Dinsmore Ely (continued 2)

All the mail is being held somewhere—and we want letters. I get about two letters a week from marraine, which fills the gap between those from home.

With love,

Your Son.

October 2, 1917.

Dear Family:

Yesterday’s mail brought a good long letter from father and about fifteen Chicago papers. It simply was good to hear the doings in Chicago and suburbs. I imagine there will be a stack of letters come in some of these days. A 77letter came from my marraine saying I must surely stay with her while in Paris.

We have just been out in the field, but wind brought rain up from the south and we returned. When we got back, the mail was in. Oh, golly! Thirteen letters for me. It has been a pretty long wait, but they came in a bunch. Letters ranging from September 2 to 12 arrived. My, but it’s a pleasure to hear from father. Of course your letters are just as good, but they come natural, as you have been always the official correspondent, but father’s letters combine surprise with novelty, and the newspaper clippings are so interesting. They appeal more than the newspapers themselves, because they allow me to follow the interests of my friends through my family. How they do marry off! It will be a different country, a different town, even a changed family when I return. I am not quite sure which is changing the faster—father or Robert. Mother seems to remain the same. Being constantly in my own company keeps me from seeing a change in myself. It is natural that Robert should develop rapidly, but father has changed so greatly that I can hardly keep pace with him. He seems to be entering a new youth from the day he ran up the stairs at 1831 78to put out the fire in your room started by my little alcohol engine—I recall him as a silent, serious, weary-with-work father, whose only real friends were in books and in his office. He was nervous and particular, and never would tell me when he was satisfied with what I tried to do—kind, patient, silent, oh, so careful. I could not move him, win him, nor understand him. This was, of course, after my curls were cut. After he had been my Santa Claus and birthday godfather and Easter fairy in granting my every wish, then came the high-school period when I would have given anything to have really heard his approval, when I no longer feared him nor yet appreciated him. At college I wished to be worthy of his name. There I learned something of men—and, oh, how proud of him I was Junior Week! But from my Christmas vacation there was a great change—the barrier was broken and I began to see in him a future friend and companion, the equal of whom I had not met among all my friends. Of course the change has been mostly in me, and my growing point of view; but, still, father has grown jollier and freer, more witty and talkative, and more intimate with people and nature and animals. I have wondered at the 79causes: two, anyway, were prosperity and Robert—God bless him and our happy home. To the other, no legend, story, or orator ever succeeded in giving to it its due; that single word more than godly, more than eternal, a title, a prayer, a caress, guardian angel of the mind—mother!

Good night, dear family,

Dinsmore.

Dear Family:

A few days of poor weather is confining us. There is time to think, and time to do everything you think of—and then time to think.

One of my lines of thought has been how I might make a little money on the side. Our spare hours come in such small classes that it does not permit me to go about seeing the châteaux of this country, or to go to Tours a great deal to sketch, except when it rains; then is not the time to go. Mother mentioned giving my letters to some paper, I believe. I know that a great many people over here are receiving quite a nice little pay for just such letters. I wish I could work it some way, but as I speak of it I feel a queer family pride which would spoil it, I suppose. For some reason or other, 80there are only certain ways of commercializing one’s assets without loss of pride. Is this loss of cosmopolitanism, and an approach to caste? I guess not. I can sketch, but that is not great fun when you haven’t interesting subjects and good weather. I can make some post cards and try coloring them, which would not be bad practice withal. Well, I’ll be going to Paris soon, and laying in a good supply of good books.

Had a letter from Gop today. His letters are full of foolishness, and most refreshing. He has gotten off all his conditions this summer, and will probably get his degree in mid-year. The fraternity house opens on the seventeenth of September, and Gop thinks there is a promising year ahead. I see from the “Tech” there is to be a great increase in the freshman class. My, but I hope they pull through with a strong line. I put a lot of interest into the development of that fraternity, and got a lot out of it. My feeling of ease in the barracks life is improving. I believe adaptation can be made without concession, and get fair results.

Fifty more American pilots from the ground schools in the States arrived yesterday. They have spent their first month in digging trenches and foundations. They arrived in France 81August 22 via England, and are glad to get here. One of them tells the story of their passage. One of the boats was torpedoed in sight of the Welsh coast. There were seven transports and a convoy of eleven torpedo boat destroyers. They were in the dining room when they felt a heavy jar. All rose to their feet and turned white, a few screamed, and others cried, “Steady.” They got to the deck in time to see a destroyer rush to a spot a half mile away, drop a sinking mine, and start up again. Before the destroyer had gone a hundred feet the ocean over the bomb raised up in a mighty spout, which lifted the rear of the destroyer thirty feet on the swell. It was one of the new mines which destroy a submarine within a radius of six hundred feet; meanwhile they had manned the life boats. Inspection proved that the torpedo had struck a glancing blow and had not exploded. It made a rent in the hull of the ship four feet long in a hold containing baled cotton. The ship contained three hundred nurses besides the troops. It is claimed that the submarine was sunk. It seems the mine does not harm the destroyer any more than a rough sea.

Well, so much for today.

Your Son.

82

Ecole d’Aviation Tours, France, October 4, 1917.

Dear Bob:

Your letter arrived about three days ago. I am mighty glad to hear that you are going to Lake Forest to school.

You will make good; you have to make good because your name is Ely—and we are here to prove that the Elys make good. You will be away from home a good deal and I think that will do you a great deal of good. But when you do go home, make the most of it; it is your duty to be with mother and father as much as you can; they need you and it is the one way you can repay them directly. There is another thing, confide in mother and father; just because they are older, don’t you think for a moment that they do not understand children. They will not blame you if you tell them things which you think may be wrong, and your conscience will blame you if you do not tell them. And they will show you the best way out of trouble; father can give more of a sermon in three minutes than any minister I ever heard could preach in an hour—and it will not make you feel foolish either. That’s at home.

At school you will have no trouble making 83friends. It is worth your while to make acquaintances with everyone, there is good in all of them. But the best of them are none too good to be your friends. Most of the boys swear and smoke and tell vulgar stories and a few may try liquor; they do it because men do it and they want to be men. Men do it usually because they started when they were boys.

Vulgar stories will keep you from becoming a strong man; once in a while you cannot help listening to them; never remember one, never tell one under any condition, and people will learn to know you as a boy with a clean mind. Liquor will keep you from having a happy home; never touch it. Smoking will keep you from being as strong and healthy as God meant you to be. Everybody who smokes will say it doesn’t hurt them, but when they want to make a team they quit smoking. Nobody can keep you from smoking but nobody can stop you either. Many good business men will not hire boys who smoke. Swear if you must, smoke if you want to after you are a man, but for goodness sake, do not do it in order to be a man or because other boys do it. If you cannot be a man without it, you can’t be a man 84with it. And an Ely doesn’t do things because other people do them. And you’re an Ely.

Amen.

You should be over here and see France. It’s the greatest farming and fruit country I ever saw—Wisconsin included. I went for a long walk today and I was eating all the time. I’d come to a vineyard with white grapes—just finished them and along came purple grapes. I’d just finished the purple grapes when I came to a place where walnut trees were on each side of the road and the walnuts were being blown down faster than one could pick ’em up—just as the walnuts were gone, I came to the apples and then the raspberries and blackberries and peaches and chestnuts. I was full by that time. At one place there was a village dug out of the chalk side of the cliff; strange doors and passages and dark rooms as old as America and wells a hundred feet deep; wine presses and wine cellars and stables—all cut from the rocks.

We still have our good scraps. Yesterday there was one with eleven men in it. We knocked over seven beds and one man, whose head was cut, got blood on five of them. It’s our only real exercise and we enjoy it.

85The other night three Frenchmen stood out in front of the barracks keeping us awake. George Mosely ran out in his nightshirt and tumbled one over, and the other two ran away. Ten minutes later, four men who had been drinking came along and put a man in the rain barrel full of water.

Some of us have been put up in the next class. Soon we have spirals and voyages. Two weeks from now I’ll get my license as an air pilot if I have luck. Then come acrobatics.

Write me a letter telling about your school life. Write often. Nothing is better practice in English, composition, spelling, and penmanship, than letter writing; and your being away from home will make you understand how much your lovin’ brother wants your letters.

Always an Ely,

Dins.

October 9, 1917.

