The French estimate of the necessary time to make an aviator is about four months before he goes up on the line, and about four months in patrol, on the line, before he is a thoroughly capable handler of a battle-plane. They cap that by saying that an aviator is born, not made, anyway, and that "all generalizations about them are untrue, including this one."
The air policy of France, however, was in a state of great fluidity at this time. They were not prepared to lay down the law, because they were in the very act of giving up their own romantic, adventurous system of single-man combat, and were borrowing the German system of squadron formation. They were reluctant enough to accept it, let alone acknowledge their debt to the Germans. But the old knight-errantry of the air could not hold up against the new mass attacks. And the French are nothing if not practical.
Even their early war aviators had prudence dinned into them—that prudence which does not mean a niggardliness of fighting spirit, but rather an abstaining from foolhardiness.
Each aviator was warned that if he lost his life before he had to, he was not only squandering his own greatest treasure, but he was leaving one man less for France.
This was the philosophy of the training-school. If the French were impatient with a flier who lost his life to the Germans through excess of friskiness, they were doubly so at the flier who endangered his life at school through heedlessness.
"If you pull the wrong lever," they said, "you will kill a man and wreck a machine. Your country cannot afford to pay, either, for your fool mistakes."
But there their dogma ended. Once the flier had learned to handle his machine, his further behavior was in the hands of American officers solely, and these, he found, were stored with several very definite ideas.
The first of these—the most marked distinction between the French system and the American—was that all American aviators should know the theories of flying and most of its mathematics.
Concerning these things the French cared not a hang.
Neither did the American aviators. But they toed the mark just the same, and many a youngster gnawed his pencil indoors and cursed the fate that had placed him with a country so finicky about air-currents on paper and so indifferent to the joys of learning by ear.