There was a quantity of such talk. Incidentally, the same experts who limited America's troops to half a million in France at the most indulgent estimate, said, over and over, that a million were to be feared, just the number announced to be in France by President Wilson one year from the time of the first debarkation. The aviators worked hard enough to deserve the German honor. In the French school supervised by the Americans the schedule would have furnished Dickens some fine material for pathos. The day began at 4 A. M., with a little coffee for an eye-opener. The working-day began in the fields at 5 sharp. If the weather permitted there were flights till 11, when the pupil knocked off for a midday meal. He was told to sleep then till 4 in the afternoon, when flying recommenced, and continued till 8.30. The rest of his time was all his own. He spent it getting to bed. There was an average of four months under this régime. The flier began on the ground, and for weeks he was permitted no more than a dummy machine, which wobbled along the ground like a broken-winged duck, and this he used to learn levers and mechanics--those things he had toiled over on paper before he was even allowed on the field. After a while he was permitted in the air with an instructor, and finally alone. There were creditably few disasters. For months there was never a casualty. But if a man had an accident it was a perfectly open-and-shut affair. Either he ruined himself or he escaped. It was part of the French system with men who escaped to send them right back into the air, as soon as they could breathe, so that the accident would not impair their flying-nerves. After the three or four months of foundation work, if the term is not too inept for flying, the aviator had his final examination, a triangular flight of about ninety miles, with three landings. The landings are the great trick of flying. Like the old Irish story, it isn't the falling that hurts you, it's the sudden stop. If the pupil made his landings with accuracy he was passed on to the big school at Pau, where acrobatics are taught. The flight acrobat was the ace, the armies found. And no man went to battle till he could do spiral, serpentine, and hairpin turns, could manage a tail spin, and "go into a vrille"--a corkscrew fall which permitted the flier to make great haste from where he was, and yet not lose control of his machine, at the same time that he made a tricky target for a Boche machine-gun. While all this training was going on the ranks of American aviators were filling in at the top. The celebrated Lafayette Escadrille, the American aviators who joined the French Army at the beginning of the war, was taken into the American Army in the late summer. Then all the Americans who were in the French aviation service who had arrived by way of the Foreign Legion were called home.