each one of an army of small boys the privilege of sitting in the pilot's seat, and showed them how to manage the controls.

The astonishing thing to me was, that while this village was not twenty kilometres off the much-frequented air route between C and R——, mine was the first aeroplane which most of them had seen. During long months at various aviation schools I had grown accustomed to thinking that aircraft were as familiar a sight to others as to

us. And yet here was a village not far distant from several aviation schools, where a pilot was looked upon with wonder. To have an American aviator drop down upon them was an event, even in the history of that ancient village. To have been that aviator well, it was an unforgettable experience, coming as it did so opportunely with America's entry into the war. I shall always have it in the background of memory, and, if health and fortune hold good, it will be one of the pleasantest of many pleasant tales I shall have in store for my grandchildren.

However, it is not their potentialities as memories which endear these adventures of ours now. Rather, it is their contrast to any that we have known before. We are always comparing this new life with the old, so different in every respect as to seem a separate existence, almost a previous incarnation.

Having been set right about my course, I pushed my biplane to more level ground, with the willing help of all the boys, started my motor, and was away again. Their cheers were so shrill and hearty that they reached me even above the roar of the motor. As a lad in a small, middle-western town, I have known the rapture of holding to a balloon guy-rope at a country fair, until the world's most famous aeronaut shouted, 'Let 'er go, boys!' and swung off into space. I kept his memory green until I had passed the first age of heroworship. I know that every youngster in a small village in central France will so keep mine. Such fame is the only kind worth having.

A flight of fifteen minutes brought me within sight of the large white circle which marks the landing field at R R—. J. B. had not yet arrived. This was a great disappointment, for we had planned a race home. I was anxious about him, too, for I knew that the godfather

of all adventurers can be very stern at times, particularly with his aerial godchildren. I waited an hour, and then decided to go on alone. The weather having cleared, the opportunity was too favorable to be lost.

The cloud-formations were the most remarkable that I had ever seen. I flew around and over and under them, watching at close quarters the play of light and shade over their great billowing folds. Sometimes I skirted them so closely that the current of air from my propeller raveled out fragments of shining vapor, which streamed into the clear spaces like wisps of filmy silk. I knew that I ought to be savoring this experience, but for some reason I could not. One usually pays for a fine mood by a sudden and unaccountable change of feeling which shades off into a kind of dull, colorless depression.

I passed a twin-motor Caudron going in the opposite direction. It was fantastically painted the wings a bright yellow and the circular hoods over the two motors a fiery red. As it approached, it looked like some prehistoric bird with great ravenous eyes. The thing startled me, not so much because of its weird appearance, as by the mere fact of its being there. Strangely enough, for a moment it seemed impossible that I should meet another avion. Despite a long apprenticeship in aviation, in these days when one's mind has only begun to grasp the fact that the mastery of the air has been accomplished, the sudden presentation of a bit of evidence sometimes shocks it into a moment of amazement bordering on incredulity.

As I watched the big biplane pass, it was with relief that I became conscious of a feeling of loneliness. I remembered what J. B. had said that morning. There was something unpleasant in that isolation, something to make one look longingly down to earth; to make

one wonder whether we shall ever feel really at home in the air. I, too, longed for the sound of human voices, and all that I heard was the roar of the motor and the swish of the wind through wires and struts - sounds which have no human quality in them, and are no more companionable than the lapping of the waves would be to a man adrift on a raft in mid-ocean. Underlying this feeling, and, no doubt, in part responsible for it, was the knowledge of the fallibility of that seemingly perfect mechanism which rode so steadily through the air; of the quick response which that ingenious arrangement of inanimate matter would make to an eternal, inexorable law, if a few frail wires should part; of the equally quick, but less phlegmatic response of another fallible mechanism, capable of registering horror, capable, it is said, of passing its past life in review in the space of a few seconds, and then - capable of becoming equally inanimate matter.

