ted, the
amount of execution done by these weapons was surprisingly small.
The observers are protected from attack from above, first by the
heavy fighting planes, flying at ten thousand feet, carrying two men
to the plane and able to keep the air for four hours at a time at a
speed of 110 miles an hour. They are supposed to use every possible
vigilance to keep the enemy's fighters away from the slower and busy
observing machines. In this they are seconded by the lighter one-man
fighting machines which cruise about at a height of fifteen thousand
feet at a speed of 130 miles an hour and able to make a straight
upward dash at the rate of ten thousand feet in ten minutes. The
aviators of these latter machines came to describe their task as
"ceiling work," suggesting that they operated at the very top of the
world's great room. They are able to keep the air only about two
hours at a time.

Americans, perhaps, gave exaggerated importance to the work of the
Lafayette Escadrille which was manned wholly by American boys, and
which, while in service from the very beginning of the war, was the
first section of the French Army permitted to display the flag of
the United States in battle after our declaration of war. It was
made up, in the main, of young Americans of good family and
independent means, most of them being college students who had laid
down their books for the more exciting life of an airman. They paid
heavily in the toll of death for their adventure and for the
conviction which led them to take the side of democracy and right in
the struggle against autocracy and barbarism months, even years,
before their nation finally determined to join with them. In the
first two and a half years of the war, seven of the aviators in this
comparatively small body lost their lives.

Harvard College was particularly well represented in the American
Flying Corps--although this is a proper and pertinent place to say
that the sympathy shown for the allied cause by the young collegians
of the United States was a magnificent evidence of the lofty
righteousness of their convictions and the spirit of democracy with
which they looked out upon the world. When the leash was taken off
by the declaration of war by the United States the college boys
flocked to training camps and enlistment headquarters in a way that
bade fair to leave those institutions of learning without students
for some years to come.

But to hark back to Harvard, it had