One other thing the coast defense had done: it had pre-empted the greater part of America's attention in times of peace and unpreparedness, so that big-gun problems had received a disproportionate amount of study. The American technical journals on artillery were always of the finest. The war services were honeycombed with men who were big-gun experts. So when the first artillery training-school opened in France, in mid-August of 1917, the problems to be faced were all of a more or less external character. The first of these, of course, was airplane work. The second was in mastering gun differences between American and French types, and in learning about the enormous numbers of new weapons which had sprung from battle almost day by day. The camp, when the Americans moved in, had much to recommend it to its new inhabitants. There need be no attempt to conceal the fact that first satisfaction came with the barracks, second with the weather, and only third with the guns and planes. Some of the artillerymen had come from the infantry camps, and some direct from the coast. Those from the Vosges camp were boisterous in their praise of their quarters. They had brick barracks, with floors, and where they were billeted with the French they found excellent quarters in the old, low-lying stone and brick houses. The weather would not have been admired by any outsider. But to the men from the Vosges it owed a reputation, because they extolled it both day and night. The artillery camp was in open country, to permit of the long ranges, and if it sunned little enough, neither did it rain. The guns and airplanes supplied by the French were simple at first, becoming, as to guns at least, steadily more numerous and complicated as the training went on. The men began on the seventy-fives, approximately the American three-inch gun, and on the howitzers of twice that size. The airplane service was the only part of the work wholly new to the men, and, naturally enough, it was the most attractive. Although the officers and instructors warned that air observation and range-finding was by far the most dangerous of all artillery service, seventy-five per cent of the young officers who were eligible for the work volunteered for it. This required a two-thirds weeding out, and insured the very pick of men for the air crews. The air service with artillery was made over almost entirely by the French between the time of the war's beginning and America's entrance. All the old visual aids were abolished, such as smoke-pointers and rockets, and the telephone and wireless were installed in their stead. The observation-balloons had the telephone service, and the planes had wireless. By these means the guns were first fired and then reported on. The general system of range-finding was: "First fire long, then fire short, then split the bracket." This was the joint job of planes and gunners--one not to be despised as a feat.