Dear Family:

I decided on the spur of the moment to go to Paris. The equinox has come, and we bid fair to have a week of bad weather. So I borrowed a French uniform from “Stuff” Spencer and am now waiting for the train. I have the privilege 86of being in the city forty-eight hours. While there I shall go to the Hôtel Cécilia to get many things from my trunk—things that I need here. I shall probably eat and sleep at my marraine’s home. I just needed a change, and as this is not likely to interfere with flying, I feel all right about it; neither will it detract from my week’s permission after my brevet. Yesterday I was reprimanded for having United States buttons on my clothes and told to take them off. It is getting cold enough now to use my heavy suit that I got at Field’s, so I shall have some gold buttons put on it, and blossom out. No use talking, leather goods are pretty high priced. The stock shoe furnished by the U. S. Army costs $9.50, the high field boots, such as aviators are wearing, cost $35.00 to $40.00; officers’ belts cost $8.00 to $10.00. You see, we will have to come across. Have not heard concerning my shoes yet, but hope they may have arrived at the club. The “Tech” Club, by the way, has been closed in favor of a University Club, which evolves from it.

Well, I must be off, will probably not write again till my return.

Yours truly,

Dinsmore.

87

October 15, 1917.

Dear Bob:

Sometimes we go two or three weeks without enough happening to write about—but yesterday something occurred. They told me to take my altitude test, and put me into the machine. In the altitude test the object is to climb to a height of twenty-six hundred meters (eighty-five hundred feet) and stay there for an hour. Well, I started with a good motor and a joyous heart, for the weather had been bad for six days and I felt like a horse that needs a run. The plane climbed wonderfully. There were quite a few clouds in the sky, but I saw blue spots to go up through as I circled high over the school. In the first fifteen minutes I had climbed fifteen hundred meters, but once up there I found that the holes in the sky had disappeared and there was nothing for it but to go right up through the clouds. The low-hanging cloudlets began to whisk by and the mist gathered on my glasses. Never having played around in the clouds much, I didn’t know what was coming. Well, the mist grew thicker and thicker, and looking down I found the ground fading away like pictures on a movie screen when the lights turn on. I began to wonder what I’d do without any ground under 88me. I soon found out when the ground disappeared entirely. Have you been in a fog so thick that you couldn’t see your hand before your face, and you sort of hesitate to step any farther for fear of falling off the edge of something or running into something? Then imagine going through such a fog at eighty miles per hour.

When I had been out of sight of ground for less than a minute something strange seemed to be happening. There was a feeling of unsteadiness, and I thought maybe I was tipping a little. I tried to level up the plane, and found I couldn’t tell whether it was tipped to right or left. The controls went flabby, and then the bottom dropped out. You understand I couldn’t see twenty feet—but I was falling—faster—faster. The wires and struts of the machine began to whistle and sing and the wind roared by my ears. I began to think very fast. No one has ever fallen far enough to know what that speed is, and lived to tell about it, unless he was in an aeroplane. There was no doubt about it, I was falling—falling like a lost star. I was frightened, in a way, but there was so much excitement—too much to think about to be panic-stricken. It was awful and thrilling. 89You wonder what happened? Why, I tell it slowly. That is how I wondered what was going to happen. The seconds seemed like minutes. I began to reason about it. Was it all over? Had I made my last mistake when I entered those clouds? Had all my training and education for twenty-three years been leading up to this fall? It seemed unreasonable and unjust. Still, there I was, falling as in a dream. Well, I didn’t need my engine, I was going fast enough without it, so I cut it off, but that’s all the good it did. I couldn’t see my propeller, and yet I plunged downward. That’s right, I must be falling downward. Ah! a bright idea. Downward, therefore toward the earth.

Then I recalled the fact that the lowest clouds were eighteen hundred meters above the earth, and I was still in them. I must come out of them before striking, so I waited. My head felt light; my eyes watered behind the glasses. I remember watching the loose lid on the map box waving and tilting back and forth; then suddenly I became aware of a shadow, a dark spot, a body, and there, ’way off at the end of my wing, was a map of the world coming at me. I headed for it and then slowly let the machine come to its flying position and it was over. I was 90flying serenely above the earth, with a surprising lack of concern. I had fallen a thousand feet. That was the first one—the thrilling, fearful one.

But I hadn’t made my altitude, so I tried again, and fell the same. Many times I tried. Once I saw the sun through the mist, and it was under my wing instead of over it. I was then falling upside down. I do not know the capers that that machine cut up there during the hour and a half of my repeated endeavor to go up through that strata of cloud, but no acrobatic was left unaccomplished, I am sure. Spirals, barrel turns, nose dives, reversements—all unknown to me. I pressed on one side, then on the other. I hung by the belt and pressed forward and backward. Again I would fall into the open. Again I climbed into the clouds, but it was all useless and vain. I could not keep my balance without the world or the sun to go by. Then my motor began to miss, so I decided to go down. Well, if a person has undergone all the dangers and surprises that the air has to offer without being able to see what he is doing, he feels perfectly at home doing anything when he has a clear outlook. I had proved that the machine couldn’t hurt itself by falling a thousand 91feet and as I was still some seven thousand feet high, I decided to experiment, so I did spirals right and left, wing slips, nose dives and tail slips, reversements and stalls, vertical banks and crossed controls—everything, in fact, that I had ever seen done with the machine. They were all simple, without terror, and quite safe. I failed in my altitude, but I learned enough about the handling of that machine to make up for a dozen failures. I’ll try my altitude again on a clear day. I am glad I had the experience, for it gave me great confidence. I did three hours of flying yesterday.

The most dangerous thing that happened was one time when I fell in the clouds and the fall seemed longer than usual before the clear air was reached. Suddenly I realized that my glasses were covered with snow, so I took them off and found I had fallen two hundred meters below the clouds while blinded by my glasses. Just to show how nicely balanced a good machine is, I let go of the control about two minutes, while cleaning my glasses, and steered entirely with my feet. My, but flying is a wonderful game. If I come through, I’ll give you one royal ride in heaven before I give up aviation.

Dins.

92

Château du Bois, La Ferté-Imbault, France, October 15 to 27, 1917.

Dear Mother:

The god of good fortune is still guarding your son, and touching his life with experience and romance. I am a guest at an old French château—but I must start at the beginning. For the past few days I have been too busy to write. After the altitude test, which I completed the following day, I took two petits voyages, which were pleasant and uneventful, save for the second when I arrived at the school after dark and made my landing by the light of a bonfire. It was a good landing, and gave me more confidence. The next man after me crashed to the ground so loudly that it was heard a quarter of a mile. The next morning I started upon my first triangle, which is a trip of over two hundred kilometers from Tours to Châteaudun, thence to Pontlevoy, and back again to Tours. My motor gave trouble before starting, but ran well for a time. When I had gone over three-fourths of the way the motor began to miss, and I landed in a field. Four out of the ten spark plugs had gone bad. They had given me only two spark plugs and no wrench. I borrowed a wrench from a passing motor car, and 93managed to clean the plugs and start up again, but as no one was there to hold the motor I could not let it warm up and it did not catch well, so I only rose twenty feet. A short turn and side landing was the only thing that kept me from landing in a stone quarry. I taxied back to the field and tried again. By that time the motor was warm and picked up pretty well. I ascended to seven hundred meters, and proceeded confidently on my way, and there is where I “done” made my mistake. For a little time I was lost. Then I found my landmarks and continued. The wind had become quite high, and it took some time for me to come back against it to my course. In fact, it took an hour. Then I continued forty-five degrees into the wind for half an hour. I should have arrived long ago and I was a little worried. The engine began to miss again. The country was spotted with woods and lakes and there were few good landing places. By now I knew I was totally lost and would have to descend, anyway, to find my way. I had no more come to this decision than the engine became hopeless, and I aimed for a field right near a little town under me; but the wind was so strong that I misjudged and overshot my landing and had to turn on my 94motor again. It caught but poorly, and barely raised me above a hedge of trees and telegraph wires. I had hardly speed to stay up and found myself over a wood, skimming the tree tops by no more than a meter. The slow speed made the controls very difficult, and the currents from the woods tossed me about like a cork on a choppy sea. The wind was blowing thirty miles per hour. For half a mile I staggered over and between the tree tops till I came to a little triangle of field. I made a vertical bank twenty feet from the ground and landed into the wind. It was a good landing, but the trouble was when I touched the ground I was going at thirty miles per hour, and there was a row of trees twenty feet in front of me. I hit between two trees, and when I crawled out, the wings, running gear, and braces and wires were piled around on the ground and trees, and I wasn’t even scratched. A crowd gathered to collect souvenirs, and I telegraphed and telephoned to the school to come and pick up the pieces. There was nothing to do but wait, so I went out to a bridge and talked French with a little boy.

