These were put at instructing for a time, then their several members became the veteran core of later American squadrons. This air unit was finally placed at 12 fliers and 250 men, and before Christmas there was a goodly number of them, a number not to be told till the care-free and uncensored days after the war. By the beginning of the new year American aviation-fields were taking shape. The engineers had laid a spur of railroad to link the largest of them with the main arteries of communication, and the labor units had built the same sort of small wooden city that sprang up all over America as cantonments. There were roomy barracks, a big hall where chapel services alternated with itinerant entertainers, a little newspaper building, plenty of office-barracks with typewriters galore and the little models on which aviators learn their preliminary lessons. There is one training-field six miles long and a mile and a half wide, where all kinds of instruction is going on, even to acrobatics. And there are several large training-schools just behind the fighting-lines, which have plenty of visiting Germans to practise on. The enormity of the American air programme made it a little unwieldy at first, and it got a late start. But on the anniversary of its beginning it had unmeasured praise from official France, and even before that the French newspapers had loudly sung its praises. The American aviator as an individual was a success from the beginning. He has unsurpassed natural equipment for an ace, and his training has been unprecedentedly thorough. And he has dedicated his spirit through and through. He has set out to make the Germans see how wise they were to be afraid. CHAPTER X THE SCHOOLS FOR OFFICERS The first economy effected after the broad sweep of training was in swing was to segregate the officers for special training, and these officers' schools fell into two types. First, there was the camp for the young commissioned officers from Plattsburg, and similar camps in America, to give them virtually the same training as the soldiers had, but at a sharper pace, inclusive also of more theory, and to increase their executive ability in action; second, there was the school established by General Pershing, late in the year, through which non-commissioned officers could train to take commissions. Of the first type, there were many, of the second, only one. The camp for the Plattsburg graduates which turned its men first into the fighting was one having about 300 men, situated in the south of France, where the weather could do its minimum of impeding.