entimental, but he sometimes carries sentiment to extremities which
appear to me absurd.

When I attempt to define, even to myself, the charm of our adventures
thus far, I find it impossible. How, then, make it real to others? To
tell of aerial adventure one needs a new language, or, at least, a
parcel of new adjectives, sparkling with bright and vivid meaning, as
crisp and fresh as just-minted bank-notes. They should have no taint
of flatness or insipidity. They should show not the faintest trace of
wear. With them, one might hope, now and then, to startle the
imagination, to set it running in channels which are strange and
delightful to it. For there is something new under the sun: aerial
adventure; and the most lively and unjaded fancy may, at first, need
direction toward the realization of this fact. Soon it will have a
literature of its own, of prose and poetry, of fiction, biography,
memoirs, of history which will read like the romance it really is. The
essayists will turn to it with joy. And the poets will discover new
aspects of beauty which have been hidden from them through the ages;
and as men's experience "in the wide fields of air" increases, epic
material which will tax their most splendid powers.

This brings me sadly back to my own purpose, which is, despite many
wistful longings of a more ambitious nature, to write a plain tale of
the adventures of two members--prospective up to this point--of the
Escadrille Lafayette. To go back to some of those earlier ones, when
we were making our first cross-country flights, I remember them now
with a delight which, at the time, was not unmixed with other
emotions. Indeed, an aviator, and a fledgling aviator in particular,
often runs the whole gamut of human feeling during a single flight. I
did in the course of half an hour, reaching the high C of acute panic
as I came tumbling out of the first cloud of my aerial experience.
Fortunately, in the air the sense of equilibrium usually compels one
to do the right thing, and so, after some desperate handling of my
"broom-stick," as the control is called which governs ailerons and
elevating planes, I soon had the horizons nicely adjusted again. What
a relief it was! I shut down my motor and commenced a more gradual
descent, for I was lost, of course, and it seemed wiser to land and
make inquiries than to go cruising over half of France looking for one
among hundreds of picturesque old towns. There were at least a dozen