"It made five loops," said the major in telling the story, "and they were dandies, too, as good as I ever saw. I thought it was the Frenchman, of course, but I asked somebody and he said, 'No, it's Harry.' When he came down I bawled him out. 'You were told not to do that, weren't you?' I asked him. He said, 'Yes, sir.' 'Well, what did you do it for?' I asked him. 'I guess it was because the Frenchman told me it was impossible,' he said. I told him that he would have to turn his machine over to another man and that other disciplinary measures would be applied. He's in disgrace still and I suppose I've got to keep it up for a while. That's all right, good discipline and all that sort of thing, you know, but there's one thing I can't take away from him, and nobody else can. He's the only man in France that ever looped that type of machine. He did it. By golly, I envy him, but I don't dare let him know it." CHAPTER XIII HOSPITALS AND ENGINEERS Some of the compliments the mannerly French poured out upon the army left the Americans feeling that they didn't quite deserve them. Others they could take standing. Well to the front of the second lot were all the good words for the medical corps. A leading writer for a big Parisian afternoon paper took the first three columns of his first page to say with undisguised emotion that the French government not merely could, with profit, but should and must pattern after the American Army Medical Service. One good army hospital in France is like another and so let it be the New York Post Graduate unit which was picked at random for the purpose of a visit. We straggled off the train with two old peasant women whose absorbed faces under their peaked white caps did not encourage us to ask our way of them, and one poilu, bent under the astonishing miscellany of the home-going French soldier. He lost his chance to escape us by eyeing us with frank if friendly curiosity. Could he direct us to the American Army Hospital, we asked, and he wrinkled his weather worn nose. No, he hadn't been home since the Americans had come to war, but, of course, there was only one building in town big enough and new enough to be used by the Americans. If we should turn to the left and then to the right and then to the left again we would come to the school and there he thought we would find the Americans. We did. To the far end of the little town we trudged till we came to a low stone building, gray and white, of good stout masonry. We knew it was the American hospital because over the arched entrance there hung a "bannière etoilée."