Read Flying for France: With the American Escadrille at Verdun in Englishwith every sentence explained

Flying for France: With the American Escadrille at Verdun by James Rogers McConnell was first published in 1917. In Passage you read the full text in the original English, marked intermediate.

"These Sand Hills will be here forever, but the war won't."

With those words James McConnell leaves Carthage, North Carolina, in January 1915 to drive an ambulance in France. In the Vosges he wins the Croix de Guerre for rescuing wounded men under fire, then trades his khaki for the horizon blue of the French flying corps.

In crisp, chatty prose he takes us from flight school at Pau to an airfield near Bar-le-Duc, twenty-five miles south of Verdun, the greatest battle of the war. We meet his fellow American volunteers, among them William Thaw, Kiffin Rockwell, Victor Chapman and Norman Prince, follow them into dogfights over the Meuse, and get to know Whiskey, the lion cub they adopt as a mascot. McConnell also explains, step by step, how a war pilot is made.

Written in 1916, before the United States joined the war, this short first-hand account captures the birth of air combat and of the squadron that became famous as the Lafayette Escadrille.

Passage sets the book as a quiet, paginated reader in English. Read at your own pace, and when a sentence stops you, tap it. You get:

• a natural translation of that exact sentence,
• a short note on the grammar, in plain words,
• the key words, which you can save with the sentence they came from,
• all of it in English, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Turkish or Portuguese, whichever you read best.

It's marked intermediate: comfortable once everyday English feels familiar, with the harder sentences one tap away. The words you save come back later in short review games, so the book keeps teaching after you close it.