Luckily nothing of this sort happened, and the feeling of loneliness passed the moment I came in sight of the long rows of barracks, the hangars and machine-shops of the aviation school. My joy when I saw them can be appreciated in full only by fellow aviators who remember the end of their own first long flight. I had been away for years. I would not have been surprised to find great changes. If the brevet monitor had come hobbling out to meet me holding an ear-trumpet in his palsied hand, the sight would have been quite in keeping with my own sense of the lapse of time. However, he approached with his ancient, springy, businesslike step, as I climbed down from my machine. I swallowed to clear the passage to my ears, and heard him say, 'Alors, ça va?' in a most disappointingly perfunctory tone of voice. I nodded.

'Where's your biograph?'

one for each stage of my journey, including the forced landing when I had lost my way. But alas! having started the mechanism going on leaving A-, I had then forgotten all about it, so that it had gone on running while my machine was on the ground, as well as during the time it was in the air. The result was a sketch of a magnificent mountain-range, which might have been drawn by the futurist son, age five, of a futurist artist. Silently I handed over the instrument. The monitor looked at it, and then at me, without comment. But there is an international language of facial expression, and his said, unmistakably, 'You poor, simple prune! You choice sample of mouldy American cheese!'

J. B. did not return until the following afternoon. After leaving me over C, he had blown out two sparkplugs. For a while he limped along on six cylinders, then landed in a field. three kilometres from the nearest town. His French, which is worse, if that is possible, than mine, aroused the suspicions of a sturdy patriot farmer who collared him as a possible German spy. Under a bodyguard of two peasants armed with hoes, he was marched to a neighboring château. And then, I should think, he must have had another historical illusion, this time with a French revolutionary setting. He says not, however. All his faculties were concentrated on enjoying this unusual adventure; and he was wonder

ing what the outcome of it would be.

At the château he met a fine old gentleman who spoke English with that nicety of utterance which only a cultivated Frenchman can achieve. He had no difficulty in clearing himself. Then he had dinner in a great hall hung with armor and hunting trophies, was shown to a chamber half as large as the lounge at the Harvard Club, and slept in a bed which he got into by means of a ladder of carved oak. This is a mere outline. Out of regard for J. B.'s opinions about the sanctities of his own personal adventures, I refrain from giving further details.

Our final triangle was completed uneventfully. J. B.'s motor behaved splendidly; I remembered my biograph at every stage of the journey, and we were at home again within three hours. We did our altitude tests and were then no longer élèves-pilotes but pilotesaviateurs. By reason of this distinction, we passed from the rank of soldier of the second class to that of corporal. We hurried to the tailor's, where the wings and star insignia were sewn on our collars and our corporal's stripes on our sleeves. For we were proud, as every aviator is proud, who reaches the end of his apprenticeship and enters into the dignity of breveted military pilot.

II

Six months have passed since I made the last entry in my journal. J. B. was asleep in his historic bed, and I was sitting at a rickety table, writing by candle-light, stopping now and then to listen to the mutter of guns on the Aisne front. It was only at night that we could hear them, and then not often, the very ghost of sound, as faint as the beating of the pulses in one's ears. That was a May evening, and now it is late in November. I arrived at the Gare du Nord only a few hours ago.

Never before have I come to Paris with so keen a sense of the joy of living. I walked down rue Lafayette, then through rue de Provence and rue du Havre, to a little hotel in the vicinity of the Gare St. Lazare. Under ordinary circumstances not one of these streets, or the people in them, would have appeared particularly interesting; but on this occasion it was the finest walk of my life. I saw everything with the enchanted eyes of the permissionnaire, and sniffed the odors of roasting chestnuts, of restaurants, of shops, and of people, never so keenly aware of their numberless variety.

