AMERICA IN THE WAR 
 
 n 
 
 THE VANGUARD OF 
 AMERICAN VOLUNTEERS
 
 AMERICA IN THE WAR 
 
 THE VANGUARD OF 
 AMERICAN VOLUNTEERS 
 
 IN THE FIGHTING LINES 
 
 AND IN HUMANITARIAN SERVICE 
 
 AUGUST, 1914 APRIL, 1917 
 
 BY 
 
 EDWIN W. MORSE 
 
 AUTHOR OF "CAtJSES AND EFFECTS IN AMEBICAN HMTOBT* 
 
 ILLUSTRATED 
 
 NEW YORK 
 
 CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 
 1922
 
 COPYEIGHT, 1918, BY 
 
 CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 
 
 Printed in the United States of America
 
 TO THE MEMORY 
 
 O THOSE HEROIC AMERICAN YOUTHS 
 
 WHO BY THEIR SELF-SACRIFICING DETOTION 
 
 POINTED OUT THE PATH 
 
 OF DUTY AND HONOR 
 TO THEIR FELLOW COUNTRYMEN
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 I. INTRODUCTORY 9 
 
 PART I 
 
 IN THE FOREIGN LEGION 
 
 II. WILLIAM THAW, LATE OF YALE 1? 
 
 III. MORLAE'S PICTURE OF THE LEGION ... 21 
 
 IV. HENRY FARNSWORTH, LOVER OF BOOKS . 27 
 V. A DESCENDANT OF CITIZEN GENET ... 37 
 
 VI. ALAN SEEGER, POET OF THE LEGION . . 50 
 VII. VICTOR CHAPMAN AS A LEGIONNAIRB . . 66 
 
 PART II 
 
 WITH FAMOUS BRITISH REGIMENTS 
 VIII. JOHN P. POE, OF THE FIRST BLACK WATCH 75 
 
 IX. DILLWYN P. STARR, OF THE COLDSTREAM 
 
 GUARDS 83 
 
 vii
 
 viii CONTENTS 
 
 PART IH 
 
 THE AMERICAN RED CROSS IN SERVIA 
 
 MOT 
 
 X. DR. RYAN UNDER FIRE AT BELGRADE . 95 
 
 XI. FIGHTING TYPHUS AT GEVGELIA .... 99 
 
 XII. CONQUERING THE PLAGUE OF TYPHUS . 106 
 
 PART IV 
 AMERICAN AMBULANCES IN FRANCE 
 
 XIII. RICHARD NORTON'S MOTOR AMBULANCE 
 
 CORPS 115 
 
 XTV. THE WORK OF MR. ANDREW'S CORPS . 129 
 XV. THE DEATH OF RICHARD HALL .... 134 
 
 XVI. AROUND BOIS-LE-PRETRE, THE "FOREST 
 
 OF DEATH" 139 
 
 i 
 
 XVII. IN THE GREAT BATTLE FOR VERDUN . . 148 
 
 XVIII. WILLIAM BARBER'S MEDAILLE MILITAIRE 152 
 
 XIX. Two YALE MEN AT VERDUN 157 
 
 XX. HENRY SUCKLEY KILLED BY A BOMB . . 161 
 
 XXI. A PRINCETON MAN'S EXPERIENCES . 165
 
 CONTENTS ix 
 
 PART V 
 
 RELIEF WORK IN BELGIUM AND IN NORTHERN FRANCE 
 
 PAQB 
 
 XXII. HERBERT HOOVER AND "ENGINEERING 
 
 EFFICIENCY" 175 
 
 XXIII. AMERICAN VOLUNTEERS IN FIELD SER- 
 
 VICE 181 
 
 XXIV. AMERICAN IDEALISM AND HUMOR . . 186 
 XXV. NARRATIVES OF PRINCETON MEN . . 192 
 
 XXVI. EFFECT ON THE AMERICANS OF GERMAN 
 
 METHODS 200 
 
 PART VI 
 
 AMERICAN VOLUNTEER AIRMEN 
 
 XXVTI. THE LAFAYETTE, OR AMERICAN, ESCA- 
 
 DRILLE 205 
 
 XXVIII. THE FIRST AMERICAN AVIATOR TO FALL 217 
 XXIX. KIFFIN ROCKWELL'S LAST COMBAT . . 225 
 
 XXX. NORMAN PRINCE KILLED BY AN ACCI- 
 DENT 231 
 
 XXXI. JAMES MCCONNELL, HISTORIAN . . . 239 
 XXXII. GENET IN THE AMERICAN ESCADRILLE . 249
 
 x CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 XXXIII. MAJOR LUFBERY, ACE OF AMERICAN 257 
 
 ACES 
 
 XXXIV. MAJOR THAW, PIONEER AMERICAN AVI- 
 
 ATOR 269 
 
 INDEX OF NAMES 279
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
 The American Ambulance Field Service Frontispiece 
 
 FACING PAGE 
 
 Members of the Foreign Legion on leave in Paris, July 
 
 7, 1915 38 
 
 Doctor Richard P. Strong 108 
 
 Richard Hall 136 
 
 The great central clothing supply station in Brussels . . 178 
 
 Major Raoul Lufbery 266
 
 PUBLISHERS' NOTE 
 
 The Publishers desire to express their acknowledgment of the cour- 
 tesy of various other publishing houses for the privilege of including 
 selections from their books in the following pages. The complete list 
 of books from which quotations have been used, which will be of value 
 to the reader who may wish to pursue any one of these subjects in more 
 detail, is as follows: 
 
 ' Letters of Henry Weston Farnsworth of the Foreign Legion." (Pri- 
 vately Printed.) 
 
 "War Letters of Edrnond Genet." (Charles Scribner's Sons.) 
 
 "Victor Chapman's Letters from France." (Macmillan Co.) 
 
 "The War Story of Dillwyn Parrish Starr." (Privately Printed.) 
 
 "Letters and Diary of Alan Seeger." (Charles Scribner's Sons.) 
 
 "Poems of Alan Seeger." (Charles Scribner's Sons.) 
 
 "Harvard Volunteers in Europe." (Harvard University Press.) 
 
 "Friends of France." (Hough ton Mifflin Co.) 
 
 "Ambulance No. 10." By Leslie Buswell. (Houghton Mifflin Co.) 
 
 "With a Military Ambulance in France, 1914-'15." By Clarence V. S. 
 Mitchell. (Privately Printed.) 
 
 "Journal from Our Legation in Belgium." By Hugh Gibson. (Double- 
 day, Page & Co.) 
 
 "Fighting Starvation in Belgium." By Vernon Kellogg. (Doubleday, 
 Page & Co.) 
 
 "Headquarters Nights." By Vernon Kellogg. (Atlantic Monthly 
 Press.) 
 
 "Flying for France." By James R. McConnell. (Doubleday, Page & 
 Co.) 
 
 "With the French Flying Corps." By Carroll D. Winslow. (Charles 
 Scribner's Sons.) 
 
 "Norman Prince." Edited by George F. Babbitt. (Houghton Mifflin 
 Co.) 
 
 Selections have also been used from various periodicals, in several 
 of which original publications were made, and to which credit has in- 
 variably been given in the text.
 
 INTRODUCTORY
 
 INTRODUCTORY 
 
 NO historian of the future will be able to 
 ignore the important part which that 
 small but heroic band, the Vanguard of Ameri- 
 can Volunteers, played in the great war to 
 make the world safe for democracy. For it 
 was they who were the voluntary leaders along 
 the path which the people and the government 
 of the United States, after more than two years 
 and a hah* of hesitation, were to follow; and it 
 was they who, by the inspiring example of their 
 self-sacrificing devotion to the cause of the 
 Allies, were largely instrumental in creating 
 and in crystallizing public opinion among their 
 own countrymen in favor of the entrance of 
 the United States into the war. 
 
 A dozen volumes such as this would not 
 suffice to give even the barest outlines of the 
 records and achievements of these American 
 Volunteers. All that can be attempted here 
 is to gather together a few typical instances of
 
 4 INTRODUCTORY 
 
 their devotion to a high sense of duty in what- 
 ever branches of the service they found them- 
 selves. Some of them enlisted under the in- 
 spiring leadership of Mr. Hoover for relief work 
 in stricken Belgium and in devastated northern 
 France; others, under the flag of the American 
 Red Cross, carried surgical and medical help 
 to invaded and plague-stricken Servia and to 
 other points; others became drivers of ambu- 
 lances over dangerous roads from the pastes de 
 secours to hospitals in the rear; still others, 
 eager to make their influence felt more directly, 
 joined the Foreign Legion of France or other 
 French or British regiments; while a handful 
 of the more daring spirits entered the French 
 flying corps and formed the nucleus of what 
 later was to become the Lafayette Escadrille. 
 
 Two aspects of this exodus of hundreds of 
 young Americans to the service of the Allies 
 are of especial interest first, the motives that 
 lay behind their action, and, secondly, the 
 effects of their participation in the great con- 
 flict. A deep humanitarian impulse gave quick 
 response to Mr. Hoover's appeal for Americans 
 to go to the assistance of the Belgians, and was
 
 INTRODUCTORY 5 
 
 of course the force behind all of the activities 
 of the American Red Cross. A pure love of 
 adventure, however, an irresistible desire to 
 take some active part in the greatest war in 
 the history of the world, was without doubt a 
 compelling motive in many instances. It was 
 with this desire that scores of young college 
 men became ambulance drivers in France. 
 Many of them, however, after witnessing the 
 effects of the German methods of waging war 
 and the heroic sacrifices which the French were 
 making in defense of their fair land, sought en- 
 trance into branches of the French or English 
 service where they could make their presence 
 felt to greater military advantage. It was 
 largely, no doubt, with the same desire to take 
 active part in a great adventure that young 
 Americans by the hundreds, from all parts of 
 the United States, swarmed across the Canadian 
 border to join the regiments forming and train- 
 ing in the early months of the war. 
 
 The figures, however, that stand out from all 
 the rest are those of the small group of young 
 Americans who, through love of France and 
 admiration for the French, or through devotioi
 
 6 INTRODUCTORY 
 
 to the high ideals of freedom and liberty for 
 which both France and England were pouring 
 out their best blood, gave their services and, 
 in not a few instances, made the supreme sacri- 
 fice of even life itself, as a measure of their de- 
 votion. It is true that the numbers of these 
 young Americans were few, and the effect of 
 their presence in the firing-lines was, in a mili- 
 tary sense, insignificant and altogether negligi- 
 ble. But the influence of their spirit and of 
 their example upon public opinion in the 
 United States in the first two years and a hah* 
 of the war was beyond all calculation. Scorn- 
 ing neutrality and regarding it as the refuge of 
 the unintelligent, the irresolute and the timid 
 among their own countrymen, they threw them- 
 selves into the conflict on the side of the Allies 
 with heart and soul aflame, as if determined to 
 prove that there were at least a few Americans 
 who from the very beginning understood to the 
 full the moral as well as the political issues in- 
 volved in the mighty struggle. And, although 
 they were only a handful, they succeeded by 
 their zeal and their energy in keeping alive 
 in the breasts of the Frenchmen and English-
 
 INTRODUCTORY 7 
 
 men by the side of whom they were fighting 
 the hope that some day the government and 
 the people of the United States would see the 
 causes and the possible consequences of the 
 great conflict eye to eye with their own view 
 of the issues involved. One has only to read 
 the address of the French surgeon-in-chief at 
 the burial of that gallant Dartmouth boy, 
 Richard Hall, or the letter of the colonel com- 
 manding the Coldstream Guards to the par- 
 ents of Lieutenant Dillwyn Starr, to see this 
 hope reflected. 
 
