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 and 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 long, 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.
The 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
to 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,