After dinner I walked out on the boulevards from the Madeleine to the Place de la République, through the maze of narrow streets, to the river, and over Pont Neuf to Notre Dame. I was amazed that the enchantment which Hugo gives it for me should have lost none of its old potency, after coming direct from the tremendous realities of modern warfare. If he were writing this journal, what a story it would be! I ought to give it up, but that second self which is always urging one to do impossible things, keeps say ing, 'Of course it's absurd. I grant you that you're not big enough for the job. But don't be too ambitious. Remember what you started in to do: "Simple narrative-two members-Escadrille Lafayette." Tell it as it falls out of your pen. Who asks you to do more than that?'

course of instruction, first on the twinmotor Caudron and then on various types of the Nieuport biplane. We thought the Caudron a magnificent machine. We liked the steady throb of its powerful motors, the enormous spread of its wings, the slow, ponderous way it had of answering to the controls. It was our business to take officer observers for long trips about the country while they made photographs, spotted dummy batteries, and perfected themselves in the wireless code.

At that time the Caudron had almost passed its period of usefulness at the front, and there was a prospect of our being transferred to the yet larger and more powerful Léotard, a three-passenger biplane carrying two machinegunners besides the pilot, and from three to five machine-guns. This appealed to us mightily. J. B. was always talking of the time when he would command not only a machine, but also a 'gang of men.' However, being Americans, and recruited for a particular combat corps which flies only singleseater avions de chasse, we eventually followed the usual course of training for such pilots. We passed in turn to the Nieuport biplane, which compares in speed and grace with these larger craft, as the flight of a swallow with the movements of a great lazy buzzard. And now the Nieuport has been surpassed, and almost entirely supplanted, by the Spad of 140, 180, 200, and 230 horse-power, and we have transferred our allegiance to each in turn, marveling at the restless genius of the French in motor- and aircraft-construction.

At last we were ready for acrobacy. I will not give a detailed account of these trials by means of which one's ability as a combat pilot is most severely tested. This belongs in the pages of a textbook rather than in those of a journal of this kind. But to us, who were to undergo the ordeal,

most ferment at the survi zi nericacy for the reason that he did NOT SHOW. beforecand vieler le VIEL DE IDE to keep his tent and we th

at the moment wi gone mad spinning 182 & tre, SOLOGIE on one rim turning pose DVL

In the end we all mastered cateri fashion, for the tests are by to melts so difficult of accomplishment as they appear to be. Up to this time, Novers ber 28, 1917, there has been but oce American killed at it in French schocis, We were not all good acrobats. One must have a knack for it which many of us will never be able to acquire. The French have it in larger proportion than do we Americans. I can think of no sight more pleasing than that of a Spad in the air, under the control of a skillful French pilot. Swallows perch in envious silence on the

ccess. and the crows caw in alea escair from the hedgerows.

vie awaiting our call

de ma ve perfected ourselves in Cese TabLeuvres, and practiced them 1 omcat un: youp dying. There, the restants of the hocis were removed, 2 we were supposed to be accomished tits e dew when, and in manner. we ked. Sometimes went on are formations, for a cmetimes, in groups of two ve made sham attacks on rains ir netor-convoys on

I was ridden to dy over Paris, or this vason we took all the more wing L. J. B. and I saw it in LIS TAVUS: II ne aze of early mornDo it many when the air had been vaster sa by spring rain, in the domes, thea

annies sires, streets, parks, the en reges all of it spread out in 1 maccent panorama. We would mrne wer Montmartre. Neuilly, the 3eis St. Cloud, the Latin Quarter, and

en fl seed homeward, listening azzersy to the sound of our motors nti ve spiraled safely down over our aerodrome. Our monitor would smile snowingly when he looked at the essence grape, but he never asked questoes. He is one of many Frenchmen whom we sha" always remember with gratitude.

We learned the songs of all motors, the peculiarities and uses of all types of French arions, pushers and tractors, single motor and bi-motor, monoplace, biplace and triplace, monoplane and biplane. And we mingled with the pilots of all these many kinds of aircraft. They were arriving and departing by every train, for G.D.E. is the dépôt for old pilots from the front, transferring from one branch of aviation to another, as well as for new ones fresh from the schools. In our talks with them, we