Soon a motor car drove up, and out stepped a young French chap. He asked if I was the guy and I says “Yes,” and he “’lowed” that he 95was just back from Verdun for his permission and asked if I would come out and have supper and stay overnight, so we got in the car and went out to a beautiful château. I met the family and apologized for my clothes, which they said were fine for war times. Then the children came in and played until supper.

They were all charming—no formality or constraint. They all spoke English, more or less, and the dinner was jolly, with difficulties of understanding. The eldest son of the family had lost his life when a bombing plane burned over Verdun last year. That gave them and me a special bond of sympathy. The other son, of about twenty-two, is a sergeant in the First Dragoons. The eldest daughter, of about twenty-eight, mother of all the little children, sat beside me. Her husband is a captain in the First Dragoons. She was very entertaining and spoke English quite well. The other member was the little daughter, about fifteen. Later I learned that M. Duval is a viscount, of the old blood of France.

After dinner we went into the petit salon. They entertained me by showing me innumerable photographs. M. Duval is a camera enthusiast, and does all his own developing and 96printing. He takes these double pictures on plates, and you look at them through a stereoscope. They have traveled very extensively. They have hunted big game and small game in mountain, forest, and plain, and the pictures tell the story like an Elmendorf lecture. Meanwhile, they all contributed interesting remarks in broken English, and so we got better acquainted. Mme. Duval showed me her postcard collection of French châteaux. The Duvals owned more than twenty through Touraine and Normandy, they and their direct relatives by marriage. We all went up the old stairway together and bid each other good night in the upper hall. They asked what I wanted for my breakfast in bed, but I came down bright and early and joined them at a seven o’clock breakfast. We looked at some more pictures and then went rabbit hunting in the drizzling rain. They gave me an American repeating gun. M. Duval assigned us to our positions, not far from the château, and we waited. Three or four men set about to drive the rabbits. Off among the trees I saw the strangest looking rabbit. I pulled up, about the fire, when it struck me there was something wrong, so I looked again. There were two of the creatures gliding 97around from one rabbit hole to another. Their color was cream yellow. After a little guessing, I concluded they must be ferrets, so I let them live. Suddenly a man called “Oh-ee,” and a rabbit humped past right by my feet. I took a pot shot, but it had me scared and I almost hit my foot, it was so close. Two more went by and didn’t mind my shooting at them. They were so close it seemed a pity to shoot them, yet that didn’t quite explain my missing. Well, you know what an old hand I am at rabbit shooting. I was just a little out of practice, having fired a shotgun, once when I was twelve years old. The blessing was that no one was there to see. Then I got one at a good distance, and found that it was much easier to hit them at a hundred feet than twenty-five. My average began to go up, and the first fifteen shots I had three rabbits. Then we changed positions, and I found that the son had eleven. I don’t think he had fired more than ten shots. At thirty shots I had twelve rabbits, and I felt a little more respectable. It was a pipe after you got used to it. Then we took a walk about the place and went in to lunch. All the food they had was from their own place: meat, wild and tame; fish from the river near by; and chestnuts, 98mashed like potatoes and baked. These latter are called les marrons. There were also sweet cakes, salads, mixed and dressed by M. Duval, and—wonder of wonders—American apple pie! I ate three pieces, and they had it for every meal while I was there. I understand why menus are written in French and old novels rave on French cuisines. Never did I eat such delicious food. Every dish is served separately as a work of art. The service was fine old china, with cracks all through it. The knives, forks, and spoons were gold plated, and the daughter would get up from the table and serve the bread if the maid didn’t happen to be in the room. Everyone eats the food as he gets it hot, and one person may be a course behind the others without causing inconvenience.

My word, how I enjoyed every minute of it! It would have been a lark any time, but it was a humming, white-feathered buzzard of a time to one who has been eating in a mess for a month.

Well, that afternoon we hunted some more, and I drove the Renault down to see if the plane was still where it had fallen. That evening the mechanics came with a truck to fetch it, but it was too late, and they had to stay at the 99château all night. Then their machine broke, and they had to telephone for another. Well, I did not get away until after lunch, so we hunted some more and played tennis. They all came down to the gate to see me off, and truly they made me feel that they were as sorry to see me go as I was to go—and that was “some sorry.”

I’ve tried to finish this letter and send it off, but like all the great things man attempts, it is never finished.

When I left the Château du Bois, they gave me their address in Paris, where they will go in a fortnight; their address at Pau, where they go the last of December, and where I shall probably go at the same time; and the address of their cousins who have a villa a short way from Bordeaux (the place where I shall probably be perfected on the Nieuport). That opens up considerable opportunity to make some friends that are really worth while.

Gee! when things happen here they happen in bunches. I have enough more to tell to make another letter longer than this. Since I started this letter I have finished the school at Tours, gotten my brevet, and now I am down at Blois 100seeing a couple of the best châteaux.

I am collecting post cards to beat the band. They will make a wonderful library for my architectural design, as well as a foundation for a little series of travelogues I am going to give the family, and while I think of it I am growing more convinced that when you are young is the time to see the world, especially for the architect. When the war is finished you can figure it will take me a year or more to get home. The education of travel is so far superior to that of school (not “Tech”) that there is no comparison.

Love to all,

Dins.

Paris, November 4, 1917.

Dear Mother:

You see I am in Paris and am staying at the house of my marraine. I wrote you a letter in Châteaudun which was lost through my fault. I wrote father a letter a week ago and carried it till yesterday without mailing. The other letter I mailed, which you should receive, left Tours over two weeks ago. This all goes to prove I am getting careless in my letter writing, for goodness knows there has been so much to 101write about that I scarcely know where to begin. In the first place, I am a pilot—no longer an élève pilot. My brevet is gained and I am recommended for a Nieuport—that is a fighting machine—all of which is as it should be. They overlooked my smash-up, as it was the fault of the motor.

Having finished at Tours, I went for a day’s sight-seeing to Blois. There I saw the grand old historic château of Catherine de’ Medici, and the beautiful architectural dream, the château of Chambord. It was a pleasant day, starting at six in the morning and ending with a five-mile walk between twelve and two-thirty last night. Then by a little flower-tossing, I got them to extend my permission so as not to include the day at Blois, and left for Paris. I came to my marraine at eight-thirty in the evening of Saturday, October 29, and she gave me a room. They have entertained me most generously ever since. I told you of her family in another letter. The daughter, who married a captain, looks for all the world like Marie Antoinette and keeps up an unending flirtation with her husband with refined French coquetry, which is a delight to watch. The two children of the other daughter are jolly little youngsters. We have an hour’s 102romp in the evening, and they have become my shadows. I have been doing Paris, as one might say. I have visited Napoleon’s tomb, the Palais de Justice, Sainte Chapelle, the jewel of Gothic architecture, Notre Dame de Paris, Sacred Heart, the Madeleine, and numerous other well-known sights of Paris. I have seen a French vaudeville, a French cinema opera, an afternoon musical of the first order, and four operas: Madame Butterfly, Werther, Sapho, Cavalleria Rusticana, and a little opéra comique. Never have things come my way stronger to make for a pleasant time. Outside of my clothes, my expenses for the week will not exceed twenty-five dollars, such is the manner of French courtesy.

You should see your son. Never has an Ely come so near being a dandy. Picture a modish khaki uniform of French cut and the best cloth, with a high collar, gold buttons, gold wings on the collar, a khaki cap with a gold crescent of the Foreign Legion on it, a Sam Brown belt and high leather boots of a well-kept mahogany brown, and over all, a very distinctive and refined Burbury coat and gray gloves. The effect is worth two hundred and fifty francs for the suit, one hundred and sixty-five francs for boots, 103one hundred and forty francs for overcoat, thirty-five francs for belt; everything is of the best and will serve as my officer’s outfit In the U. S. Army with a few minor changes. I felt I had better have the wherewithal to dress well when I was entertained, and I have not regretted it.

Yesterday I met two Chicago ladies. Some time after Christmas one of them might call at father’s office to say that she saw me.

The other day when walking from the flying school to the station in leaving for Paris, Frazier Hale, of Cherry Street, passed me in a machine. He yelled, and I did, and that was all. There will probably be a growing frequency of such meetings as time passes. In war news we hear of ignominious defeat in the Italian sector and good work in the French sector. Your war news is more reliable than ours, no doubt. I shall follow father’s advice as to study of the map. The first book on aeronautics arrived last Saturday and seemed satisfactory, though I have not taken time to read more than the introduction. I have plenty of general reading material at my disposal now in the way of history, aeronautical study, and novels by classic and modern writers.

