This is the classic hour for French pilots to foregather in excited groups to expliquer les coups--an expressive phrase for which I can recall no exact equivalent in English. They (or rather we) spend a full hour every evening in telling just how it was done, or why it was not done, and so on, _ad infinitum_. Snatches of characteristic talk reach your ears--(I will attempt a rough translation). "You poor fish! why didn't you dive that time they had us _bracketed_?--I had to follow you and I got an éclat as big as a dinner-plate within a foot of my back." "Did you see me get that Boche over the wood? I killed the observer at the first rafale, rose over the tail, and must have got the pilot then, for he spun clear down till he crashed." "See the tanks ahead of that wave of assault? Funny big crawling things they looked--that last one must have been en panne--the Boches were certainly bouncing shells off its back!" "Raoul and I found a troop of Boche cavalry on a road--in khaki, I swear. Thought they were English till we were within one hundred metres. Then we gave them the spray--funniest thing you ever saw!" "Yes--I'll swear I saw some khaki, too. Saw a big column of Boche infantry and was just going to let 'em have it when I saw horizon-blue guards. Prisoners, of course." You can imagine pages of this sort of thing--every night. At the bar we have a big sign: "Ici on explique les coups." At the mess, another: "Défense d'expliquer les coups ici." There are limits. As mess-officer I have been going strong of late--nearly every day one or two or three "big guns" (grosses huiles, the French call them) of aviation drop in to lunch or dinner. Down from a patrol at 10.30, and scarcely out of the machine, when up dashes our cook, knife in one hand and ladle in the other, fairly boiling over with anxiety. "Commandant X---- and his staff are coming to lunch--I can't leave the stove--what on earth shall we do?" An hour and a half. Just time for the cyclist to buzz down to the nearest town for some extra hors d'oeuvres, salad, and half a dozen old bottles. In the end everything runs off smoothly, and when the white wine succeeds the red, the usual explication des coups begins--highly entertaining inside stuff, from which one could cull a whole backstairs history of French aviation. It has been my privilege to meet many famous men in this way--great "aces" and great administrators of the flying arm; men whose names are known wherever European aviators gather. I wish I could tell you half the drolleries they recount, or reproduce one quarter of the precise, ironical, story-telling manner of a cultivated Frenchman.