At Nice I ran into many Americans, and there were a good many Britishers about, recovering from the recent severe fighting around Passchendaele. They are a quiet and agreeable lot--very interesting when they talk about their work, which is seldom. One captain had strolled into some heavy fighting with no weapon but a heavy cane, and with this, walking astride of a deep narrow enemy trench, he had killed eight Germans! An Australian captain, with the rare ribbon of the V.C. on his breast, had gone into a crowded German dugout with one companion, who was wounded at the first exchange of bombs. Single-handed, he had bombed out the Boches, taken forty prisoners back single-handed, and returned to bring out his wounded brother officer. An epic feat! III FULL-FLEDGED Soon after my stay at Nice I went for a month to the Combat and Acrobatic School of Pau, which completes the most dangerous of all the flying training. A wonderful experience--somersaults, barrel-turns, corkscrew dives, every conceivable aerial caper, and long flights daily: skimming the highest peaks of the Pyrenees at three hundred feet above the snow--trips to Biarritz and along the coast, flying ten feet above the waves, etc. It is hard to say enough in praise of the school at Pau--the hundreds of splendid machines, the perfect discipline and efficiency, the food, the barracks, the courteous treatment of pilots by officers and instructors. We were twenty Americans, in a clean airy barrack, with an Annamite to make the beds and sweep up. The school covers an enormous area in the valley of the Gave, just under the Pyrenees, and is ideal for an aviation center so far as weather conditions go, its one drawback being that motor-trouble, out of range of the aerodromes, means almost inevitably a smash. All along the Gave they have the smallest fields and the highest hedges I ever saw. The climate is superb--like the foothill climate of California: cool nights, delicious days, wonderful dawns and sunsets. They started us on the eighteen-metre machine, doing vertical spirals, which are quite a thrill at first. You go to a height of about three thousand feet, shut off the motor, tilt the machine till the wings are absolutely vertical, and pull the stick all the way back. When an aeroplane inclines laterally to over forty-five degrees, the controls become reversed--the rudder is then the elevator, and the elevator the rudder, so that, in a vertical spiral, the farther back you pull the stick, the tighter the spiral becomes. You are at the same time dropping and whirling in short circles. I once did five turns in losing a thousand feet of altitude--an unusual number, the monitor told me with satisfaction. Usually, one loses about three hundred feet to each turn, but on my first attempt, I lost twenty-one hundred feet in three fourths of a turn, because I did not pull back enough on the stick.