104Now, I do not see how anyone could hope to be an architect without seeing the works of this old country. I never knew what design or interior decoration or landscape gardening were before. Every day reveals a new jewel whose impression may leave an idea for future work. Certainly the unconscious assimilation of ideas and proportions will be invaluable. I am not endeavoring to drive myself into following any of these new interests, as I feel it essential to conserve all physical and nervous energy for what will probably be the greatest tax on my life at the Front. My natural tastes seem good enough for the present to lead me to an enjoyment of the best, and I am experiencing the novelty for the first time in my life of living entirely according to my natural taste—not that I have ever been cramped, but family environment and educational influence have always dictated my course in life. Now I am swimming entirely alone, and it is pleasant for a new man. This living abroad puts one in tune with the ways of the world.

My love to you all.

Your son,

Dinsmore Ely.

105Dear Father:

My first experience, a bit exciting, came rather early. On my second solo flight when I was half way around and going with the wind at a height of one hundred meters the motor stopped. That is about as bad as can happen at such a height for a student. The minute your motor stops you have to peak at thirty degrees and land into the wind. When my motor stopped, I looked for a landing, and peaked. The landing was a little behind me, so I made a short turn with a steep bank and managed to straighten her out just in time for a bare landing. It is very difficult to turn and bank with a dead motor, and I feel rather elated; and the best of it was that I was not frightened or worried in the least. It all went just as easily and naturally as I believed it would when I took up aviation. The great problem is not to lose speed, you know. In the Nieuport hangars they hang a motto: “Loss of speed is death.” Well, the field I had landed in was a bit rough and weedy, but there was a smooth, long stretch adjacent, so I decided to try to get her out myself. You see, the engines we use are Gnome rotary, an archaic type, and very impractical. At the field men hold the machine while the mechanic adjusts the 106carbureter, and then at a given signal it is released and soars skyward. The charm is that when shut off it won’t start again till you prime it, and the mechanic adjusts the carbureter over again for full speed. Well, a Ford was just passing, and they stopped and waited to see what I’d do. I went over and got a can from them to prime the engine with gas, then I cranked the thing and when it started up it darn near ran away with the poor scared man before I could get to the seat, so then I taxied the “girl” up to the far end of the field and wheeled her around. It takes two hundred yards to get to twenty feet height. I had three hundred yards to adjust the carbureter in and clear a row of trees thirty feet high, into the wind, of course. Well, they had explained the thing to us, and I had watched the mechanics, so I gave it to her and didn’t look up till I got the engine going. By that time the trees were one hundred yards ahead. She rose a little and I kept her low till she gained speed, and twenty-five yards from the trees I pulled her up and she fairly bounded over the road. I made an “S” curve and just got over the field at the school when the engine died again, and I came down by the bunch with a cylinder burned out.

107

November 15, 1917.

Dear Father:

Where the sky turns from an azure blue to a rosy pink the delicate new moon rests with its points toward the evening star. From these two jewels of heaven, the sunset sky grades away to a misty, mysterious horizon. The gray distance is offset with a delicate lacework of the autumn-stripped hedge of poplars with their slim, graceful lattice work, reaching to points in the pink, and where the dark earth and the white road come to the foreground, two great apple trees with their gnarled autumn boughs frame the scene of simple beauty as it fades to night. As I entered the kitchen of a little old farm house, which people who eat there choose to call the “Aviator,” cheery voices and appetizing odors greeted me in preparation for the evening meal. The clean tile floor, the whitewashed walls, the low-hung, richly stained rafters, and the old walnut chest by the brick fireplace all made me think of Aunt Maggie’s old kitchen where the pies and the cookies were kept, and that makes me think of other fireplaces and other rafters—and the folks at home.

So I just sit down to the oilcloth-covered table and try to tell them what a restless, twentieth-century 108lad thinks of the environment of his parents’ childhood.

Dinsmore.

Dear Family:

Today started out very foggy, because there was no wind. We stood in the field till one o’clock waiting for the air to clear. I got a machine by four. The next hour contained enough excitement to do for the day. The planes are like mad little Indian ponies turned loose in the field—or, better still, like Pegasus bound into the air with a spirit that must be tamed by steady nerves and gentle hand. It is hard to describe just the feeling which possesses one. We are taught the principles and the movements that control the machine and then we are sent alone into the air to find an understanding of them. Perhaps you are turning a corner at an angle of forty-five degrees on the bank. Suddenly you feel something is wrong. The wind whistles louder than usual. Is it because you are pointing nose down, or are you sliding out over the rim of the curve, or down into the center of it? It is one of the three, and to correct the wrong one is to make worse the other two, yet the correction must be 109made. Now it is too late to figure it out, so you just correct it without thinking, and wonder which fault it was. In an animal we call it instinct, but there is an instant there which, when it passes, leaves a vacuum in the nervous system. The machine climbs like a tiger, and as we are not yet permitted to cut down the gas, it takes much strength to hold its nose down. I made fifteen five-minute rides, and now I’m pleasantly tired and relaxed.

I had ten rides in the eighteen-meter Nieuport and am getting the run of it. It is one of the most difficult machines to drive. I had bad luck in motors or would have finished today. My motor stopped twice when I was twenty-five meters from the ground, but I landed without mishap. With these machines the wing area is so small you head almost straight for the ground and just straighten out in time to land. You make a tour of five or six miles and mount a thousand feet into the air in five minutes—but you will be tired of reading this sort of thing very soon. The thing to do is to go to some aviation field and see it all done.

One of father’s letters arrived with a lot of clippings in it. Those clippings are very interesting. I enjoy them much more than the 110papers. The Saturday Evening Post is read from cover to cover and passed about till the pages are thin, so it would fill a big demand. Another book on aviation came. I have not yet had time to finish the first one. As they go into the technical end of things rather deeply, I can only study a small amount at a time. Most of my reading lately has been history.

Dins.

Bourges, November 7, 1917.

Dear Family:

I am at Bourges on my way to Avord after my happy permission in Paris. As there were no train connections I had to stay here over night. Well, last Sunday we went to an American church, with an all-American service. It seemed rather pleasant. In the afternoon we went to the Opéra Comique to see Werther and Cavalleria Rusticana. They were both splendid and included some of the best stars. Oh, how I love the opera!

... I spent Monday afternoon in roaming about Paris. I went to the Louvre and Gardens of the Tuileries and Luxembourg, and to several of the less important churches. I saw St. James’s church from the tower of which the 111bells were rung as a signal on the night of St. Bartholomew. I believe I know Paris and its sights better now than Chicago, not that I have seen everything—one could never do that—but just the general layout. I never will get tired raving about the architecture.

My train leaves soon.

With love,

Your Son.

November 10, 1917.

Dear Father:

Yours of October 13 received. The letters of my family are of more interest and intimacy than ever before. You say I should be glad you are not in the machine with me to give me advice, but I say unto you, “You are the one to be glad.” If you are worried by the thought of what might happen if a steering buckle in an automobile should break, how would you feel to be hanging on wires and compressed air? Once in the air it is a fool’s pastime to think of what might happen. The god of luck is the aviator’s saint. Man pits his resource against the invisible, and never for an instant doubts his ability. Those who doubt are probably those who do not come back. They are much in need 112of Nieuport pilots, and rushing us through as fast as weather permits.

Cannot write tonight as everybody is telling flying stories.

Good night,

Your Son.

November 12, 1917.

Dear Bob:

Your letter came yesterday, and as I am in a great writing mood tonight I shall answer it. First, to tell you what we are doing. We are now back at the school of Avord. Here we learn to fly the Nieuport. A year ago that was the fastest plane at the Front and they still use them as fighting planes. First we ride in double command “twenty-eight’s.” (Twenty-eight means twenty-eight meters square of wing surface.) Then we do “twenty-three” double command and then are cut loose on them. Lastly, we finish with twenty rides solo in an “eighteen.” I finish the “twenty-eight” class tomorrow and will be through at this school in ten days. The eighteen-meter machines land at ninety miles an hour. They are wonderful little things and will do anything in the air. We go to work at six in the morning, and return 113at six in the evening, but the hardest work is waiting when there is too much wind to fly. We build a fire and sit about telling stories and making toast. When we cannot get bread we just tell stories. When it rains we go in the tent and read. I am reading a history of France. It is more fun to read history than to study it, and I think you know more when you get through. Of course I am surrounded by all the old castles and battle grounds and graves of the warriors of seven centuries. That makes a difference.

There was a bad accident the week before I got here. A two-passenger plane struck a solo plane in the air. It was a head-on collision, and all three aviators were killed. That is a very rare accident, though.

I see America is preparing for five years of war. You may get over yet. Write me whenever you can. You do not know how much your letters help to buck up a lonely brother sometimes.