 The great majority of these young volun- 
 teers were college-bred men of the best Ameri- 
 can type. The old law of noblesse oblige pointed 
 the way to duty unerringly, and they followed 
 it unhesitatingly. Only a few days before the 
 United States Government declared war against 
 Germany, in April, 1917, there were no fewer 
 than 533 graduates and undergraduates of Har- 
 vard, for example, in some branch of service in 
 Europe, either on the firing-lines, or in Belgium, 
 or in connection with hospital and ambulance 
 work; and the deaths of Harvard men in service 
 up to that time had numbered twenty-seven.
 
 8 INTRODUCTORY 
 
 Many other universities and colleges, from Bow- 
 doin in the East to Stanford in the West, were 
 equally well represented in proportion to their 
 numbers. These were the young men who by 
 faithful service were winning what Owen Wister, 
 in his preface to "The Aftermath of Battle,'* 
 calls "the spurs of moral knighthood." "And 
 this host for host it is of Americans," added 
 Mr. Wister, "thus dedicated to service in the 
 Great Convulsion, helps to remove the stain 
 which was cast over all Americans when we 
 were invited to be neutral in our opinions while 
 Democracy in Europe was being strangled to 
 death." 
 
 The presence in the danger zones of these 
 American volunteers and the occasional death 
 of one of them in the performance of duty, 
 made a deep impression in France as well as in 
 America. The people of France, as Mr. Chap- 
 man points out in his preface to his son Victor's 
 "Letters," were "living in a state of sacrificial 
 enthusiasm for which history shows no parallel. 
 Their gratitude to those who espoused their 
 cause was such as to magnify and exalt hero- 
 m." The prime minister of France, M. Briand,
 
 INTRODUCTORY 9 
 
 spoke of young Chapman, who was the first of 
 the American aviators to fall in battle with an 
 enemy air-ship, as "the living symbol of Ameri- 
 can idealism," adding: "France will never forget 
 this new comradeship, this evidence of a devo- 
 tion to a common ideal." 
 
 No one gave more effective expression to this 
 "new comradeship" than Alan Seeger, whose 
 "Poems," published in 1916, enabled thousands 
 of readers to find their own souls in the reflec- 
 tion of that of the Poet of the Foreign Legion, 
 
 Who, not unmindful of the antique debt, 
 Came back the generous path of Lafayette, 
 
 and gallantly kept his "rendezvous with death" 
 on the blood-soaked fields of Belloy-en-Santerre.
 
 PART I 
 IN THE FOREIGN LEGION

 
 II 
 
 WILLIAM THAW, LATE OF YALE 
 
 TO the young Americans with French sym- 
 pathies who, at the beginning of the war, 
 were eager to get into the real fighting as 
 quickly as possible, the Foreign Legion offered 
 the readiest means. Every able-bodied man 
 who was willing to fight for France was wel- 
 comed as a brother to its ranks, whatever his 
 nationality and without regard to his record. 
 For scores of years the Legion had been famous, 
 even notorious, as the refuge of soldiers of for- 
 tune, criminals, scapegraces and adventurers of 
 all types of all the outcasts of society in fact. 
 This unenviable reputation was no obstacle, 
 however, in the way of the young Americans 
 who were anxious to get into the fighting-lines 
 by the easiest and quickest means possible. 
 They were willing to take their chances. 
 
 Their experiences varied because the regi- 
 ments differed greatly in the character of the 
 
 men. To Farnsworth and Morlae they were 
 
 is
 
 14 IN THE FOREIGN LEGION 
 
 picturesque and interesting. Chapman found 
 himself among "the scum of the Paris streets," 
 and doubted if six months' training would make 
 them fit for active service. That some of the 
 regiments failed to conform in character to the 
 traditions of the Legion may easily have been 
 the case, if Genet was correct in his statement 
 of January, 1916, that there had been about 
 48,000 volunteers enrolled in that body since 
 the war began, of w T hom there were then only 
 about 5,000 left fit for service. 
 
 One of the first of the American youths to 
 join this famous organization was William 
 Thaw, of Pittsburgh, who had been a member 
 of the class of 1915 at Yale. As was the case 
 with several other Americans, Thaw was des- 
 tined to win renown not in the Legion but in 
 the flying corps. His experiences in the Legion, 
 however, were described in his letters to his 
 family, which were printed in the Yale Alumni 
 Weekly, in such a racy, breezy manner and with 
 such a genuinely American sense of boyish 
 humor, that some selections from them are well 
 worth quoting. Incidentally it may be noted 
 that at the very beginning, when practically
 
 WILLIAM THAW, LATE OF YALE 15 
 
 all the rest of the world was in a state of more 
 or less bewildered amazement at what was 
 taking place in Belgium, this Yale youth grasped 
 the essential, fundamental fact that this was 
 to be a world-conflict between civilization and 
 barbarism. 
 
 Under date of August 30, 1914, Thaw wrote: 
 
 I am going to take a part, however small, 
 in the greatest and probably last, war in his- 
 tory, which has apparently developed into a 
 fight of civilization against barbarism. That 
 last reason may sound a bit grand and dramatic, 
 but you would quite agree if you could hear the 
 tales of French, Belgian and English soldiers 
 who have come back here from the front. . . . 
 
 Talk about your college education, it isn't 
 in it with what a fellow can learn being thrown 
 in with a bunch of men like this ! There are 
 about 1200 here (we sleep on straw on the floor 
 of the Ecole Professionel pour Jeunes Filles) 
 and in our section (we sleep and drill by sec- 
 tions) there is some mixture, including a Colum- 
 bia Professor (called "Shorty"), an old tutor 
 who has numerous Ph.D.s, M.A.s, etc., a 
 preacher from Georgia, a pro. gambler from 
 Missouri, a former light-weight second rater, 
 two dusky gentlemen, one from Louisiana and 
 the other from Ceylon, a couple of hard guys 
 from the Gopher Gang of lower N. Y., a Swede, 
 a Norwegian, a number of Poles, Braeilians,
 
 16 IN THE FOREIGN LEGION 
 
 Belgians, etc. So you see it's some bunch ! I 
 sleep between the prize-fighter and a chap who 
 used to work for the Curtiss Co. As for the 
 daily routine it reminds me of Hill School, and 
 then some; only instead of getting demerits 
 for being naughty, you get short rations and 
 prison. 
 
 Early in September the detachment was 
 transferred to Toulouse, where it was joined by 
 500 veterans from the Legion in Africa. Nearly 
 a month was spent in Toulouse in drilling and 
 hardening the men for front-line work. Thaw 
 was made a student-corporal. He wrote: 
 
 It is not a very exalted position, as you com- 
 mand only seven men. But it was a starter, 
 and meant four cents a day instead of one, 
 better shoes, and the power to put the guys you 
 don't like in prison for four days instead of 
 having to lick them personally ! But of course 
 now that we'll be with veterans there will have 
 to be a lot of officers killed off before I get an- 
 other chance. But it was a rare sight to see 
 me drilling the awkward squad to which I was 
 assigned. (A somewhat doubtful compliment 
 to my abilities as a commander.) And that 
 squad was some awkward. To add to my diffi- 
 culties there were in it a chap from Flanders 
 who spoke neither French nor English, a Rus- 
 sian who didn't speak French, a Frenchman
 
 WILLIAM THAW, LATE OF YALE 17 
 
 who didn't speak English and some Americans 
 and English with various linguistic accomplish- 
 ments. It took me two hours to get them to 
 obey about twenty simple commands with any 
 sort of precision. But it was a lot of fun, even 
 if I did lose half my voice and about 3 kilos. 
 
 Finally, early in October, Thaw's company 
 was moved north to Camp de Mailly, Chalons- 
 sur-Marne. This paragraph from a letter dated 
 October 4 indicates the nature of Thaw's work 
 as a scout: 
 
 Yesterday I got a new job, being one of the 
 two scouts or eclaireurs de marche, for our squad 
 of 17 men. The other is a big Servian, who is 
 beside me in ranks and who was wounded twice 
 in the Balkan War. It's some job; you have 
 to beat it off through the country, when your 
 company is on the march, walk about three 
 kilometres over rough ground, and, as far as 
 I can see, get shot at, which gallant deed proves 
 that the enemy are near and warns your com- 
 rades. The sergeant (he's always kidding us) 
 consoled us by saying that he chose only men 
 of great "sang froid" and skill with the rifle, and 
 only the best marchers, whereupon I offered him 
 a cigarette. 
 
 The cross-country "military marches," each 
 man carrying the official equipment weighing
 
 18 IN THE FOREIGN LEGION 
 
 120 pounds,* were severe tests of the endurance 
 of the men: 
 
 I was agreeably surprised to find that I got 
 less tired than most, and didn't even mind carry- 
 ing an extra gun the last five kilos. It's just 
 a matter of getting used to it; but, take it from 
 me, in comparison a game of football is almost 
 a joke, for you don't get a rest every fifteen 
 minutes, and a game doesn't last seven hours. 
 
 By the middle of October Thaw's battalion 
 was in the front-line trenches. In the mean- 
 time his skill with the rifle had won for him pro- 
 motion to soldier of the first class, with a red 
 stripe on his sleeve. He found the life monoto- 
 nous and disappointing, however. Under date 
 of November 27 he wrote: 
 
 War is wretched and quite uninteresting*. 
 Wish I were back dodging street cars on Broad- 
 way for excitement. Am that tired of being 
 shot at ! Got hit in the cap and bayonet Do 
 you mind? Have been in the trenches now 
 nearly six weeks. Haven't washed for twenty 
 days. Expect to get a ten days' rest after an- 
 other two weeks. 
 
 * This weight was confirmed in a later letter from Thaw.
 
 WILLIAM THAW, LATE OF YALE 19 
 
 A month later he summarized his experiences 
 thus: 
 
 We didn't make an attack and were attacked 
 only once, and I doubt that, for I didn't see any 
 Germans. I didn't even shoot when they gave 
 the order "fire at will," and when I told the 
 excited, spluttering little sergeant that there 
 was nothing to shoot at (it was very dark) he 
 said, shoot anyway, which I did at the German 
 trenches 800 metres away, for by that time 
 they were replying, in astonishment, no doubt, 
 to our fire, and their bullets were snipping 
 through the trees at us which is my idea of 
 some battle. 
 
 The humorous side of one episode appealed 
 strongly to this American youth: 
 
 Another very exciting experience, of which 
 I'd nearly forgotten to tell you, was when one 
 night we received "sure dope" that there would 
 be an attack, six of us, under the American 
 corporal, Morlae, went out as an advance 
 guard into an open trench 100 metres in front 
 of the main line, the idea being that while the 
 Germans were killing us off the others would 
 be warned and have time to get ready. It was 
 a peachy idea, but "les Boches" never showed 
 up, and the "exciting experience" consisted in 
 standing for thirteen hours in three inches of 
 water and nearly dying of fright when a dozen
 
 20 IN THE FOREIGN LEGION 
 
 cows came browsing across the meadows in per- 
 fect skirmish order. "C'est terrible, la guerre," 
 as we Frenchmen say." 
 
