r,
until it vanished in a golden haze, far to the north. It was then four
o'clock. In an hour's time the pilot would be circling down over his
aerodrome on the Champagne front.

III

BY THE ROUTE OF THE AIR

The winter of 1916-17 was the most prolonged and bitter that France
has known in many years. It was a trying period to the little group of
Americans assembled at the Ecole Militaire d'Aviation, eager as they
were to complete their training, and to be ready, when spring should
come, to share in the great offensive, which they knew would then take
place on the Western front. Aviation is a waiting game at the best of
seasons. In winter it is a series of seemingly endless delays. Day
after day, the plain on the high plateau overlooking the old city of
V---- was storm-swept, a forlorn and desolate place as we looked at it
from our windows, watching the flocks of crows as they beat up against
the wind, or as they turned, and were swept with it, over our
barracks, crying and calling derisively to us as they passed.

"Birdmen do you call yourselves?" they seemed to say. "Then come on
up; the weather's fine!"

Well they knew that we were impostors, fair-weather fliers, who dared
not accept their challenge.

It is strange how vague and shadowy my remembrance is of those long
weeks of inactivity, when we were dependent for employment and
amusement on our own devices. To me there was a quality of unreality
about our life at B----. Our environment was, no doubt, partly
responsible for this feeling. Although we were not far distant from
Paris,--less than an hour by train,--the country round about our camp
seemed to be quite cut off from the rest of the world. With the
exception of our Sunday afternoons of leave, when we joined the
_boulevardiers_ in town, we lived a life as remote and cloistered as
that of some brotherhood of monks in an inaccessible monastery. That
is how it appeared to me, although here again I am in danger of making
it seem that my own impressions were those of all the others. This of
course was not true. The spirit of the place appealed to us,
individually, in widely different ways, and upon some, perhaps, it had
no effect at all.

Sometimes we spent our winter afternoons of enforced leisure in long
walks through country roads which lay empty to the eye for miles. They
gave one a sense of loneliness which colored thought, not in any
sentimental