Your ever loving brother,

Dins.

114

November 13, 1917.

Dear Mother:

Today was a wonderful, clear, crisp November day, and we breathed our fill of it. I had seven rides in a twenty-eight meter and one in a twenty-three meter Nieuport. In life the things we look forward to usually fall below our expectations, but not so in aviation. In aviation, every experience so totally eclipses all expectations that you realize you were totally incapable of imagination in that field. We change planes five times in progressing from Penguin to Spad. Each change is as great an advance and difference as stepping from a box car to a locomobile limousine with Westinghouse shock absorbers.

The Nieuport is the plane we are using now, with a man to give the scale. It has a supporting area of twenty-three square meters. It is the fighting plane used at the Front seven or eight months ago.

Dinsmore.

November 15, 1917.

Dear Mother:

Things are going quite well. Day before yesterday I left the twenty-eight meter Nieuport 115class and today finished the twenty-three meter class and was advanced. Tomorrow I shall finish solo work on the twenty-three’s and take up eighteen’s. The monitors seem to think my work fairly good. The little eighteen-meter Nieuports are great. They are small and racy, with a wing spread of twenty-five feet. They have fine speed and land at eighty-five miles an hour. You land by cutting off the power and pointing the nose for the ground. By pulling the tail down she slows up and finally drops a yard to the ground. It is a very precise sport.

You would like it fine above the clouds, Mother. It is most beautiful and dazzling as the sun’s rays bounce along on the snowy billows, and you can swoop down and skim the crest of the cloud waves till the frost turns the wires to silver and your cheeks sting red in the mist.

Dinsmore.

Ecole d’Aviation, Pau, November 22, 1917.

Dear Father:

This is the most pleasantly situated and best regulated camp I have been in yet. Pau itself is on a little plateau overlooking a valley with a river and surrounded by the foothills of the 116Pyrenees. On the sky line to the south and west of the beautiful snow-capped peaks, 4,000 feet high.

In this environment we are to attain proficiency in the handling of the war plane. The trip down from Avord was a tedious one, with a pleasant break of day at Toulouse. I came down with two Frenchmen who were excellent company. We spent two nights on the train. All the sleeping cars are used at the Front to carry wounded, so we slept sitting up. Sleeping cars are not so common in Europe, I guess. When I woke up yesterday morning the character of the country had changed from the rolling valleys of Touraine to the more rocky and broken country of Toulouse. The buildings were brick instead of stone, and one could see the round arch and barrel vault of Romanesque influence, combined with the low broken roofs of Spanish architecture. Here and there appeared the beautiful pines which suggested the blue of the Mediterranean and cliff villages, as pictured in paintings of Naples and southern Italy. Arriving in Toulouse about nine in the morning, we washed and had breakfast at a very pleasant hotel restaurant. It had the atmosphere of a good Paris restaurant, but the 117waitresses were of the brunette southern type, with sparkling eyes and impetuous activity. We liked it so well that we had all three meals there. At lunch, the table next to us was occupied by a good-looking gentleman with a dark moustache, who evidently was suing the favor of the proprietress’ very attractive daughter, therefore the waitress who attended him was gifted with ability and liberty. She caught the spirit of her position, and ushered in each new delicacy with a pomp and grimace, playing the part of bearer of the golden platter and king’s jester with a flippant coquetry and grace which was more entertaining than any show I’ve seen in France.

We spent the day in seeing the town. It is rich in monuments of history and art. The cathedral of St. Etienne is a monument of brick which opened to me a whole new field of possibility in the use of that material. It combines the mass of Romanesque with the Gothic form of an early vitality. The great basilica of St. Sernin is truly Romanesque and a perfect example of the Provincial style which introduced the Romanesque influence into France. We saw the paintings in the Hôtel de Ville, done by masters of the city of Toulouse, who were of the Ecole 118des Beaux-Arts. These works were distinctly of the most modern school, and they appeal to me more than anything I ever have seen. Wonderful composition and lighting effect, combined with a freshness of color and naturalness which shows what really can be done with paint.

The large museum was in a great old monastery, built of hand-made bricks by the monks of St. Augustine in the ninth century. It is still beautifully complete, with cloistered court and brick-vaulted chapel. Past peoples live in monuments they leave. Monuments express the life and art and religion of a people. To build such monuments is the work of an architect. This is the greatest thing that ever happened to me. It shows me the purpose and benefit of education; for the rest of my life what I read will be absorbed with so much more interest and insight and profit. Maybe the course of technology is narrow and technical, but I find that never did I want to study and learn by reading as at present. It has waked me to the fact that I have tastes and the right to follow them as I please. And I can follow them in my many spare hours without detracting from my service in the Cause.

Your letter containing clippings and cartoons was very entertaining. I believe cartoons serve 119the purpose of keeping alive the trend of public thought without being filled up with unreliable censored facts and rumors.

Love to you all.

Your son,

Dinsmore.

November 29, 1917.

Dear Family:

Today was Thanksgiving, and we all had the very pleasant surprise of a day of repos given us by the captain that we might be present at a banquet given us by the American colony at Pau. It was held at one of the good hotels and had all the proper characteristics of a regular Thanksgiving dinner. There were forty-two of us there. After the meal we had some songs from local talent, which were of no mean variety, and then we went to a moving picture show which was rather a failure except as a place to digest an excellent and more than hearty meal.

My, but the machines we have now are a joy to run. They climb, they turn, they dive, and recover as you think. You have but to wish in the third dimension and you are there. It is beyond description. You sit comfortably behind a little windshield without glasses and 120watch the country far below. You forget the motor and space, and speed until suddenly something of interest causes you to lean out and you are struck in the face by a gust of wind which bends your head back and pumps your breath back into your lungs. Then you know what speed means. Soon your motor begins to miss, and you become worried and look for a place to land. You find the fields not more than one hundred feet square. You glance at the altimeter and find that you have unconsciously climbed to an altitude where the air is light, and your motor pants, so you make a readjustment, glance back at the school fifteen miles behind, which you left eight minutes ago, and go on your way.

Tomorrow I do spirals in fifteen-meter machines, and then go to vol de group. There we learn to fly in group formation and keep relative positions. They play “follow the leader” and “stump” in that class—some class! Then come acrobatics.

Dins.

Dear Family:

This is a country of beautiful views, wonderful colorings of distant hills and the snow-capped 121mountains as changeable as the sea. We fly among the foothills and look down upon the beautiful estates and castle ruins nestling among them. There has been little sun, but the fact that one catches but passing glimpses of the mountains among the clouds does not detract from their charm, and the moisture in the air makes the coloring richer. I am in no hurry to leave.

Erich Fowler, one who has been with us from the beginning, and one of our best liked and most congenial fellow-sportsmen, was the first among our crowd to be killed. He fell five hundred meters with full motor and did not regain consciousness. It is believed he fainted in the air, as the controls were found intact and no parts of the machine missing. He was buried today at Pau. When the fellows find no way to express their feelings it is taken laconically, and the subject has been dropped already. No one is unnerved or frightened by the experience. Fortunately the ego is strong enough in every man to make him feel the fault would not have been his in such a case, and he believes in his own good fortune enough to be confident nothing will happen to his machine.

This is the school where the poor aviators are 122weeded out. The men who have dissipated relentlessly have lost their nerve and dropped out. The poorer drivers have voluntarily gone to bombing planes. The physically unfit have dropped off in the hospitals, and here those who have not the head to fly come to grief. Four out of five of the Russians who enter this school leave in a hearse. Some national characteristic makes it almost impossible for them to complete the course.

Out of twenty-five machines broken in a fall, one man is killed. Out of ten men killed, nine deaths are caused by inefficiency on the part of the pilot. They say I have more than the ordinary allotment of requirements of a good pilot. My assets are perfect health and a clear mind to offset the chance of misfortune which may stand against me. Knowing me, realize that all the statements I have made are conservative.

In a letter I received from Viscountess Duval the other day she said: “As you are interested in art, it will be a pleasure to show you through our galleries when you come to Paris. They are as fine as any in the city.” Her husband is evidently a writer of some distinction. They are coming to Pau and I hope will arrive before I leave.

123I shall be quite busy for the next week and not have a great deal of time to write. No letters have reached me from home for over three weeks.

Yours with love and wishes for a very Merry Christmas.

Your son,

Dinsmore.

Not till the last line did I realize that Christmas was so near. Naturally, the war Christmas will be more conservative than ever, but I hope that real festivities will continue. America is far enough from the Front to keep the sound of battle from breaking the rhythm of the dance. I should like to be back there for three or four days of the Christmas vacation, with a fair round of dancing and turkey and calling on old friends. I shall make every effort to spend Christmas at my marraine’s.

