Although many men in the army have longer lists of fallen Germans to their credit, no Frenchman has ever flown with the grace and skill of Navarre. The great Guynemer was only a fair flier and owed his success to his skill as a gunner. But Navarre was master of all the tricks. Upon one occasion he bet a companion that he could make a landing on an army blanket. The blanket was duly fastened in the middle of the field and away flew the aviator. His preliminary calculation was just a bit off and at the last minute he nosed sharply down and wrecked the machine. But he hit the blanket and won the bet. Next to Germany, America has done most to take romance out of the air, so the Frenchmen say. The American air student attends lectures and learns about meteorology and physics. He learns how to take a motor apart and put it together again. In fact, he is versed in all the theory of flying long before he is allowed to venture in the air. Of course this is the best system. It would be the system of any nation which had the opportunity of taking its time, yet the scholarly approach cannot fail to dim adventure a little bit. Launcelot would have been a somewhat less dashing knight if he had begun his training in chivalry by learning the minimum number of foot pounds necessary to unhorse an opponent or the relative resilience of chain mail and armor. Yet not all the training in the world can take the stunt spirit out of the young American aviator. One who shipped as a passenger with a Frenchman bound for a bombing raid, paid for his passage by crawling out along the fuselage of the machine to release a bomb which had stuck. But it was a little incident back of the lines which gave me the best insight into the character of the American aviator. I know a young aviator of twenty-five who is already a major and the commander of a squadron. He wasn't particularly old for his years, either. I remember he told us with great glee how he and another young aviation officer had nailed the purser in his cabin one night during the trip across. Yet he could be stern upon occasion. He was walking along the field one day when he saw a plane looping. He was surprised because the French instructor attached to the squadron had told them that the type of machine which they were using would not do the loop the loop. It didn't have sufficient power, he said, nor would it stand the strain.