Dear Bob:
Your letter came yesterday, and as I am in a great writing mood tonight I shall answer it. First, to tell you what we are doing. We are now back at the school of Avord. Here we learn to fly the Nieuport. A year ago that was the fastest plane at the Front and they still use them as fighting planes. First we ride in double command “twenty-eight’s.” (Twenty-eight means twenty-eight meters square of wing surface.) Then we do “twenty-three” double command and then are cut loose on them. Lastly, we finish with twenty rides solo in an “eighteen.” I finish the “twenty-eight” class tomorrow and will be through at this school in ten days. The eighteen-meter machines land at ninety miles an hour. They are wonderful little things and will do anything in the air. We go to work at six in the morning, and return at six in the evening, but the hardest work is waiting when there is too much wind to fly. We build a fire and sit about telling stories and making toast. When we cannot get bread we just tell stories. When it rains we go in the tent and read. I am reading a history of France. It is more fun to read history than to study it, and I think you know more when you get through. Of course I am surrounded by all the old castles and battle grounds and graves of the warriors of seven centuries. That makes a difference.
There was a bad accident the week before I got here. A two-passenger plane struck a solo plane in the air. It was a head-on collision, and all three aviators were killed. That is a very rare accident, though.
I see America is preparing for five years of war. You may get over yet. Write me whenever you can. You do not know how much your letters help to buck up a lonely brother sometimes.
Your ever loving brother,
Dins.
November 13, 1917.
Dear Mother:
Today was a wonderful, clear, crisp November day, and we breathed our fill of it. I had seven rides in a twenty-eight meter and one in a twenty-three meter Nieuport. In life the things we look forward to usually fall below our expectations, but not so in aviation. In aviation, every experience so totally eclipses all expectations that you realize you were totally incapable of imagination in that field. We change planes five times in progressing from Penguin to Spad. Each change is as great an advance and difference as stepping from a box car to a locomobile limousine with Westinghouse shock absorbers.
The Nieuport is the plane we are using now, with a man to give the scale. It has a supporting area of twenty-three square meters. It is the fighting plane used at the Front seven or eight months ago.