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only time he spoke to me in English. (I thought it possible that Philippe had given him a quick lesson)'  He said "I am sorry.  You...have understood.. zem?"  I shook his hand and said I had understood. Then, running out of English, he said in French that we would finish our réglage that afternoon. We did.

The roster of squadron 40 included the only observer I ever heard of who survived after his pilot has been killed in the air.  It happened within two weeks after I left.  The pilot was Denis.  The observer was a little fellow named Chappuis.  I remember him best sitting at the piano in the manor house, playing the Poet and Peasant overture, with a cigarette drooping from one side of his mouth.  I heard about it from an American named McDonald, who joined the squadron just as I was leaving it.  I saw McDonald somewhere later on. The German drive had begun a few days after his arrival at the Ferme d'Alger. He said that German chasse swarmed over the area, going after any French plane they found in the air.  The French had kept McDonald on the ground while that lasted.  Squadron 40 lost over half of its planes and flying personnel.  Philippe was among those killed.  When  Chappuis found himself still alive after the Germans had made a pass at them and killed Denis, he climbed from his cockpit over to the pilot's, managed somehow to hold Denis's body off the controls, and flew the plane home.  I don't think I would have attempted it. None of our two-seater planes had double control except one experimental type made by Spad very late in the war.  The Salmson was so constructed that it was a difficult acrobatic feat to climb from one cockpit to the other.  So we ordinarily regarded a crash as inevitable if the pilot was killed or rendered incapable of handling his controls.

Since I flew only twice a week or so, I had a lot of time to kill at the Ferme d'Alger.  Denis was indulgent about granting passes.  I took one overnight trip to Paris and another to Nancy, at the other end of the Chemin de Fer de l'Est. Returning from Nancy I had a little adventure that illustrates the things I liked and disliked about the way the American army was run.

My Train, on time, stopped for 10 minutes at Gondrecourt. We arrived at 12:50 P, M. The American installations at Gondrecourt continued to grow, and there was now a fine PX right beside the