 A month later Thaw was transferred at his 
 request to the French aviation service.
 
 Ill 
 
 MORLAE'S PICTURE OF THE LEGION 
 
 TWO days after the war began E. Morlae, 
 the American corporal referred to by 
 Thaw, left Los Angeles, California, for Paris. 
 Born in California, Morlae was of French par- 
 entage, his father having served in the French 
 army in the War of 1870. On arriving in Paris 
 he enlisted in the Foreign Legion, and his 
 father's record, with his general familiarity with 
 military matters and his command of French, 
 soon secured for him promotion to the rank of 
 corporal. After serving in the Legion for more 
 than a year he returned to the United States, 
 wounded in the neck and knee. 
 
 Morlae contributed to the Atlantic Monthly 
 for March, 1916, a description of the Legion's 
 share in the battle of Champagne, the last week 
 in the previous September, which was remarka- 
 ble for its vividness and its graphic power. 
 The scene of that portion of the battle which 
 
 Morlae described was from Souain to Navarin, 
 
 21
 
 22 IN THE FOREIGN LEGION 
 
 where lay the immediate objective of the at- 
 tack, the little fort of Navarin. This objective 
 was attained, but at a heavy cost of lives. Of 
 Morlae's section of sixty men only twelve sur- 
 vived, several of those being severely wounded. 
 In the following paragraph from his Atlantic 
 Monthly paper, Morlae described the honors 
 that were paid to the Legion before and after 
 this battle, and gave the reasons therefor: 
 
 One day during the latter part of August, 
 1915, my regiment, the %me. Etranger (Foreign 
 Legion), passed in review before the President 
 of the French Republic and the Commander-in- 
 chief of her armies, General Joffre. On that 
 day after twelve months of fighting, the regi- 
 ment was presented by President Poincare with 
 a battle-flag. The occasion marked the admis- 
 sion of the Legion Etrangere to equal footing 
 with regiments of the line. Two months later 
 it was October 28 the remnants of this regi- 
 ment were paraded through the streets of Paris, 
 and, with all military honors, this same battle- 
 flag was taken across the Seine to the Hotel des 
 Invalides. There it was decorated with the 
 Cross of the Legion of Honor and, with reverent 
 ceremony, was placed between the flag of the 
 cuirassiers who died at Reichshofen and the 
 equally famous standard which the Garibaldians 
 bore in 1870-71. The flag lives on. The regi- 
 ment has ceased to exist.
 
 MORLAE'S PICTURE OF THE LEGION 23 
 
 To the men of the Legion, which survived 
 this blow as it had others, these honors, as 
 Morlae points out, meant much. For they 
 were no longer to be classed as pariahs and out- 
 casts, as they had always been. Of the per- 
 sonnel of the Legion and of the reasons for the 
 devotion of the Legionnaires to France, Morlae 
 said: 
 
 Of the Legion I can tell you at first hand. It 
 is a story of adventurers, of criminals, of fugi- 
 tives from justice. Some of them are drunkards, 
 some thieves; and some with the mark of Cain 
 upon them find others to keep them company. 
 They are men I knew the worst of. And yet 
 I am proud of them proud of having been one 
 of them; very proud of having commanded some 
 of them. 
 
 It is all natural enough. Most men who 
 had come to know them as I have would feel as 
 I do. You must reckon the good with the evil. 
 You must remember their comradeship,, their 
 esprit de corps, their pathetic eagerness to serve 
 France, the sole country which had offered them 
 asylum, the country which had shown them 
 confidence, mothered them and placed them on 
 an equal footing with her own song. These 
 things mean something to a man who has led 
 the life of an outcast, and the Legionnaires have 
 proved their loyalty to France many times 
 over.
 
 24 IN THE FOREIGN LEGION 
 
 Im my own section there were men of all 
 races and all nationalities. There were Russians 
 and Turks, an Anamite and a Hindu. There 
 were Frenchmen from God knows where. There 
 was a German, God only knows why. There 
 were Bulgars, Servians, Greeks, Negroes, an 
 Italian and a Fiji Islander, fresh from an Oxford 
 education, a silent man of whom it was whis- 
 pered that he had once been an archbishop,^ 
 three Arabians and a handful of Americans who 
 cared little for the quiet life. 
 
 Of this group of Americans Morlae wrote as 
 follows : 
 
 But even the Americans were not all of one 
 stripe. J. J. Carey had been a newspaper 
 artist, and Bob Scanlon, a burly negro, an artist 
 with his fist in the squared ring. Alan Seeger 
 had something of the poet in him. Dennis 
 Dowd was a lawyer; Edwin Boligny a lovable 
 adventurer. There was D. W. King, the sprig 
 of a well-known family. William Thaw, of 
 Pittsburgh, started with us, though he joined 
 the Flying Corps later on. Then there were 
 James Bach, of New York, B. S. Hall, who hailed 
 from Kentucky, Professor Ohlinger, of Colum- 
 bia, Phelizot, who had shot enough big game in 
 Africa to feed the regiment. There were Del- 
 penche and Capdevielle, and little Trinkard, 
 from New York. Bob Subiron came, I im- 
 agine, from the States in general, for he had 
 been a professional automobile racer. The
 
 MORLAE'S PICTURE OF THE LEGION 25 
 
 Rockville brothers, journalists, signed on from 
 Georgia; and last, though far from least, was 
 Friedrich Wilhelm Zinn, from Battle Creek, 
 Michigan. 
 
 The King referred to by Morlae was David 
 W. King, a Harvard undergraduate of the class 
 of 1916, whom Victor Chapman found in July, 
 1915, in a village in Alsace "rolling in luxuries," 
 "smoking imported cigarettes and refusing to 
 make a row even when the bill was three times 
 what it should be." 
 
 In a letter which was reprinted in the Harvard 
 Alumni Bulletin, King described how Zinn, 
 who had become his best friend, was wounded 
 a few months later: 
 
 The night of the 8th [of October, 1915] we 
 came up here. It's the deuce of a place. We 
 work on the front line all night, and they amuse 
 themselves by dropping shrapnel and "mar- 
 mites" into the working parties. During the 
 day we are supposed to rest, but there are bat- 
 teries all around us, and the consequence is 
 that the Boches are always feeling around for 
 them, and the guns themselves make such a 
 fiendish racket we are almost deaf. To make 
 things more cheerful, as we were going to work 
 a shell burst near my best friend (F. W. Zinn) 
 who was walking just ahead of me and he got
 
 26 IN THE FOREIGN LEGION 
 
 a piece in the side. It did not penetrate, but 
 it made a bad contusion just under his heart, 
 and I am afraid it smashed some ribs. There 
 were no Red Cross workers near by, so I had to 
 take him back. He could hardly breathe when 
 I got him to the "poste de secours." Lucky 
 devil! He will get a month's rest, but I miss 
 him like anything, as friends are pretty scarce 
 around here.
 
 IV 
 
 HENRY FARNSWORTH, LOVER OF BOOKS 
 
 ONE young American volunteer in the 
 Foreign Legion was killed in the battle 
 for the Fortin de Navarin at the end of Sep- 
 tember, 1915. He was Henry Weston Farns- 
 worth, of Dedham, Massachusetts, a graduate 
 of Groton and of Harvard, of the class of 1912. 
 His tastes were bookish, musical and artistic. 
 Burton, Dostoievski, Tolstoi, Gogol, Ibsen and 
 Balzac were favorites with him, although his 
 studies in literature covered a much wider 
 field the English classics as well as the modern 
 continental writers. After he was graduated 
 he spent the summer in Europe; visiting Vienna, 
 Budapesth, Constantinople, Odessa, Moscow, 
 and St. Petersburg, revelling in the historical 
 associations, the art collections and the music 
 of these cities, and making odd friends here and 
 there, as was his wont, and studying the people. 
 His curiosity was insatiable, particularly as 
 regards the Oriental peoples and the Russians. 
 
 87
 
 28 IN THE FOREIGN LEGION 
 
 When the European War broke out Farns- 
 worth was in the city of Mexico, whither he had 
 gone when the United States Government sent 
 troops to Vera Cruz. In the meantime he had 
 had some experience as a newspaper correspon- 
 dent and reporter for the Providence Journal 
 and had published a book, "The Log of a 
 Would-be War Correspondent," describing his 
 experiences and observations in the Balkan 
 War in the autumn of 1912, the fascination of 
 which he could not resist. Returning home 
 from Mexico, he sailed for England in October, 
 1914, with no intention of taking active part in 
 the war, but with the desire to become an on- 
 looker, in the hope that he might write some- 
 thing about the great conflict that would be 
 worth while. The air of London and Paris was 
 full of military projects, and he was tempted in 
 various directions. Finally, after a period of 
 hesitation and uncertainty, he entered the For- 
 eign Legion early in January. 
 
 From the "Letters of Henry Weston Farns- 
 worth of the Foreign Legion" to the members 
 of his family, which have been privately printed 
 by his father, William Farnsworth, it is possible 
 to follow him during the nine succeeding months.
 
 HENRY FARNSWORTH, LOVER OF BOOKS 29 
 
 He was under no illusions about the Germans. 
 "Mad with envy," he writes, "is how they 
 strike me. At the expression ' English Channel ' 
 they froth at the mouth." And his admiration 
 for their Gallic adversaries was deep. "Noth- 
 ing," he says, "can over-express the quiet for- 
 titude of the French people." 
 
 Farnsworth, who, as we have seen, had a 
 decided taste for odd characters, found his 
 associates in his company of the Legion inter- 
 esting studies. Under the date of January 9, 
 1915, he wrote: 
 
 In the first place there is no tough element 
 at all. Many of the men are educated, and the 
 very lowest is of the high class workman type. 
 In my room, for instance, there are "Le Petit 
 Pere" Uhlin, an old Alsatian, who has already 
 served fourteen years in the Legion in China 
 and Morocco; the Corporal Lebrun, a Socialist 
 well known in his own district; Engler, a Swiss 
 cotton-broker from Havre; Donald Campbell, a 
 newspaper man and short story writer, who will 
 not serve in the English army because his 
 family left England in 1745, with the exception 
 of his father, who was a captain in the Royal 
 Irish Fusileers; Sukuna, a Fijian student at 
 Oxford, black as ink; Hath, a Dane, over six 
 feet, whom Campbell aptly calls "The Blonde 
 Beast" (vide "Zarathustra"); Von somebody,
 
 30 IN THE FOREIGN LEGION 
 
 another Dane, very small and young; Bastados, 
 a Swiss carpenter, born and bred in the Alps, 
 who sings when given hah* a litre of canteen 
 wine far better than most comic opera stars 
 and who at times does the Ranz des V aches so 
 that even Petit Pere Uhlin claps; the brigadier 
 Mussorgsky, cousin descendant of the com- 
 poser, a little Russian; two or three Polish Jews, 
 nondescript Belgians, Greeks, Roumanians, etc. 
 I already have enough to write a long (ten 
 thousand word) article, and at the end of the 
 campaign can write a book truly interesting. 
 
 The more he saw of it the more picturesque 
 and fascinating Farnsworth found the new life 
 into which he had plunged. He liked the men 
 and the spirit that prevailed in the Legion: 
 
 I am thoroughly at home by this time and 
 good friends with everyone in the company, 
 even including a Belgian whom I was forced to 
 lick thoroughly. The two great Legion march- 
 ing songs, "Car nous sommes tous les freres" 
 and the old, the finest marching song in the 
 world, 
 
 Soldats de la Legion 
 
 La Legion Etrangere, 
 N'ayant pas de patrie, 
 La France est notre mere, 
 
 are quite true at bottom, at least in the 
 company.
 