My present to mother is a silver frame containing a picture of her son in war array of leathers and furs, helmet and goggles, standing by the propeller of France’s fastest war plane. To father I give my croix de guerre representing the first Boche I brought down, and to Bob goes a penholder shaped like a propeller and made 124from a splinter of the propeller of my first Boche plane—all imaginary gifts, but true.

Your son,

Dinsmore.

December 1, 1917.

Dear Bob:

Your letter written November 10 came yesterday with a lot of other letters and about five packages. Gee! it was just like Christmas. We all sat about the stove and ate nuts and dates, figs and candy, till our stomachs ached. You can’t appreciate what wonderful and necessary things figs and prunes are till you go without sweet things by the month. Take a prune, for instance. If I could have a candied prune for every mile I walked, I would use up a pair of shoes every week. Myrtle sent me three cans of salted nuts; and a girl in Boston sent me a surprise package.

Well, Bob, I am a real pilot now. I can play “stump the leader” with anybody. Turning loops and somersaults and corkscrew turns are nothing any more. The hardest things to do are the “roundversments,” “barrel roll” and “vertical bank.”

Here they give us a machine and we go up 125and do what we like for two hours. One day I went ’way up over the mountain peaks and circled close around the highest one; then I went down in the valleys and played chicken hawk over the villages and followed the railroad train down the valley. You should see the cows and sheep run when my shadow crossed their fields. You can head right for the mountainside and then whirl around and skim along with the fir trees passing close by—twice as fast as an express train.

Inside the machine the seat is comfortable and you huddle down behind the windshield as comfortable as can be. The wind roars by so loudly that it drowns out the noise of the motor. Before long your ears are accustomed to the sound and you feel as if you were slipping along as silently as a fish.

Another day we went sixty-five miles to Biarritz. It is a bathing resort on the ocean. I went down over the ocean and circled around the lighthouse on the way back and then sped down the beach just over the water line. I didn’t see any submarines, but maybe they saw me first and beat it. I got back to the school just before dark and didn’t have gasoline enough left to go five miles. They gave it to me for being gone so 126long, but it was a great trip. The next day I tried for an altitude and made next to the highest in this school—6,500 meters or 21,320 feet. It wasn’t much joy. I froze three finger tips and frosted my lungs I think, and had chills and headache till supper time. For an hour I pounded my hands together while steering with my knees. There were six strata of clouds. The last was above me and at the top. I didn’t see the ground for an hour and a half. When you realize that they do their fighting between five and six thousand feet, you see what endurance it will take. They are right to make the test high for aviators.

The most fortunate of us are being sent to Cazaux on the coast near Bordeaux. There they have all kinds of target practice from an aeroplane. You shoot at floats in a lake by diving at them, and at sausages dragged through the air by another plane. Well, we have done some of that here. We went up and dropped a parachute and then pretended it was a German plane and dived at it back and forth. Believe me, it was no easy matter to aim a gun into that machine while you are diving down at a speed of 250 miles an hour. Then we go in pairs for team work and dive at it turn about.

127The last few days we have been having a great time. We divided into two groups and called one the French and the other the Boche, and we go out and hunt each other up and down the valley. We have sham combats and keep our squadron formation during the maneuvers. We do this for ten days before going to Cazaux. I am unusually lucky to get so much of this training, and am pleased about it, though I’m afraid I’ll not be in Paris for Christmas. (I hope you will write and tell me about your dance and your Christmas holidays, and I’ll tell you what I do Christmas.) As for this war, I’m not saying a word, but I wouldn’t be surprised if you and your children would get a chance to fight in it. There have been hundred-year wars before now, and our modern civilization is not so small that it can’t reproduce what has been done before. But if every American has to return to the United States and start producing, raising, and training soldiers for the next fifty years to beat them, we’ll thrash them, by God, if it leaves America a desert and Germany a hole in the ground.

The shoes the family sent me are a perfect fit and just what I wanted, and the socks were a surprise. As for that surprise box, I will continue 128to enjoy that for many a day. I ate a little and passed around a little each day.

Good night, Bob.

Don’t lose any sleep over studies.

Your loving brother,

Dins.

Merry Christmas—Happy New Year.

December 6, 1917.

Dear Family:

The past few days have been wonderful in weather and accomplishments. I have been seeing southern France at the rate of a hundred miles an hour—five hours a day. Yesterday morning I flew to Notre Dame de Lourdes. It is a place to which thousands pilgrimage each year to be healed by the flow of waters there. It is a beautiful little village at the base of the mountains, and is hidden in the shadow of steep cliffs. From there I wandered among the foothills and circled over the little mountain hamlets. In the afternoon I headed straight for Pic du Midi. It is the second highest mountain in this vicinity. In three-quarters of an hour I was a thousand meters above it. I swooped down around it and took pictures, with it in the foreground. Then I came back by way of 129another canyon, and arrived at the school at dusk. After a lot of foolish monkey business, I spent the last hour running at a height of two hundred feet with my motor throttled ’way down. Sitting low in my seat, hardly touching the controls, skimming the tree tops in the quiet hazy evening air, it made me think of how father used to love to see the old White throttle down to two miles an hour, the difference being that I had throttled down to ninety.

This morning four of us went down to Biarritz and out over the ocean. I went down and circled around the lighthouse. All these things are forbidden by the school, but as men are daily risking their lives in gaining proficiency in flight, it is difficult to waive a punishment, so they all do it.

Dinsmore.

Hôtel de l’Univers, Tours, December 8, 1917.

Dear Family:

I am too tired tonight to write a real letter, but all the stuff arrived, and it was great. The shoes and surprise package with the Christmas card, and letters from October 20 to November 10 arrived. If you knew how we gloat over those prunes and dates and figs and candies and 130nuts, you would—send some more. Thank you much.

I am now a real flyer in every sense of the word, and am working five hours every day. I’ll tell you all about it soon.

Your Son.

Pau, France, Saturday, December 15, 1917.

Dear Family:

We are having sham battles every day. They thought a few of us good enough to hold over for extra training ten days and send us to a special shooting school as Cazaux. This increases our efficiency some fifty per cent before going to the Front and gives us that much more chance. I have had more training than the average, due to more luck and interest. Today I shot a machine gun at a pointed aeroplane. Out of eighty shots, of which three bullets failed to leave the gun, sixty-seven hit the square target; of these sixty-seven, twenty-seven struck the plane and the man in it. It is the best score I have seen, and encourages me. This shooting is very vital.

We leave here in about two days, and remain at Cazaux about ten. Then we go to Paris and wait for our call to the Front. I’ll be in Bordeaux Christmas, and in Paris New Years. At 131the Front we go into different escadrilles, French, and spend the first month as apprentices before going to fight the Boche. We attend lectures and fly all the time here and sleep twelve hours a day. It is a full-sized job, and enough for me. It may be a beautiful life in training, but I am beginning to realize that the real service will take all that war requires of any man. In fact, it will be all that I anticipated before entering the work. There has been a period in which I thought it rather an easy branch of the service. But I am much better fitted for it than the average man doing it. I was a little afraid I would be too conservative; not devilish enough—but I guess my reason does not curb my abandon. There is not much to be told just now, as we follow a pretty steady routine from 6 A.M. to 9:30 P.M. The weather has been beautiful; frost on the trees and mist on the mountains, lighted by a rose-colored winter’s sun in beauty unsurpassed. I sketch a little and read a little and struggle to keep up my correspondence. Family letters are slow in coming, but have been delayed or lost, no doubt.

Good night, and love to all from

Dinsmore.

132

Ecole de Tir, Cazaux, December 18, 1917.

Dear Family Mine:

Here I am back near Bordeaux where I started on my tour of France. We came to this school understanding that we were to be abused by the severest military discipline, but we are delighted to find that they continue to spoil us. We have as pleasant barracks as are to be had in France. We are permitted to eat in the sous-officers’ mess—a very special mark of favor, which is really a break of military discipline—and to cap it all, they are giving the whole camp repos to go to Paris for Christmas and for New Years. That is pretty nice. You know we are really only corporals—that is to say, privates of no rank—yet they really treat us like commissioned officers.

My affection for the French people continues to grow. They are not more gallant in action than the American is at heart, and they are less gallant at heart, but the French politeness which irritates some people seems to me to express a desire to be inoffensive to one’s fellows.

