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of the plane. In the French squadron with which I served briefly, all the observers ate at the officers' mess while only two pilots did. One of them however was the squadron commander, Lieutenant Denis; the other, Lieutenant Labauve, was the chief pilot. The Americans copied the French system except that both observer and pilot were commissioned. The British, as might have been expected, followed a plan that differed from anyone else's. In their observation planes the pilot was also the observer. The extra man, commonly a corporal, served only as a lookout for enemy aircraft and as rear gunner in case of attack. In all Allied two-seater planes the [rear?] cockpit carried twin Lewis machine guns on an ingenious movable mount. The pilot of a two-seater had one or two Vickers machine guns firing through the propeller, but he rarely got a chance to use them. Enemy chasse always attacked from behind. 
An observer had to learn mostly from experience rather than at school. He had to learn to find his way over strange territory by map. The French maps were excellent. We had to memorize the conventional signals made to us by cloth panels, the only means we had of receiving messages from the ground. We had to practise diligently at sending dot-and-dash radio signals with the buzzers. We learned to recognize by silhouette, at long distance, the various types of Allied and German planes that were currently active on the front. All Allied planes bore the cocarde, the concentric circles of red, white and blue. German planes all bore the black cross. But nobody ever waited to identify a plane until it was close enough to see the insignia. We learned something of the theory of air gunnery, though we couldn't do any shooting from the air in the area of Tours. That had to wait until I went to Cazaux in June. But aiming a machine gun