 
 HENRY FARNSWORTH, LOVER OF BOOKS 31 
 
 In course of time Farnsworth's regiment 
 was moved to the front in northern France, 
 and early in March he was writing from the 
 trenches. The sector was quiet and little of im- 
 portance happened except an occasional bom- 
 bardment or some desultory rifle firing. He 
 was often on night patrol in No Man's Land: 
 
 There is a certain fascination in all this, 
 dull though it may seem. The patrol is selected 
 in the afternoon. At sunset we meet to make 
 the plans and tell each man his duty; then at 
 dark our pockets are filled with cartridges, a 
 drawn bayonet in the belt, and our magazines 
 loaded to the brim. We go along the boyau to 
 the petit poste from which it is decided to leave. 
 All along the line the sentinels wish us good 
 luck and a safe return. In the petit poste we 
 clamp on the bayonets, blow noses, clear throats, 
 and prepare for three hours of utter silence. 
 At a word from the chief we form in line in the 
 prearranged order. The sentries wish us luck 
 for the last time, and the chief jumps up on the 
 edge of the trenches and begins to work his 
 way quickly through the barbed wire. Once 
 outside he disappears in the beet weeds and one 
 after another we follow. 
 
 Then begins the crawl to the appointed 
 spot. We go slowly with frequent halts. Every 
 sound must be analyzed. On the occasion of 
 the would-be ambush, I admit I went to sleep
 
 32 IN THE FOREIGN LEGION 
 
 after awhile in the warm fresh clover where we 
 lay. It was the Adjutant himself who woke 
 me up with a slight hiss, but as he chose me 
 again next night, he does not seem to have 
 thought it a serious matter. 
 
 Then, too, once home we do not mount 
 guard all the rest of the night, and are allowed 
 to sleep in the morning; also there are small 
 but pleasing discussions of the affair, and above 
 all the hope of some night suddenly leaping out 
 of the darkness hand to hand with the Ger- 
 mans. 
 
 In one of these night expeditions Farnsworth 
 and his companions succeeded in sticking some 
 French newspapers announcing Italy's declara- 
 tion of war on the barbed wire in front of the 
 German trenches. Pleased with their enter- 
 prise, their captain gave seven of them twenty 
 francs for a fete. "What an unforgettable 
 supper !" cries the young Legionnaire: 
 
 There was the sergeant, Zampanedes, a 
 Greek of classic type, who won his spurs at 
 Zanina and his stripes in the Bulgarian cam- 
 paign. Since, he has been a medical student 
 in Paris; that to please his family, for his heart 
 runs in different channels, and he studies music 
 and draws in his spare time. . . . We first fell 
 into sympathy over the Acropolis, and Cemented 
 a true friendship over Turkish war songs and
 
 HENRY FARNSWORTH, LOVER OF BOOKS 33 
 
 Byzantine chants, which he sings with a mourn- 
 ful romanticism that I never heard before. 
 
 Then there was Nicolet, the Company Clar- 
 ion, serving his twelfth year in the Legion, 
 an incredible little Swiss, tougher than the 
 drums of the fore and aft and wise as Nestor in 
 the futile ruses of the regiment. 
 
 The Corporal, Mortens, a legionary wounded 
 during the winter and cited for bravery in the 
 order of the army. He was a commercial trav- 
 eller in his native grand duchy of Luxemburg, 
 but decided some five years ago to leave his 
 debts and troubles behind him and become a 
 Petit Zephyr de la Legion Etrangere. 
 
 Sudic, a butcher from the same grand duchy, 
 a man of iron physically and morally, but men- 
 tally unimportant. 
 
 Covalieros, a Greek of Smyrna, who might 
 have spread his silks and laces at the feet of a 
 feudal princess and charmed her with his shin- 
 ing eyes and wild gestures into buying beyond 
 her means. He also has been cited for reckless 
 gallantry. 
 
 Sukuna and myself brought up the list. We 
 were all in good spirits and flattered, and I, 
 being in funds, put in f. 10 and Sukuna the 
 same. Some of us drank as deep as Socrates, 
 and we ate a mammoth salad under the stars. 
 Nicolet and Mortens talked of the battalion in 
 the Sahara, and Zampanedes sang his Eastern 
 songs, and even Sukuna was moved to Tongan 
 chants. Like ^Eneas on Polyphemus's isle, I 
 feel that some years hence, well out of tune
 
 34 IN THE FOREIGN LEGION 
 
 with all my surroundings, I shall be longing for 
 the long warm summer days in northern France, 
 when we slept like birds under the stars, among 
 congenial friends, when no man ever thought of 
 the morrow, and you changed horizons with 
 each new conversation. 
 
 The letter from which the foregoing is a selec- 
 tion was written by Farnsworth to his mother 
 on June 4, 1915. A month later the news from 
 home that a friend of his was going to a train- 
 ing-camp in the United States where he ex- 
 pected to march five or six miles a day prompted 
 him to give this vivid picture of an episode in 
 the life of the Legionnaires: 
 
 The other day we were waked at 2 a.m. and 
 at 3 sent off in a pouring rain for some in- 
 definite place across the mountains for a divi- 
 sional review. We went off slowly through the 
 wet darkness, but about dawn the sun came 
 out and, as is usual with the Legion, everybody 
 cheered up, and at 7 a.m. we arrived at the 
 parade ground after fifteen kilometres in very 
 good spirits. Two regiments of Zouaves from 
 Africa were already drawn up. We formed up 
 beside them, and then came the two tirailleurs 
 regiments, their colors with them, then the 
 second fitrangere, two thousand strong, and 
 finally a squadron of Chasseurs cTAfrique.
 
 HENRY FARNSWORTH, LOVER OF BOOKS 35 
 
 We all stacked arms and lay about on the 
 grass till 8.30. Suddenly the Zouave bugles 
 crashed out sounding the "Garde a vous" and 
 in two minutes the division was lined up, every 
 man stiff as a board and all the time the 
 bugles ringing angrily from up the line, and the 
 short staccato trumpets of the chasseurs an- 
 swering from the other extremity. 
 
 The ringing stopped suddenly and the 
 voices of the colonels crying " Ba'ionnettes aux 
 canons" sounded thin and long drawn out and 
 were drowned by the flashing rattle of the 
 bayonets going on a moment of perfect silence, 
 and then the slow, courtly-sounding of the 
 "General ! General ! qui passe ! " broken by the 
 occasional crash as regiment after regiment pre- 
 sented arms. Slowly the General rode down 
 the lines, the two Brigadiers and a Division 
 General in his suite. 
 
 Then came the defile. The Zouaves led off, 
 their bugles playing "As tu vu la casquette, la 
 casquette." Then the tirailleurs, playing some 
 march of their own, slow and fine, the bugles 
 answering the scream of the Arab reed flutes as 
 though Loeffler had led them. Then the Le- 
 gion, the second Etr anger e swinging in beside 
 us at the double, and all the bugles crashed 
 out with the Legion marching song, " Tiens voila 
 du boudin pour les Beiges" etc. On and on 
 went the bugles playing that light, slangy tune, 
 some of the verses of which would make Rabe- 
 lais shudder, and the minor variations of which 
 bring up pictures of the Legion marching in
 
 36 IN THE FOREIGN LEGION 
 
 thin ranks in foreign, blazing lands, and the 
 drums of which, tapping slowly, sound like the 
 feet of the regiment scrunching through desert 
 sand. It was all very glorious to see and hear, 
 and to wind up the chasseurs went by at the 
 gallop going off to their quarters. 
 
 To wind up the day the Colonel took us 
 home straight over the mountain fourteen 
 kilometres over mountain-goat tracks.* When 
 we got in at 3.30 p. M., having had nothing to 
 eat but a bit of bread, three sardines and a 
 finger of cheese, few of the men were really 
 exhausted. It was then I got your letter about 
 the training camp. 
 
 In August Farnsworth's regiment was in Al- 
 sace. In September, however, it was on the 
 march and took part in the bloody battle in 
 Champagne toward the end of the month. His 
 last letter was dated September 16, 1915. He 
 was killed in the charge that his battalion made 
 on the 28th, before the Fort in de Navarin. The 
 Farnsworth Room in the Widener Memorial 
 Library at Harvard, a large room for the lei" 
 surely reading of such standard books as Henry 
 Farnsworth loved, was handsomely supplied with 
 books, pictures and furniture by Mr. and Mrs. 
 William Farnsworth, in memory of their son. 
 
 * Making about eighteen miles going and returning.
 
 A DESCENDANT OF CITIZEN GENET 
 
 ONE of the most graphic narratives of tke 
 part which the First Regiment of the 
 Foreign Legion played in the battle before 
 Navarin, in which Farnsworth lost his life, is 
 to be found in the "War Letters of Edmond 
 Genet." Young Genet he was only nineteen 
 when he took part in this desperate engagement 
 was a great-great-grandson of Citizen Genet, 
 whom the Revolutionary government of France 
 sent to this country as its representative in 
 1792, and whose indiscretions led to the request 
 that he be recalled. He did not return to 
 France, but made his home in Albany, and later 
 married the daughter of Governor Clinton. 
 
 Genet, whose home was in Ossining, New 
 York, sailed for France at the end of January, 
 1915. He had already been in the service of 
 the United States Navy, and was on the battle- 
 ship Georgia in Vera Cruz harbor in the previous 
 spring. He was, as he wrote his chum on the 
 
 37
 
 38 IN THE FOREIGN LEGION 
 
 eve of sailing, "born to be a wanderer." Yet 
 he was a youth of great independence and of 
 resolute will, so that when he came to a full 
 realization of the nature of the conflict and of 
 the peril in which his beloved France was placed, 
 his decision was prompt and was followed by 
 immediate action. His high sense of duty and 
 the call of the blood left him no alternative but 
 to take his chances in the great war, as he 
 phrased it, with the French. He had no illu- 
 sions as to the probable outcome of his venture, 
 but his religion he was a devout Churchman 
 enabled him to face the worst that might 
 happen to him with composure of mind and 
 with a resolute heart. "I expect to have to 
 give up my life on the battle-field," he wrote 
 to a friend. "I care nothing about that. 
 Death to me is but the beginning of another life 
 better and sweeter. I do not fear it." 
 
 Early in February, 1915, Genet carried out 
 the definite plan which he had formed before he 
 left America of enlisting in the Foreign Legion. 
 After nearly two months in various training- 
 camps his regiment was put into the trenches 
 in northern France, where, with alternate peri-
 
 l> r a 
 
 J5 *! a 
 
 So 
 
 > 2 
 
 |J 
 
 o> 
 
 n -o v 
 
 S "- 
 -C .2 a 
 
 gel 
 
 i* i c 
 
 >! C 
 
 ^ S "E 
 
 i -5 
 
 .3
 
 A DESCENDANT OF CITIZEN GENET 39 
 
 ods of rest and mild trench warfare, he passed 
 many weeks. Finally, on September 22, in a 
 short letter to his mother, he wrote that a "big 
 fight" was coming. 
 
