flying garb.

"What's wrong now?" inquires one of the tenants of the tent.

"Everything, or else I've gone nutty," is the indignant reply,
delivered while disengaging a leg from its Teddy Bear trousering.
"Why, I emptied my whole roller on a Boche this morning, point blank
at not fifteen metres off. His machine gun quit firing and his
propeller wasn't turning and yet the darn fool just hung up there as
if he were tied to a cloud. Say, I was so sure I had him it made me
sore--felt like running into him and yelling, 'Now, you fall, you
bum!'"

The eyes of the _poilus_ register surprise. Not a word of this
dialogue, delivered in purest American, is intelligible to them. Why
is an aviator in a French uniform speaking a foreign tongue, they
mutually ask themselves. Finally one of them, a little chap in a
uniform long since bleached of its horizon-blue colour by the mud of
the firing line, whisperingly interrogates a mechanician as to the
identity of these strange air folk.

"But they are the Americans, my old one," the latter explains with
noticeable condescension.

Marvelling afresh, the infantrymen demand further details. They learn
that they are witnessing the return of the American Escadrille--composed
of Americans who have volunteered to fly for France for the duration
of the war--to their station near Bar-le-Duc, twenty-five miles south
of Verdun, from a flight over the battle front of the Meuse. They have
barely had time to digest this knowledge when other dots appear in the