e said, "Oh, la la! Il est perdu!" in a mild voice. The whole
affair happened so quickly that I was not able to think myself into a
similar situation before the end had come. At the last, the machine
made a quick swoop downward, from a height of about fifty metres, then
careened upward, tipped again, and diving sidewise, struck the ground
with a sickening rending crash, the motor going at full speed. For a
moment it stood, tail in air; then slowly the balance was lost, and it
fell, bottom up, and lay silent.

An enterprising moving-picture company would have given a great deal
of money to film that accident. It would have provided a splendid
dramatic climax to a war drama of high adventure. Civilian audiences
would have watched in breathless, awe-struck silence; but at a
military school of aviation it was a different matter. "Oh, la la! Il
est perdu!" adequately gauges the degree of emotional interest taken
in the incident. At the time I was surprised at this apparent
callousness, but I understood it better when I had seen scores of such
accidents occur, and had watched the pilots, as in this case, crawl
out from the wreckage, and walk sheepishly, and a little shaken, back
to their classes. Although the machines were usually badly wrecked,
the pilots were rarely severely hurt. The landing chassis of a Bleriot
is so strong that it will break the force of a very heavy fall, and
the motor, being in front, strikes the ground first instead of
pinning the pilot beneath it.

To anticipate a little, in more than four months of training at the
Bleriot school there was not a single fatality, although as many as
eleven machines were wrecked in the course of one working day, and
rarely less than two or three. There were so many accidents as to
convince me that Bleriot training for novices is a mistake from the
economic point of view. The up-keep expense is vastly greater than in
double-command biplane schools, where the student pilot not only
learns to fly in a much more stable machine, but makes all his early
flights in company with a _moniteur_ who has his own set of controls
and may immediately correct any mistakes in handling. But France is
not guided by questions of expense in her training of _pilotes de
chasse_, and opinion appears to be that single-command monoplane
training is to be preferred for the airman who is to be a combat
pilot. Certain it is that men have greater confidence in themselves
when they learn to fly alo