 The letter in which Genet described his part 
 in the battle which began on September 25 mis- 
 carried, and consequently he sent a second, at a 
 much later date, giving the details. From this 
 letter the following selections are made: 
 
 Leaving the camp of concentration that same 
 night we marched to a town called Suippes 
 and thence to a woods about three kilometres 
 beyond and nearer the front. The country all 
 around there is made up of many large plains, 
 with here and there small wooded parts which 
 were admirable hiding-places for troops. There 
 we camped until the morning of the 25th, about 
 a two weeks' period in which we were served 
 the necessities for the coming fight new clothes 
 for old if required, masks for protection from 
 gas, the metal helmets and many other things 
 I including the extra ammunition; 120 rounds is 
 ordinarily carried per man and 250 for actual 
 fighting. The latter is no light load. The last 
 few nights of those two weeks we dug "lead- 
 ers" to the trenches for the passage of extra 
 troops. . . . 
 
 The night before the 25th our colonel read 
 to us in the dusk the order from Gen'l Joffre
 
 40 IN THE FOREIGN LEGION 
 
 for the attack. The Division Marocaine was 
 to be in the first reserve. The Colonial Divi- 
 sion made the attack. Long before dawn on 
 the 25th we marched to our position just to the 
 rear of the first French line, to the west of the 
 little village (then a mass of shattered ruins) of 
 Sompey, amid a drenching misty rain. We had 
 light loads in our sacks and plenty of cold ra- 
 tions in our musettes (food-bags). The bom- 
 bardment of the German trenches before the 
 charge was terrific. The German line looked 
 like a wall of fire and hellish flames from the 
 bursting shells. The batteries of both sides 
 made the world sound like Hades let loose. 
 From the sharp crack of the famous French 
 75's to the deep roar of the aerial torpedoes it 
 was an incessant Bedlam. About nine o'clock 
 a French aeroplane flew right over our first 
 line, circled around and back. It was the sig- 
 nal for the French batteries to cease shelling 
 the German first line and for the Colonials to 
 charge. They did, and nobly too. Taking the 
 German first line, with a vast number of pris- 
 oners, they forced the Germans back to their 
 reserve lines. 
 
 Then it was that we began our advance in 
 their rear as reserves. Passing through the 
 leaders toward the old French line we passed 
 scores of captured wounded Germans. Some 
 of them, mere boys of 16 to 20, were in a ghastly 
 condition. Bleeding, clothing torn to shreds, 
 wounded by ball, shell and bayonet, they were 
 pitiable sights. I saw many who sobbed with
 
 A DESCENDANT OF CITIZEN GENET 4i 
 
 their arms around a comrade's neck. We 
 passed French dying and wounded being hur- 
 riedly cared for by the hospital attendants. 
 Blood was everywhere and it was simply sick- 
 ening. The smell of powder filled the air and 
 to me it is one of the most disagreeable odors 
 we encountered with the exception of what 
 came later that of decayed bodies of horses 
 and mules and even men, left unburied for 
 whole weeks. That is too horrible for more 
 than mention. 
 
 We followed up the Colonials and passed 
 part of the late morning in the captured Ger- 
 man trenches. They were battered beyond 
 description and filled with dead mostly Ger- 
 mans. German equipments lay thrown every- 
 where, discarded in the flight. Many German 
 wounded could be seen making their way pain- 
 fully to the rear. I remember one poor fellow 
 who must have been totally blinded for he 
 walked directly into the barbed wire and had 
 a most trying and painful time to get out. . . . 
 
 About two o'clock we began to advance un- 
 der fire behind the Colonials and then it was 
 that I had about the closest shave from death 
 in all that month. Our section had to advance 
 over a ridge and we must have been seen by a 
 battery which was sending shells of 320 mm. 
 calibre into the advancing Colonials. Some- 
 how we felt that huge shell coming; how, I 
 don't know, but we all just threw ourselves flat 
 into the mud. If I had been one little hun- 
 dredth of a second late I wouldn't be telling
 
 42 IN THE FOREIGN LEGION 
 
 the tale now. I felt that monster hurl directly 
 over my head; the intake of air raised me at 
 least an inch out of the mire which I was grip- 
 ping with every finger and with all my might. 
 The shell burst not more than three yards be- 
 hind me and killed four of the section and 
 wounded several others. My heart had one 
 of the quickest jumps of its life. . . . 
 
 We continued on our advance until darkness 
 set in and lay all that night in a drenching 
 rain in watery mud. Sleep was practically 
 impossible. Shells were dropping around us 
 every few minutes and anyway the horrors of 
 the day just closed were too awful to allow 
 pleasant dreams or even sleep to follow. All 
 night the cries of the dying could be heard. I 
 felt as though I were in some weird nightmare. 
 I wish it had been, for then I could have awak- 
 ened and found it to be only a dream. As it 
 was it was a grim reality. 
 
 Just after we arrived at that place, when 
 darkness had set in, was when Dave Wheeler* 
 showed his coolness. There was a false cry for 
 us to charge and the Third Company, in which 
 he was, started forward with bayonets on. 
 The Commandant of the Battalion, seeing the 
 mistake, jumped in front of the advancing and 
 excited men and tried to check them. One of 
 the sergeants of the Third helped him and Dave, 
 cooler than the rest, did the same. The check 
 succeeded and Dave told me afterward that 
 
 * Dr. David E. Wheeler, at Buffalo, N. Y., a member of the Legion 
 and a warm friend of Genet's.
 
 A DESCENDANT OF CITIZEN GENET 43 
 
 the Commandant asked who he was. The 
 Commandant found a soldier's death directly 
 in front of Dave on the 28th in our attack. 
 Early the next morning I tried to find Dave 
 and couldn't and so was very afraid that he 
 had been killed in the previous day's advance. 
 
 We changed our position early that morning 
 to a small woods behind the new French line 
 which the Colonials were holding, and were 
 under a terrific bombardment all the day, being 
 in direct line between the dual fire of a French 
 battery of 75 's and one of the German 77's. 
 The German shells landed nearer to us than 
 they did to the French battery. That night 
 our first lieutenant, a fine young man, was in- 
 stantly killed by a bursting shell. We buried 
 him where he fell like any other soldier. 
 
 Being out of rations, several of us had to go 
 nearly six kilometres that night for new rations 
 for the company. You can imagine how tired 
 we were when we got back and it was raining 
 again which didn't help sleeping a bit. 
 
 The following day we moved farther back to 
 another woods, but here we got into a worse 
 bombardment. We lost men there every day. 
 To protect ourselves as much as possible from 
 the bursting shells we dug individual trenches 
 into the ground just large enough to lie in, but 
 many a poor fellow merely dug his own grave 
 for they are no protection should a shell fall 
 directly into one on top of the occupant. It 
 was hell and nothing less. That day I found 
 Dave and felt much better for it. I guess he
 
 4i IN THE FOREIGN LEGION 
 
 did too for that matter. That was the 27th 
 only the third day of the horrors. 
 
 The 28th (it will live in my memory forever) 
 brought no excitement until the middle of the 
 afternoon. Then we were ordered to prepare 
 to depart for the attack. The Colonel had 
 chafed over continually being in reserve and 
 had personally asked the General in command 
 for permission to put the Legion to the front 
 attack. His request was granted. The first 
 and second companies of the First Battalion 
 and the third and fourth of the Second Battalion 
 were to take the advance. The other two 
 companies of each battalion held the reserve. 
 Ahead of us the Arab Tirailleurs made two 
 strong charges and both times had to fall back. 
 They were ordered to make a third and, refusing 
 to face again the murderous fire of the German 
 machine-guns, turned in flight. 
 
 Meanwhile we had started our advance in 
 solid columns of fours, each section a unit. It 
 was wonderful that slow advance. Not a 
 waver, not a break, through the storm of shell 
 the Legion marched forward. Officers in ad- 
 vance with the Commandant at their head; it 
 inspired us all to courage and calmness. We 
 met the fleeing Tirailleurs and our officers tried 
 to turn them back. I saw our Commandant, 
 wrath written all over his face, deliberately 
 kick one Arab to make him halt in his flight. 
 Shells were bursting everywhere. One lost his 
 personal feelings. He simply became a unit 
 a machine.
 
 A DESCENDANT OF CITIZEN GENET 45 
 
 Crossing a clearing we came at last to a 
 woods just in front of the German line. There 
 we met the decimating fire of the machine-guns, 
 bayonets were fixed, and the order given to 
 advance on the run. A faint cheer rose above 
 the ping-ping of the bullets. Leaping a trench 
 containing the terrified Tirailleurs, we charged. 
 The forward French line which the Colonial 
 troops were holding was still before us. There 
 was a slight pause when we got there. The sec- 
 tions formed into a skirmish-line and, being in 
 the fourth section of our company, the Fourth, 
 I got away over on the left flank. The Third 
 Company was on our right. Everywhere men 
 were falling. The fire was terrific. As I ran for 
 the left with the secti >n I could hear the bullets 
 cutting the leaves and twigs all around me 
 ping, ping, they hissed as they struck the trees. 
 They came from the front and the left, hissing 
 death in our ranks 'til there were few of us left. 
 
 While the woods ended at the French line in 
 front, they extended far beyond on our flank. 
 We leaped the first line where the Colonials 
 were. Their duty was to stay there and hold 
 that line. We charged on, but somehow about 
 fifty metres ahead of the line I found myself 
 alone with one other young fellow from my 
 section. The others who had leaped the French 
 line with us were nowhere to be seen. Seeing 
 this, we dropped flat behind a bush, thinking 
 the rest would rush up behind us and continue 
 the charge. The Germans had begun to shell 
 the wood just ahead of us. The din was ter-
 
 46 IN THE FOREIGN LEGION 
 
 rific. Dead Tirailleurs were lying everywhere, 
 killed in those two first charges, ghastly and 
 bloody. There were none of the Legion around 
 us to charge. I turned to my companion and 
 said, "They're all dead here (motioning to the 
 corpses); the section must be behind us; shall 
 we beat it back?" He nodded, stood up and 
 started back on the run. I followed and 
 reached the Colonial line without a scratch. I 
 never saw the young Italian again but heard a 
 long time after that he had been wounded and 
 was carried back that night. 
 
 Behind the Colonial line I found the two 
 sergeants of my section with half a dozen men. 
 They had retreated before my comrade and I 
 had seen them, and were waiting there for 
 further events. Darkness was falling. I had 
 thrown away my sack in the commencement 
 of the charge and in it were my rations some 
 bread and a tin of beef and my tent. I had 
 a mouthful of water in my canteen but nothing 
 to eat. We lay there until after seven and then 
 the Adjutant, the only officer left of our com- 
 pany, found us and the remnants of the Third 
 and our company were gathered together to 
 go back to where we were before the attack. 
 A half kilometre back of the line the Major (the 
 Battalion doctor) had five badly wounded men 
 of the two companies and asked the Adjutant 
 to let us carry them back to the field-hospital 
 in the rear. Tents were secured, and with four 
 of us to each tent we carried them nearly four 
 kilometres over rough muddy ground to the
 
 A DESCENDANT OF CITIZEN GENET 47 
 
 field-hospital. You can imagine the agonies of 
 those five wounded men being carried along un- 
 der such conditions. They stood it far better 
 than I thought they would. 
 
