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 Letord, a
three-passenger biplane carrying two machine gunners 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 single-seater _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
genius of the French in motor and aircraft construction.

At last we were ready for acrobacy. I will not give an account of the
trials by means of which one's ability as a combat pilot is most
severely tested. This belongs among the pages of a textbook rather
than in those of a journal of this kind. But to us who were to undergo
the ordeal,--for it is an ordeal for the untried pilot,--our
typewritten notes on acrobacy read like the pages of a fascinating
romance. A year or two ago these aerial maneuvers would have been
thought impossible. Now we were all to do them as a matter of routine
training.

The worst of it was, that our civilian pursuits offered no criterion
upon which to base forecasts of our ability as acrobats. There was J.
B., for example. He knew a mixed metaphor when he saw one, for he had
had wide experience with them as an English instructor at a New
England "prep" school. But he had never done a barrel turn, or
anything resembling it. How was he to know what his reaction would be
to this bewildering maneuver, a series of rapid, horizontal, corkscrew
turns? And to what use coul