Our interpreter and lecturer speaks English very well, and is an excellent fellow. He has served in the Arabian division of the French Army, and in the French lines also. He says 133the Arabians are volunteer veterans of the French Army and make some of their best fighters. They cannot stand bombardment and so are used only for attacks. They go over the top with bayonets, swords, revolvers, cutlasses, and war cries. They throw the weapons away in the order mentioned, as they close with the enemy. At the finish, they are using only cutlasses, and they take no prisoners. They fight like devils, and ask no quarter. We see many of them around the aviation school. They have fine, sensitive features, and those novel, keen but dreamy eyes of the Orient. Their carriage is proud, and their smile disarming.

The Senegalese are another interesting factor in the French fighting forces. They, too, are volunteers, and of the finest aggressive troops used only in attacks. Great, stalwart blacks from Africa, with intelligent faces and a rather indolent air, which impresses one as masking a latent virility. They little suggest the man-eating head-hunters that they are. They are of many tribes, and are distinguished by a tribal mark in the form of great scars, which have mutilated their features since childhood. One will have great symmetrical slashes cutting each cheek diagonally; another a large cross upon his 134forehead; another a ring of little pie cuts enclosing his eyes, nose, and mouth, and anyone able to remember their strange name can recognize the tribe by the mark.

They tell some terrible stories of these men. It is rumored that at this camp two of them went wild under the influence of liquor and killed and ate two members of an enemy tribe. In an attack these men are worse than the Arabs and outbutcher the Huns. The Germans fear them like death. In the advance, when they come upon a German who may be playing ’possum, they drive the bayonet in an inch or so to test him out and sink it to the hilt if he moves. They charge with their teeth showing, and do their nicest work with a weapon which is a cross between a butcher’s cleaver and a corn knife. They are called “trench cleaners” and return with strings of human ears and heads, which after boiling make good skull trophies. Yet these vicious Africans make reliable soldiers, and one sees them standing guard night and day in prison camps and aviation schools.

There is a great Russian camp near here in which thousands of Russians are held in detention. There was a mutiny of Russian troops in the French lines and they sent them down here. 135They will not fight or work, but only wander about the landscape eating good food. Something will, no doubt, be done with them as soon as it is possible to focus on the Russian question, but this is cause enough for the French to hate the Russians. A man in Russian uniform is mobbed in the streets of Paris now. Officers there are forced to go about in civilian clothes. It is very hard on some of the conscientious aviators who are anxious to fight. For a time they were quite broken-hearted and disconsolate. But now it has been arranged that Russian escadrilles will be formed as part of the French service. One of these Russians, with whom I’ve struck quite a friendship, is a great, six-foot-two fellow, with a splendid face and a genial nature. He has served three years in the Russian cavalry, and was describing their life. They travel in groups of six for reconnaissance work and are gone from their companies days at a time. One will forage the meat, another the bread, another the drink, and so on. Their experiences are fascinating, but too long to tell here. He spoke highly of the valor of the Cossacks. He said he had seen a Cossack attack an entire company of German infantry single-handed. (As he told it, a light came in his eyes and he lowered his 136head, making gestures with his big hands. His name is Redsiffsky.) The Cossack drew up in front of the Germans, looked on one side and then the other, drew his long saber and raising in his saddle charged into the heart of them. His great frame swayed and his saber cut circles of blue light about his horse’s head as he slashed down man after man. A German’s arm would be severed as it raised to strike; a German’s head would roll down its owner’s back; a German’s body would open from neck to crotch. Still the Cossack on rearing horse slashed through and the Germans crowded in. Then the Cossack’s mount went down, stabbed from beneath, and with a final slash, the Russian threw his saber and drew his poniard from his belt. He ripped and stabbed at the Germans as they closed in for the final sacrifice. His life was marked by seconds then, but every second paid till a telling musket in full swing descended on his skull. When the Germans withdrew, nine of their number stayed behind and seven left with aid. Of the Russian, nothing was to be found. The German revenge had been complete, but a Cossack had died.

Your Son.

137

December 19, 1917.

Dear Uncle:

Please consider this a Christmas letter. It will not arrive on Christmas, it isn’t even written on Christmas, but the Christmas spirit is responsible for its writing, and wishes for a “Merry Christmas” and “Happy New Year” go with it to you, Aunt Virgie, and all my Cleveland friends.

There are a whole bunch of us sitting at the same table writing home. We have just discovered that we are to have permission to Paris for Christmas. The result is that it has required three-quarters of an hour for me to write this much. Between the silences are bursts of conversation connected by laughter.

We have now arrived at the last stage of aerial training in France. It is a school of special merits, and the best of its kind. Not only that, but it is also a very pleasant place to live. The barracks are situated in orderly rows in a wood of Norway pine bordering a large lake. From the shores long piers and rows of low hangars painted gray and white run out into the water, forming harbors. In the little harbors, speed boats with khaki awnings and machine guns on prow and stern lie anchored in 138flotillas, and hydroaeroplanes are drawn up in rows on the docks. Flags float, and sailors and soldiers in the uniforms of five nations move about in military manner. From one broad pier containing a row of shooting pavilions, the rattle of musketry and light artillery keeps the air tense. The sky line is dotted with man-flown water birds going and coming, and off In the distance the chase machines at practice look like dragon flies as they swoop and whirl about the drifting balloon which is their target. Though it has the sound and aspect of war, there is the spirit of a carnival present.

Our work consists of lectures, target practice, and air training. In the lectures we learn the science of gun construction and that of marksmanship in aviation. It is a science, too. Considering that the target and shooter are both moving at the greatest speed of man, allowance must be made instantaneously without instruments for the speed of each plane. The angle of their flight is in three dimensions, and in addition there is the speed of the bullet to be considered. Of course, each plane type of the enemy has its own speed, which varies according to whether it is climbing or diving. Practice must make all this calculation second nature. 139The calculation made, we are then ready to try our ability in directing the course of an aeroplane in carrying out the calculation. The target practice consists of shooting clay pigeons with shotgun and rifle, shooting carbines at fixed and floating targets and shooting floating targets from the observer’s seat of an aeroplane. The third branch is shooting from a chase monoplane; we shoot at balloons and sausages towed by other machines, and dive at marks in the water and on the ground. It is great sport.

In twenty days we leave here. We hope to be at the Front.

I must eat now. Love to all.

Yours ever,

Dins.

December 19, 1917.

My Dear Mrs. Halbert:

After all, it is the surprises that add the most spice, and it was certainly a pleasant surprise to receive your knit helmet. As a matter of fact, no gift could have been more aptly chosen. The only helmet I had was knit by a girl friend whose enthusiasm was greater than her skill; it no doubt represented much painstaking, but romance will not keep the head warm nor the 140ravelings out of one’s eyes when aloft, and I had wished hard and oft for a helmet of just the type you sent; others had them. Thank you so much for it, it fits perfectly.

You probably know something of how my time has been spent. I am still in the LaFayette Flying Corps of the French Foreign Legion. We have been through four French schools of aviation and are now as good pilots as can be made without experience at the Front. We are now working in machines the same as are used at the Front, and engage daily in target practice and sharpshooting as well as the theory of gunmanship. We have been trained for pilots in the class machines, that is, fighting monoplane biplanes. They travel at a speed of from ninety to one hundred and fifty miles an hour; in a dive they will go two hundred and fifty or so. Aerial acrobatics in these machines are like a morning swim, and they have the appearance of a clipped-wing dragon fly. The life is wonderful and healthy and full of thrills. Every flight brings a new experience. We have flown circles around the highest peaks of the Pyrenees and swooped over the bathers at Biarritz. We have played hide-and-seek in the clouds and fought sham battles above them. One day I went to an altitude 141of 21,500 feet and froze three finger tips; I came down out of the sunshine through a snow storm and landed in the rain after sunset. Such changes were never possible before this age. They are a great strain on the system, and it is resisting that strain which is an aviator’s real work. The rest is play and sport.

I would like to write more but must go to bed. Thank you again for your thoughtfulness. My best wishes for a happy, prosperous New Year to the Halbert family.

As ever, sincerely,

Dinsmore.

December 28, 1917.