 When the Adjutant counted us off in fours 
 to carry them he counted just thirty-one, in- 
 cluding himself, gathered there from the two 
 companies of 250 each ! I found my little S. 
 American comrade safe among them and heard 
 from a hospital attendant that he had seen 
 Dave crawling off to the rear after the fight 
 with a bullet wound in his leg. He said he had 
 more pluck than any of them. Thus it was 
 that I wrote to Mrs. Wheeler the next day and 
 told her of Dave's condition and not to worry. 
 As it was, she heard from him before she got 
 my note, but just the same I was glad I had 
 written. Brave Dave went down beside his 
 captain, the last of his company in that section, 
 and he saw his captain and the Commandant 
 both make very brave ends. 
 
 The thirty-one of us reached our old camp 
 about ten and dropped gladly into our little 
 trenches for sleep. It was raining, there was an 
 inch of water in my trench and I had no tent 
 to put over me. I was soaked through, cov- 
 ered with mud, hungry, thirsty, and thoroughly 
 exhausted but sleep was impossible. I dozed 
 and shivered for the rest of the night, thinking 
 of the afternoon's events and wondering fear- 
 fully whether Dave was alive and safely on his 
 way to succor. I prayed it was so and dawn 
 brought sunshine and som n . warmth.
 
 48 IN THE FOREIGN LEGION 
 
 We who were left looked around that morn- 
 ing to see who was there. Old faces were gone. 
 Out of my squad of twelve there were only two 
 of us left. We all had our little accounts to 
 tell. Our Adjutant and the few sergeants left, 
 at the order from the Colonel, got the Third 
 and Fourth Companies together into one. There 
 were, with those who turned up that day, about 
 120 all told all that was left from nearly 500 ! 
 We got soup and meat, a swallow of whiskey 
 and wine, and tried to make ourselves com- 
 fortable. It was hard work. . . . 
 
 The next day I found some of the Ameri- 
 cans in the other Battalion and learned of 
 Farnsworth's death in the attack. No other 
 American was lost in the First Regiment. 
 
 October 2nd we were drawn back to the rear 
 to the camp where we were the first day at 
 Champagne. The French were strengthening 
 their position all over. New positions were 
 being established for the batteries. All the 
 counter-attacks of the German forces had failed. 
 The French victory was complete. 
 
 Soon after this terrific battle Genet's regi- 
 ment of the Foreign Legion went into retire- 
 ment near Paris, and he saw no more active 
 service in its ranks. During the winter he was 
 in this rest-camp, with occasional visits to 
 Paris, where he saw much of his friends the 
 Wheelers, Dr. Wheeler having recovered from
 
 A DESCENDANT OF CITIZEN GENET 49 
 
 the wound in his leg.* In the spring of 1916 
 Genet was able to secure a transfer from the 
 Foreign Legion to the French aviation corps, 
 a change for which he had been working since 
 the previous autumn. His experiences as an 
 aviator will be considered later. 
 
 *After serving as captain in the Canadian Army, Dr. Wheeler, when 
 the United States entered the war, was transferred to the American 
 forces with the rank of major. He served as regimental surgeon in 
 Lorraine, at Cantigny, and at Chateau-Thierry, and was killed ki 
 August, 1918, while attending the wounded under fire.
 
 VI 
 ALAN SBEGER, POET OF THE LEGION 
 
 THE fullest and the most serious and prob- 
 ably, as a consequence, the most valuable 
 record thus far published of life in the For- 
 eign Legion, is to be found in the "Letters 
 and Diary of Alan Seeger." Seeger wa* some- 
 what older than the other American volunteers 
 who were in the Legion and more mature in 
 mind, having seen much of the world, having 
 meditated deeply and having expressed himself 
 in verse of enduring value. Then, too, it was 
 vouchsafed to him, being in reserve yet by no 
 means out of danger, to live through the battle 
 of Champagne, so vividly described by young 
 Genet, and to continue in the Legion until 
 July, 1916, nearly two years, when he fell at 
 Belloy-en-Santerre. His diary and letters, there- 
 fore, cover a longer period than those of any 
 other Amerian in the Foreign Legion. 
 
 Born in New York, of old New England 
 
 50
 
 ALAN SEEGER, POET OF THE LEGION 51 
 
 stock, in 1888, Seeger passed his boyhood on 
 Staten Island. When he was twelve the family 
 moved to the city of Mexico, where the youth 
 lived two years, a period which left a deep im- 
 pression upon his temperament and his tastes. 
 He entered Harvard in 1906 from the Hackley 
 School at Tarrytown, New York, having in the 
 interval spent a year with a tutor in California. 
 The first hah* of his college course was given to 
 his studies and to miscellaneous reading, the 
 latter half rather more to his friends. The 
 members of his family were exceptionally gifted 
 as writers and musicians, and his tastes were 
 along similar lines. Even when a boy in the 
 city of Mexico he and the other members of 
 the family had issued a home magazine, and in 
 college he was one of the editors of the Harvard 
 Monthly. 
 
 The two years following Seeger's graduation 
 in 1910 formed a period of hesitation and un- 
 certainty as to his course in life. Finally he 
 decided that what he sought might be found in 
 Paris beauty, romance, picturesqueness, the 
 joy of life. Thus it happened that when the 
 war began he was living among the students of
 
 52 IN THE FOREIGN LEGION 
 
 the Latin Quarter, absorbing experiences and 
 recording his thoughts and feelings in verse. 
 Before the war was three weeks old he, with a 
 number of his fellow countrymen, enlisted in 
 the Foreign Legion of France. He has ex- 
 plained, with simplicity and with obvious sin- 
 cerity, the motive which led them to take this 
 step. In a letter written from the Aisne trenches 
 in May, 1915, to the New Republic, he said: 
 
 I have talked with so many of the young 
 volunteers here. Their case is little known, 
 even by the French, yet altogether interesting 
 and appealing. They are foreigners on whom 
 the outbreak of war laid no formal compulsion. 
 But they had stood on the butte in springtime 
 perhaps, as Julian and Louise stood, and looked 
 out over the myriad twinkling lights of the 
 beautiful city. Paris mystic, maternal, per- 
 sonified, to whom they owed the happiest mo- 
 ments of their lives Paris was in peril. Were 
 they not under a moral obligation, no less bind- 
 ing than [that by which] their comrades were 
 bound legally, to put their breasts between her 
 and destruction? Without renouncing their 
 nationality, they had yet chosen to make their 
 homes here beyond any other city in the world. 
 Did not the benefits and blessings they had re- 
 ceived point them a duty that heart and con- 
 science could not deny?
 
 ALAN SEEGER, POET OF THE LEGION 53 
 A month later he wrote to his mother: 
 
 You must not be anxious about my not 
 coming back. The chances are about ten to 
 one that I will. But if I should not, you must 
 be proud, like a Spartan mother, and feel that 
 it is your contribution to the triumph of the 
 cause whose righteousness you feel so keenly. 
 Everybody should take part in this struggle 
 which is to have so decisive an effect, not only 
 on the nations engaged but on all humanity. 
 There should be no neutrals, but everyone 
 should bear some part of the burden. If so 
 large a part should fall to your share, you would 
 be in so far superior to other women and should 
 be correspondingly proud. There would be 
 nothing to regret, for I could not have done 
 otherwise than what I did, and I think I could 
 not have done better. Death is nothing terrible 
 after all. It may mean something even more 
 wonderful than life. It cannot possibly mean 
 anything worse to the good soldier. 
 
 It was in this spirit of high chivalry and with 
 a deep conviction of the justice of the cause for 
 which he was ready to lay down his life that 
 Seeger entered the Foreign Legion. Many 
 weeks of hard drilling at Toulouse followed. 
 Then his regiment, the Second Etranger, about 
 4.000 men, was transferred to the Camp de
 
 54 IN THE FOREIGN LEGION 
 
 Mailly, and by the middle of October he had 
 hopes of soon being at the front. "I go into 
 action," he wrote, "with the lightest of light 
 hearts. The hard work and moments of fright- 
 ful fatigue have not broken but hardened me, 
 and I am in excellent health and spirits. . . . 
 I am happy and full of excitement over the 
 wonderful days that are ahead." 
 
 Seeger's hopes for early action were not ful- 
 filled. His regiment found itself in the trenches 
 in the centre of the battle line in northern 
 France in the early winter, without any pros- 
 pect of open warfare, and his disappointment 
 was keen. In a letter to the New York Sun, 
 written early in December, he described life in 
 the trenches as follows: 
 
 This style of warfare is extremely modern 
 and for the artillerymen is doubtless very inter- 
 esting, but for the poor common soldier it is 
 anything but romantic. His role is simply to 
 dig himself a hole in the ground and to keep 
 hidden in it as tightly as possible. Continually 
 under the fire of the opposing batteries, he is 
 yet never allowed to get a glimpse of the enemy. 
 Exposed to all the dangers of war, but with 
 none of its enthusiasms or splendid elan, he is 
 condemned to sit like an animal in its burrow
 
 ALAN SEEGER, POET OF THE LEGION 55 
 
 and hear the shells whistle over his head and 
 take their little daily toll from his comrades. 
 
 The winter morning dawns with gray skies 
 and the hoar frost on the fields. His feet are 
 numb, his canteen frozen, but he is not allowed 
 to make a fire. The winter night falls, with its 
 prospect of sentry duty, and the continual ap- 
 prehension of the hurried call to arms; he is not 
 even permitted to light a candle, but must fold 
 himself in his blanket and lie down cramped in 
 the dirty straw to sleep as best he may. How 
 different from the popular notion of the evening 
 campfire, the songs and good cheer. 
 
 Early in January, 1915, Seeger's regiment 
 was moved to a ruined village, where he found 
 the life much less trying than in the trenches. 
 The village, however, was in the most danger- 
 ous part of the sector, close to the German 
 lines, from which patrols came down almost 
 every night to harass the French outposts. In 
 a letter to his father, dated January 11, Seeger 
 narrated an incident, illustrating the nature of 
 this patrol warfare: 
 
 Four days almost without sleep, constant 
 assignment to petit paste, sometimes 12 out of 
 24 hours on guard in the most dangerous posi- 
 tions. It was in one of these that I came for 
 the first time in immediate contact with the
 
 56 IN THE FOREIGN LEGION 
 
 enemy in a most unfortunate affair. I was 
 standing guard under the wall of a chateau 
 park with a comrade when a patrol sneaked up 
 on the other side and threw a hand grenade 
 over, which sputtered a moment at our feet 
 and went out without exploding. Without cry- 
 ing to arms, I left the other sentry on the spot 
 and walked down to the petit poste, about 100 
 metres away and called out the corporal of the 
 guard. We walked back to the spot together 
 and had hardly arrived when another bomb 
 came over, which exploded among us with a 
 tremendous detonation. In the confusion that 
 followed the attacking party burst in the door 
 that covered a breach in the wall at this spot 
 and poured a volley into our midst, killing our 
 corporal instantly and getting away before we 
 had time to fire a shot. 
 
 In a letter to the New York Sun Seeger de- 
 scribed this incident with more particularity, 
 adding this detail: 
 
 That night there was not much difference 
 at petit poste between the two hours on guard 
 and the two hours off. Every one was on the 
 alert, keyed up with apprehension. But noth- 
 ing happened, as indeed there was no reason 
 to suppose that anything would. Only about 
 midnight, from far up on the hillside, a diaboli- 
 cal cry came down, more like an animal's than 
 a man's, a blood-curdling yell of mockery and 
 exultation.
 
