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an adze in his hand and was chipping away at a perfectly good propeller. I shouted at him and the nun made him stop, though I am afraid the propeller had already been ruined. Then the nun hailed a man passing with a cart and directed him to take the pilot and me back to the airfield. He did. 
My pilot on that occasion was Brunce Hopper, perhaps the most handsome man who ever came from Montana. He was a Harvard graduate who had gone over in the American Ambulance Corps before we got into the war. After we became officially belligerent he went into the aviation. I got into combat service before he did, but he was later assigned to the 96th squadron, the first American day bombing outfit to be sent to the front. He survived the war and eventually became a professor of Political Science at Harvard and a VIP on campus. He was, I heard, very popular with undergraduate students and something of a campus dandy.
At Tours I began to learn what I was getting into. Both sides had long since concluded that one-man aeroplanes were useful only as chasse. No one man could operate a plane, keep an adequate lookout for enemy aircraft and pay much attention to objects on the ground. The chasse pilot, like all others, had to navigate by looking at the ground, but chasse planes usually flew in formation. Only the leader needed to look at the ground at all. A man trained primarily for aviation might not know what to look for in enemy territory that might be of interest to his own ground troops. Both the Germans and the French has set up observation squadrons of two-seater planes in which the rear seat was occupied by an artillery or an infantry officer. In both the German and the French services the pilots of observation plans were usually sergeants. In the air the observer was in command