Dear Family:

I awake to the melody of the same reveille which brings ten million soldiers to action over the world each morning; the same bugle which sounds the end of the night’s bombardment, and the beginning of the day’s carnage on battle fronts from the North Sea to the Mediterranean. I yawn, stretch, lie in ten or fifteen minutes of delicious indecision and then dress sitting on the edge of my cot. My underwear in the daytime is my night clothes; socks are changed almost every week, dried of the dampness 142of the day by the warmth of the night in bed; my sweater and shirt also work twenty-four hours a day. The muffler mother knitted for my neck is a fine pillow; my great sheepskin coat—my greatest comfort and the envy of officers—plays the comforter; all these are the constant guardians of the warmth of my body. It is they, and not parade dress that should be allowed to wear war’s honors if they are worn for it is they who have served. Then I rush out and wash hands and face dutifully in cold water. Then I hasten to my breakfast—three slices of bread and butter. The bread is free, but the butter costs five cents, twenty-five centimes in French money, and is eaten while walking to the field. During the morning I fly perhaps an hour and a half. I return to lunch and an hour’s repose. Another hour or so of flying and a lecture occupy the afternoon. On the way home at four o’clock we stop in at a little shanty where three amiable and good-looking country girls serve us with oysters and jam and chocolate. The oysters are better than blue points, and cost ten cents a dozen. We talk and sing and walk home. At six I have dinner and after dinner write letters till weary. Then I go to bed.

143The war’s toll has been 3,000,000 lives or so. A fourth of the ships are sunk. The great nations will be bankrupted. Will we dare speak of God? Will architecture be a good profession after the war? What is one man in all this? I go to bed each night trying to get a perspective of life and the world and my place.

Dinsmore Ely.

December 28, 1917.

Dear Family:

My Christmas was spent in Paris with my marraine. There was snow on the ground. On Christmas Eve I went to the great Paris Grand Opera House. It is a monument to the artistic appreciation of the French public, and as a piece of architecture it is a masterpiece. As you ascend its grand stairway and pass through the foyer and grand balconies into the gorgeous theater, you feel the power of the master designers and builders and artists who contributed to its conception. The opera was Faust. The French singers are no better musically but they are splendid actors, which is not the case in American opera. The love scene in Faust was done with the taste of Sothern’s and Marlowe’s Romeo and Juliet. The Faust ballet was splendid. 144Oh, how I enjoyed that evening. On Christmas day I went twice to see David Reed, whom I liked so well in the Ambulance Unit, and who has been sick in the hospital with grip and a broken arm. He is one of those the war cannot soil.

My marraine’s grandchildren gave me a big box of candied fruit, which I found in my shoes on Christmas morning. I gave the little girl a doll, dressed in “Old Glory,” and the boy an American pocket flashlight. The train left at eight on Christmas evening. My four comrades and I met in our reserved compartment and had a very pleasant journey back to Cazaux, arriving at ten-thirty in the morning. We all had a good time telling of our merry Christmas. The cakes and chocolate which my marraine gave me helped to fill five empty stomachs at five in the morning.

My worst experience in the air was awaiting me. We flew in the afternoon. I took a machine and a parachute and climbed to 1,800 meters. We were only supposed to climb to 1,400, but I disobeyed and it probably saved my life. I threw out the parachute and took a couple of turns at it. After diving at the thing and mounting again, I started into a “roundversment” 145with my eyes on the parachute. Unconsciously, I went into a loop and stopped in the upside-down position, where I hung by my belt. I cut the motor, and grabbed a strut to hold myself in my seat. The machine fell in its upside-down position till it gained terrific speed, then it slowly turned over into a nose dive, and I came out in a tight spiral which slowly widened into a circle at ligne de vol, but the controls were almost useless, and it took all my strength to keep from diving into the ground. You know what skidding is, so you can imagine what loss of control in an automobile going at high speed would be, but you cannot imagine what loss of control of an aeroplane is any more than a lumberjack can imagine a million dollars.

When a machine is upside down, the stress comes on the wrong side of the wings and is apt to spring them. My plane had fallen a thousand meters, and the wings had been thrown out of adjustment so that the controls were barely able to correct the change. I did not regain control of any sort until I was 400 meters from the ground, and then I could do nothing but spiral to the left. In that fall, when I found I could not control the machine, I believed it was my last flight. It was the first time I ever 146had been conscious of looking death squarely in the face. After the first hundred meters of fall, I was perfectly aware of the danger. I was wholly possessed in turn by doubt, fear, resignation (it was just there that I was almost fool enough to give up), anger (that I should think of such a thing), and, finally realization that only cool thinking would bring me out alive—and it did! From 400 meters I spiraled down with barely enough motor to keep me from falling, in order that the strain on the control would be minimum. The old brain was working clearly then, for I made a fine adjustment of the throttle and gasoline—just enough to counteract the resistance of controls, crossed in order to counteract the bent wings, and just enough to let the plane sink fast enough so that it would hit the ground into the wind in the next turn of the spiral, which I could not avoid. Allowing for the wind, I managed to control the spiral just enough to land on the only available landing ground in the vicinity. The landing was perfect, but the machine rolled into a ditch and tipped up on its nose. As I had cut the motor just before landing, the propeller was stopped and not a thing was broken. If the wing had been bent a quarter of an inch more, 147they would have carried me home. The machines they use here are old ones, and that was probably responsible for the accident. This weak spot of the Nieuport caused many deaths before anyone ever survived to tell what had happened. Again the gods were with me, and I lived to be the wiser.

When I undid my belt and climbed out of the machine my hands were never steadier nor my mind more tranquil. Many Russians from the detention camp near by swarmed around, and I set them to work righting the plane and wheeling it over to a post, where an American was on guard.

Leaving the machine in his care, I hit cross-country for the aviation field. As I walked through the brushwood, the beauties of nature were possessed with renewed charm, the sea breeze laden with the scent of pine seemed a sweeter incense, the clouds were more billowy, my steps were wondrously buoyant, for I felt like one whom the gods had given special privilege to return among the treasures of his childhood. The passing of death’s shadow is a stimulus to the charm of living.

Today I had an hour and a half of flying, and engaged in a sham combat of half an hour with 148another pilot. We both killed each other several times.

It is rumored that a plot was discovered in the Russian camp. They were to attack the camp here today at two o’clock and seize the armory. They had all the machine guns and armored planes ready and a guard around the school and camp, but nothing came of it. It would have furnished good target practice.

We get another permission New Years, but the trip to Paris is a long one, so I shall stay in Bordeaux. An invitation from Countess Duval for Christmas dinner at Arcachon was too late to reach me. I shall pay a call, as it is only an hour on the train from here.

Villa St. Jean, Arcachon, January 1, 1918.

My Dear Family:

Happy New Year. Fortune has again been very kind to me. You will remember the Duvals who were so kind to me when I had a forced landing at La Ferté-Imbault. When I left them, they gave me the address of their cousins at Arcachon, and said to be sure and let them know when I came down to Cazaux, so that they could write to their cousins, and give me an opportunity to meet more people of 149such charming hospitality. An invitation reaching me after my return from Christmas in Paris, invited me to Christmas dinner here at the Villa St. Jean, where I am writing. I acknowledged the invitation, and received another one for New Years dinner. I said I would call two days before New Years to pay my respects, and it was then that the Marchioness Duval asked me to come New Years. I remained that night and returned to the school, where four of us had to do patrol duty over the Russian camp. Returning to Arcachon that evening that I might stay at a hotel and so not have to rise for the early train, chance caused me to run across the Viscount Duval, who was returning on the same train from Bordeaux. He insisted that I return with him and spend the remainder of my leave with them, which I am doing.

Now, who are they? Lord only knows. I have not been able to distinguish their titles from their names yet, but finding me interested in pictures they thought perhaps I would be interested in looking over one of the family albums. It was a daughter-in-law of the Viscount Duval who showed me the album. The Countess Duval had three sons, the eldest an author of some note; the second owns Château 150Du Bois, and the third is the one with whom I am staying now. This family consists of a married daughter, formerly the Marchioness Duval, now Viscountess Richecourt; the son, married to the Marchioness Ribol; and the daughter, still the unmarried Marchioness Duval.

Devoting a short paragraph to the latter, which is her due. She is charming, beautiful, of what might be called the flower of French gentility, and is twenty-three. She speaks English very well, plays the piano and violoncello, and is much interested in art. She has not had so much time for these, however, since the war has centered her real interests in the soldiers at the Front. It was she who described the spirit of Frenchmen as “so beautiful.” Speaking of a mass for their dead, which was held by the family some six months ago, the smile did not fade, but there was sadness in her voice as she said, “More than twenty-five of our poor boys had died at that time.” That included cousins and second cousins of their family, but she said, “We must be happy.” She just came in where we are all writing letters, with her hair hanging about her shoulders. I didn’t notice what she was saying, but I think 151she was thanking me very much for a little sixty cent maiden-hair fern with a little white flower in the center which I brought her on the way from the barber shop as a New Years present. She set it on her desk. It will grow there.

They are going out to distribute meat to some poor people, so I shall go with them, and continue this anon.