 ALAN SEEGER, POET OF THE LEGION 57 
 
 In that cry all the evolution of centuries 
 was levelled. I seemed to hear the yell of the 
 warrior of the stone age over his fallen enemy. 
 It was one of those antidotes to civilization of 
 which this war can offer so many to the searcher 
 after extraordinary sen ations. 
 
 Spring passed and summer came in compara- 
 tive inactivity, though the regiment was moved 
 from place to place. Early in July the Ameri- 
 cans received permission to spend the Fourth 
 in Paris, and Seeger notes that there were 
 thirty-two to avail themselves of this privilege. 
 The glimpses one gets of his American comrades 
 are few and meagre; his French companions are 
 apparently of more interest to him. His diary 
 under date of July 27, however, notes that the 
 regiment is billeted in a village in Alsace at the 
 foot of the Vosges and that he and his college- 
 mate, King, often spent the evening together at 
 a little inn called Le Cheval Blanc. He passed 
 some time, also, reading Treitschke's "Lectures 
 on Politics," which Victor Chapman had lent 
 him. On July 31 he made this entry: "Walked 
 up to Plancher-les-Mines with Victor Chapman; 
 there met Farnsworth who is in the l er Etr an- 
 ger, and we all had dinner together."
 
 58 IN THE FOREIGN LEGION 
 
 In August Seeger wrote in this vein to his 
 mother: 
 
 Given my nature, I could not have done 
 otherwise than I have done. Anything con- 
 ceivable that I might have done had I not en- 
 listed would have been less than what I am 
 doing now, and anything that I may do after 
 the war is over, if I survive, will be less too. I 
 have always had the passion to play the biggest 
 part within my reach and it is reafly in a sense 
 a supreme success to be allowed to play this. 
 If I do not come out, I will share the good for- 
 tune of those who disappear at the pinnacle of 
 then* careers. Come to love France and under- 
 stand the almost unexampled nobility of the 
 effort this admirable people is making, for that 
 will be the surest way of your finding comfort for 
 anything that I am ready to suffer in their cause. 
 
 The great offensive that was to be launched 
 by the French at the end of September found 
 Seeger in a state of high expectation. His regi- 
 ment was to support the Colonials. In Octo- 
 ber he wrote to his mother as follows of his 
 share in the battle: 
 
 The part we played in the battle is briefly 
 as follows. We broke camp about 11 o'clock 
 the night of the 24th, and marched up through 
 ruined Souain to our place in one of the numer-
 
 ALAN SEEGER, POET OF THE LEGION 59 
 
 ous boyaux where the troupes d'attaque were 
 massed. The cannonade was pretty violent all 
 that night, as it had been for several days pre- 
 vious, but toward dawn it reached an intensity 
 unimaginable to anyone who has not seen a 
 modern battle. A little before 9.15 the fire 
 lessened suddenly and the crackle of the fusil- 
 lade between the reports of the cannon told us 
 that the first wave of assault had left and the 
 attack begun. At the same time we received 
 the order to advance. The German artillery 
 had now begun to open upon us in earnest. 
 Amid the most infernal roar of every kind of 
 fire-arms and through an atmosphere heavy 
 with dust and smoke we marched up through 
 the boyaux to the tranchees de depart. At shal- 
 low places and over breaches that shells had 
 made in the bank we caught momentary glimpses 
 of the blue lines sweeping up the hillside or sil- 
 houetted on the crest where they poured into 
 the German trenches. When the last wave of 
 the Colonial brigade had left, we followed. 
 Baionnette au canon, in lines of tirailleurs, we 
 crossed the open space between the lines, over 
 the barbed wire, where not so many of our men 
 were lying as I had feared (thanks to the effi- 
 cacy of the bombardment) and over the Ger- 
 man trench, knocked to pieces and filled with 
 their dead. In some places they still resisted 
 in isolated groups. Opposite us, all was over, 
 and the herds of prisoners were being already 
 led down as we went up. We cheered, more in 
 triumph than in hate, but the poor devils, ter-
 
 60 IN THE FOREIGN LEGION 
 
 ror-stricken, held up their hands, begged for 
 their lives, cried "Kamerad," "Bon Frangais," 
 even "Vive la France." We advanced and lay 
 down in columns by two behind the second 
 crest. Meanwhile, bridges had been thrown 
 across trenches and boyaux, and the artillery, 
 leaving the emplacements where they had been 
 anchored a whole year, came across and took 
 position in the open, a magnificent spectacle. 
 Squadrons of cavalry came up. Suddenly the 
 long, unpicturesque guerre de tranchees was at 
 an end and the field really presented the aspect 
 of the familiar battle pictures the battalions 
 in manoeuvre, the officers, superbly indifferent 
 to danger, galloping about on their chargers. 
 But now the German guns, moved back, began 
 to get our range and the shells to burst over 
 and around batteries and troops, many with 
 admirable precision. Here my best comrade 
 was struck down by shrapnel at my side pain- 
 fully but not mortally wounded. 
 
 I often envied him after that. For now our 
 advanced troops were in contact with the Ger- 
 man second-line defenses, and these proved to 
 be of a character so formidable that all further 
 advance without a preliminary artillery prepa- 
 ration was out of the question. And our role, 
 that of troops in reserve, was to lie passive in 
 an open field under a shell fire that every hour 
 became more terrific, while aeroplanes and cap- 
 tive balloons, to which we were entirely ex- 
 posed, regulated the fire. 
 
 That night we spent in the rain. With port-
 
 ALAN SEEGER, POET OF THE LEGION 61 
 
 able picks and shovels each man dug himself 
 in as well as possible. The next day our con- 
 centrated artillery again began the bombard- 
 ment, and again the fusillade announced the en- 
 trance of the infantry into action. But this 
 time only the wounded appeared coming back, 
 no prisoners. 
 
 Seeger's regiment was held in reserve during 
 September 28, the enemy's wire entanglements 
 before a piece of woods to be attacked not hav- 
 ing been sufficiently destroyed, and the com- 
 manding officer, who had replaced the wounded 
 colonel of the regiment, refusing to risk his 
 men. In his review of the battle Seeger ad- 
 mitted that, although the French had forced 
 back the German line along a wide front, had 
 advanced several kilometres and had captured 
 many prisoners and cannon, the larger aim of 
 driving the enemy across the Aisne, broken and 
 defeated, had failed. 
 
 His admiration for the French was, however, 
 undiminished. Under date of October 25 he 
 wrote to his mother: 
 
 This affair only deepened my admiration 
 for, my loyalty to, the French. If we did not 
 entirely succeed, it was not the fault of the
 
 62 IN THE FOREIGN LEGION 
 
 French soldier. He is a better man, man for 
 man, than the German. Any one who had 
 seen the charge of the Marsouins at Souain 
 would acknowledge it. Never was anything 
 more magnificent. I remember a captain, badly 
 wounded in the leg, as he passed us, borne back 
 on a litter by four German prisoners. He asked 
 us what regiment we were, and when we told 
 him, he cried, "Vive la Legion," and kept re- 
 peating "Nous les avons eus. Nous les avons 
 eus." He was suffering, but, oblivious of his 
 wound, was still fired with the enthusiasm of 
 the assault and all radiant with victory. 
 
 What a contrast with the German wounded, 
 on whose faces was nothing but terror and de- 
 spair. What is the stimulus in their slogans of 
 " Gott mit uns" and "fiir Konig und Vaterland" 
 beside that of men really fighting in defense of 
 their country? Whatever be the force in in- 
 ternational conflicts of having justice and all 
 the principles of personal morality on one's 
 side, it at least gives the French soldier a 
 strength that's like the strength of ten against 
 an adversary whose weapon is only brute vio- 
 lence. It is inconceivable that a Frenchman, 
 forced to yield, could behave as I saw German 
 prisoners behave, trembling, on their knees, for 
 all the world like criminals at length overpow- 
 ered and brought to justice. Such men have 
 to be driven to the assault, or intoxicated. But 
 the Frenchman who goes up is possessed with a 
 passion beside which any of the other forms of 
 experience that are reckoned to make life worth
 
 ALAN SEEGER, POET OF THE LEGION 63 
 
 while seem pale in comparison. The modern 
 prototype of those whom history has handed 
 down to the admiration of all who love liberty 
 and heroism in its defense, it is a privilege to 
 march at his side so much so that nothing the 
 world could give could make me wish myself 
 anywhere else than where I am. 
 
 Seeger passed the winter of 1915-16 with his 
 regiment in reserve. An attack of bronchitis 
 took him out of the service for three and a half 
 months, but did not diminish his ardor. "I 
 shall go back the first of May," he wrote, "with- 
 out regrets. These visits to the rear confirm 
 me in my conviction that the work up there on 
 the front is so far the most interesting work 
 that a man can be doing at this moment, that 
 nothing else counts in comparison." He passed 
 a happy month in Paris. "I lived," he wrote, 
 "as though I were saying good-by to life," as 
 indeed he was. 
 
 After his return to the front-line trenches 
 Seeger found time to write several sonnets 
 which he sent to his "marraine," Mrs. Weeks. 
 In two days, moreover, in the intervals of ex- 
 hausting work with pick and shovel in boyau- 
 digging, he composed the "Ode in Memory of
 
 64 IN THE FOREIGN LEGION 
 
 the American Volunteers Fallen for France," 
 without doubt the most noteworthy poem 
 which any American had contributed up to 
 that time to the permanent literature of the 
 war. He hoped to read it on Decoration Day 
 before the statue of Washington and Lafayette 
 in Paris, but this rare privilege was denied 
 him, owing to the failure of his permission for 
 forty-eight hours' leave to arrive in time. His 
 last letter was dated June 28, and, anticipating 
 active fighting, it was characteristic of him to 
 end it with these courageous words: 
 
 I am glad to be going in first wave. If you 
 are in this thing at all it is best to be in to the 
 limit. And this is the supreme experience. 
 
 Seeger was killed in the successful attack on 
 Belloy-en-Santerre, which the Legion made 
 late on the afternoon of July 4. He was in the 
 first line of his company that swept across the 
 plain before the village, and, with many of his 
 comrades, was mowed down by a cross-fire of 
 German machine-guns. 
 
 "Mortally wounded/' wrote a participant in 
 the attack in La Liberte of Paris, "it was his
 
 ALAN SEEGER, POET OF THE LEGION 65 
 
 fate to see his comrades pass him in their splen- 
 did charge and to forego the supreme moment 
 of victory to which he had looked forward 
 through so many months of bitterest hardship 
 and trial. Together with those other generous 
 wounded of the Legion fallen, he cheered on 
 the fresh files as they came up to the attack and 
 listened anxiously for the cries of triumph which 
 should tell of their success. 
 
 "It was no moment for rescue. In that zone 
 of deadly cross-fire there could be but one 
 thought to get beyond it alive, if possible. 
 So it was not until the next day that his body 
 was found and buried, with scores of his com- 
 rades, on the battle-field of Belloy -en-San terre." 
 
