My sick-leave over, I reported for duty again and got a real surprise--I was told I could learn to fly! This made me happier than I can express. I pictured myself in one of the swift little fighting planes I had seen in France, and I felt in my heart of hearts that I would make good. I already knew what it felt like to fly; I knew the language of the air, the esprit of the Corps, and some of the heart-palpitating peculiarities of our best-balanced engines. But all this time I had been a sort of innocent bystander. Now, at last, I was going into the air “on my own.” The first step was to go to a school of instruction--a ground school--where the theory of flying and the mechanical side of aviation are expounded to you. I went through these courses, and by special permission was allowed to take my examination three weeks earlier than would have been the case in the ordinary course of events. I worked like a Trojan, and passed without much difficulty. Then was to come the real part of it all, the part for which I had waited for over a year. On November 1st, 1916, I was sent to another school for elementary training in the air. This consisted, first of all, in going up in another old machine--a steady type called the Maurice Farman, and fitted with a dual set of controls, so that the instructor could manage one while I tried to manage the other. Never will I forget those days of dual control. I tried very hard, but seemed to me I just could not get the proper “feel” of the machine. First the instructor would tell me I was “ham-handed”--that I gripped the controls too tightly with every muscle tense. After that I would get what you might call timid-handed, and not hold the controls tightly enough. My instructor and I both suffered tortures. So when suddenly one day he told me I could go up alone, I had my doubts as to whether it was confidence or desperation that dictated his decision. I didn’t worry long as to which it was; I was willing to take the chance. Then followed my first solo! This is, I think, the greatest day in a flying man’s life. Certainly I did not stop talking about it for the next three weeks at least. I felt a great and tender pity for all the millions of people in the world who never have a chance to do a solo! An ambulance stood in the aerodrome, and it seemed to me, as it has to many another student-pilot, that all the other business of flying had suddenly ceased so that everybody could look at me. I noticed with a shiver that the ambulance had its engine running. Were the doctors at the hospital expectantly fondling their knives? Everybody looked cold-blooded and heartless. But I had to do it: so into the machine I crawled, trying to look cheerful, but feeling awful lonesome. How I got off the ground I do not know, but once in the air it was not nearly so bad--not much worse than the first time you started downhill on an old-fashioned bicycle.