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didn't come around very often, but the fellows certainly got all that was coming to them, and more too.
About the last of March Major Davidson came down and took charge of the cadets. then things commensed to get better. He got us daily passes to town and week end passes to Niost and Partiers. At the same time they started sending to St. Maxient for volenteers from the cadets for observers, bomers, and machine gunners. A lot of the boys were so disheartened that they
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volenteered when if they could have seen any chance to get to flying they would not have. It was pretty hard on the boys from the states to be there under such conditions and see 1st Leiutenants come in all the time from the States who had graduated from ground school after them, and in several cases they were men who flunked one week at the same ground school as were some of the boys. The bright students were sent over here to receive immediate training, and what they got was enough
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to discourage anyone. About a month and a half after my arrival we got up our own mess, with cadet cooks, sargent, and K.P's. From then on the food was all that could be wished for.
Another thing that worried all of us was the uncertainty of our pay. The 16th F.D. boys had their pay held up for three months to see weather they would get $100.00 or $33.00 a month. All that time I revceived my hundred but never got my $67.00 back pay for December '18.
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Things always seemed to turn out all right in the end, but we always had something to worry about such as having incompetent officers, who would ride us to try and make good. We showed them all a bad time.
Captain Eastlan only lasted a week before we ran him out. It got so that the cadets were just looking for trouble, and wern't backward about standing up for their rights. The boys all had the feeling that they couldn't get to be any worse off so they should worry about what they did.
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The last two months there we had a so called school. The whole thing was a joke as far as learning anything was concerned. I believe the idea of the school was not to teach us, as much as to get our hundred dollars a month pay, and to boost the stock of those in command of the post.
The above are my impressions of St. Maxient before I left for Gondrecourt.
The way things finally turned out we were not so bad off, and could have had a very