 As William Archer well remarks in the intro- 
 duction to the volume of Seeger's "Poems,'* 
 "He wrote his own best epitaph in the 'Ode'": 
 
 And on those furthest rims of hallowed ground 
 Where the forlorn, the gallant charge expires, 
 When the slain bugler has long ceased to sound, 
 And on the tangled wires 
 The last wild rally staggers, crumbles, stops, 
 Withered beneath the shrapnel's iron showers: 
 Now heaven be thanked, we gave a few brave drops, 
 Now heaven be thanked, a few brave drops were ours.
 
 vn 
 
 VICTOR CHAPMAN AS A LEGIONNAIRE 
 
 "\ 7ICTOR CHAPMAN'S Letters from 
 V France," dealing with his service for 
 ten months in the Foreign Legion, after which 
 he was transferred to the aviation corps, must 
 be read in the light of the illuminating memoir 
 which his father, John J. Chapman, prefaces 
 to the volume. By far the most significant 
 portion of this memoir is the vivid portrait of 
 the boy's mother, half Italian by blood but 
 wholly Italian in temperament and in the 
 traits which she bequeathed to her son. 
 
 Young Chapman was graduated at Harvard 
 in 1913. Before entering college he had spent 
 a year in France and Germany, and on being 
 graduated he became a Beaux-Arts student of 
 architecture in Paris. When the war broke out 
 he and his father and stepmother his own 
 mother had died when he was six fled from 
 Paris to London. 
 
 66
 
 VICTOR CHAPMAN AS A LfiGIONNAIRE 67 
 
 Even when he was a boy Chapman, accord- 
 ing to his father, never really felt that he was 
 alive, except when he was in danger. He did 
 not care for books or for sports, but he was pas- 
 sionately fond of color and scenery. "If you 
 could place him," says his father, "in a position 
 of danger and let him watch scenery, he was in 
 heaven. I do not think he was ever completely 
 happy in his life till the day he got his flying 
 papers." From his mother he got his large 
 frame and his corresponding physical energy, 
 which he loved to expend lavishly in the service 
 of his friends. He "could eat anything, sleep 
 on anything, lift anything, endure anything," 
 says his father. "He never had enough of 
 roughing it till he joined the Foreign Legion." 
 
 Chapman was in the Legion from the end of 
 September, 1914, until August, 1915. During 
 tJbis period his battalion, though often under 
 fire, was not actively engaged. He found the 
 inactivity of trench life irksome, and felt that 
 he was wasting his time. His chief interests 
 were the odd characters in the Legion with 
 whom he made friends, and the scenery. Here 
 is his description of the Christmas truce of
 
 68 IN THE FOREIGN LEGION 
 
 1914, when, in certain parts of the line, the Ger- 
 mans and the Legionnaires fraternized: 
 
 Xmas in the trenches was interesting but not 
 too exciting. Beginning the eve before, "con- 
 versations" in the form of calls. "Boches," "ga 
 va," etc. In response: "Bon camarade" "ciga- 
 rettes," "nous boirons champagne a Paris," etc. 
 Christmas morning a Russian up the line who 
 spoke good German wished them the greetings 
 of the season, to which the Boches responded 
 that instead of nice wishes they would be very 
 grateful to the French if the latter buried their 
 compatriot who had lain before their trenches 
 for the last two months. The Russian walked 
 out to see if it were so, returned to the line, got 
 a French officer and a truce was established. 
 The burying funeral performed, a German 
 Colonel distributed cigars and cigarettes and 
 another German officer took a picture of the 
 group. We, of course, were one half-mile down 
 the line so did not see the ceremony, though our 
 Lieutenant attended. No shooting was inter- 
 changed all day, and last night absolute still- 
 ness, though we were warned to be on the alert. 
 This morning, Nedim, a picturesque, childish 
 Turk, began again standing on the trenches 
 and yelling at the opposite side. Vesconsole- 
 dose, a cautious Portuguese, warned him not 
 to expose himself so, and since he spoke Ger- 
 man made a few remarks showing his head. 
 He turned to get down and fell ! a bullet hav- 
 ing entered the back of his skull: groans, a pud- 
 dle of blood.
 
 VICTOR CHAPMAN AS A LEGIONNAIRE 69 
 
 Two months later Chapman sent his father 
 this pen-portrait of Nedim: 
 
 There was Nedim, Nedim Bey, a Turk a 
 black, heavy-faced Turk, and a typical Asiatic. 
 He always wore two passes-montagnes, one pulled 
 down round his chin so that his grizzled un- 
 kempt beard and nose protruded through. I 
 believe he had been sent by the Turkish Gov- 
 ernment to study, and had worked in the French 
 cannon factories. At any rate the Lieutenant 
 had a high admiration for him which no one 
 could understand. His French was wonderful ! 
 The article did not exist, but he was fond of the 
 preposition de; as, mon de pain. He got per- 
 mission at both places to build a separate hole 
 for himself. After working night and day till 
 it was finished he would light a roaring fire and 
 sleep in an atmosphere warm enough to boil 
 an egg. At the other position he had a dug-out 
 about five feet long by two high, with a grate 
 fire at the end of it. And he slept with his 
 head against the fireplace ! His love for fire 
 resulted in his burning ends and patches of all 
 of his clothes, and about his abri were always 
 strewn pieces of burnt sacks. . . . He made 
 an indestructible creneau from which he pumped 
 shot. Inevitably the Germans soon located it 
 and the other day he was hit in the head and 
 evacuated. 
 
 Chapman's chief resource in the way of in- 
 tellectual companionship was a Polish Jew
 
 70 IN THE FOREIGN LEGION 
 
 named Kohn. Of him he wrote as follows, 
 under date of January 30, 1915: 
 
 My great joy, though vexation occasionally, 
 is Kohn. Though of such a lovable and child- 
 like innocence of character, he is a softy from 
 having been always pampered. His learning 
 is immense. I picked up a New York Times 
 last night article by G. B. Shaw. So I cas- 
 ually asked Kohn, who was entirely between 
 the sack curtains, what kind of Socialist was 
 Shaw? "A Fabianist," and with that he gave 
 me an account of the growth of Socialism in 
 England, how it influenced the continents the 
 briefest kind of a sketch of the points of diver- 
 gence between Socialism and Anarchism. Well, 
 I was numbed by slumber soon and had to beg 
 him to leave off till I was in a more receptive 
 mood. And Political Economy is not his line, 
 for he says mathematics is his specialty. With 
 that he is of an artistic temperament, almost 
 mystic, in his way of doing things. Heredia 
 used to say that Kohn did the rude physical 
 work as though he was performing a religious 
 rite: in fact, with such devotion and zeal that 
 he soon wore himself down and became more 
 subject than any of us to the cliche we all suf- 
 fered from. 
 
 Three weeks later, in a letter to his uncle, 
 Chapman gave the details of the death of his 
 friend Kohn, "shot beside us in front of our
 
 VICTOR CHAPMAN AS A LEGIONNAIRE 71 
 
 abri while taking observations with field-glasses 
 of hills to the northeast." Chapman missed his 
 companionship very much. 
 
 After his regiment was transferred to Alsace 
 Chapman met several Americans who were in 
 other regiments of the Foreign Legion Alan 
 Seeger, Henry Farnsworth, and David King. 
 In the company of these men, all of whom, as it 
 happened, had been at Harvard, and in a beau- 
 tiful valley among the foot-hills of the Vosges, 
 Chapman was "very happy." He was, how- 
 ever, to attain to his highest point of happiness, 
 as will be revealed later, as an aviator.
 
 PART II 
 WITH FAMOUS BRITISH REGIMENTS
 
 VIII 
 JOHN P. POE, OF THE FIRST BLACK WATCH 
 
 ON the official records of Princeton he was 
 known as John Prentiss Poe, Jr., of Bal- 
 timore, of the class of 1895. To his college 
 mates he was known as Johnny Poe. He was 
 eminently a man of deeds, not words. When in 
 his freshman year he was elected president of 
 his class, chiefly for the reason, rival candidates 
 alleged, that he was "the homeliest man in the 
 whole bunch," this was his speech of accep- 
 tance: 
 
 Fellows, I am proud of the honor you have 
 bestowed upon me. My face can't be ruined 
 mach, so I'll go in all the battles with you head 
 first. Nominations are now in order for vice- 
 president. 
 
 This was the martial spirit that animated 
 Johnny Poe, not only during his college career, 
 when, like his brothers, he won fame on the 
 football-field, but throughout his whole life. 
 
 75
 
 76 WITH FAMOUS BRITISH REGIMENTS 
 
 The softness and ease of peace had no attrac- 
 tions for him; his one ambition was to get into 
 the thick of a good fight, "head first." 
 
 The army offered the best outlet for his 
 superabundant energies. So in the war with 
 Spain, in 1898, we find him in Cuba with the 
 Fifth Maryland Regiment. But he participated 
 in no fighting. The taste, however, which he 
 had got of army life made him hungry for 
 more, and so, in the hope of seeing some real 
 fighting, he joined the regulars, and in 1899 he 
 was in the Philippines, a private in the 23d 
 United States Infantry. But he was again dis- 
 appointed; the campaign was tame. He did 
 not give up, however. In 1903 he served with 
 a detachment of Kentucky militia in the sup- 
 pression of a mountain feud. 
 
 Late in the same year, in November, when 
 there was considerable excitement on the isth- 
 mus because of the revolt of Panama from Co- 
 lombia, Poe thought that "the real thing" 
 might be within his grasp, if the United States 
 Government sent troops to the scene. Accord- 
 ingly he went to Washington and wrote a char- 
 acteristic letter to the commandant of the Ma-
 
 JOHN P. POE, OF THE BLACK WATCH 77 
 
 rine Corps, offering to enlist for active service. 
 The letter was as follows: 
 
 I understand that the Dixie is to take a 
 battalion of marines to Colon from League 
 Island next week. ... I wouldn't mind en- 
 listing except that I might be put to guarding 
 some colony of land crabs 200 or 300 miles from 
 where the fighting was going on, as in the Phil- 
 ippines, where the only thing our company did 
 was to make the Sultan of Sulu sign a receipt 
 for the 125 dollars Uncle Sam gave him. If I 
 were to go there, to Panama, and not see any 
 service, I would feel that if I were to go to 
 Hades for the warmth, the fires would be at 
 least banked, if not altogether extinguished, 
 owing to furnaces being repaired. I was in- 
 troduced to some cow-punchers in New Mexico 
 by Mike Furness, '91, as "the hero of two wars, 
 whose only wounds are scars from lying on his 
 bunk too much." I must outlive that reputa- 
 tion* 
 
 Impressed by the unusual tone of this letter, 
 General George F. Elliott took Poe himself over 
 to John D. Long, then Secretary of the Navy, 
 and laid the case before him. Secretary Long 
 was so amused by the letter and so pleased by 
 the writer's soldierly spirit that he ordered the 
 necessary arrangements to be made for Poe to
 
 78 WITH FAMOUS BRITISH REGIMENTS 
 
 join the marines. He sailed on the Dixie and 
 was made a sergeant. He refused, however, to 
 accept the position, preferring to remain in the 
 ranks. His reason was that he did not care for 
 authority and disliked responsibility, even the 
 small share that would attach to a non-commis- 
 sioned office. He wanted to enjoy the pleasure 
 of fighting independently, as an individual, 
 without the care of controlling other men. 
 Again, however, he was thwarted in his desire 
 to get into active service; and Poe regarded 
 active service, according to Captain Frank E. 
 Evans, editor of the Marine Corps Gazette, from 
 which the foregoing facts are taken, as "the 
 acme of adventure, the greatest game in the 
 world." There was no fighting of any conse- 
 quence on Panama, and he returned to the 
 United States. 
 
 Poe had to wait until 1914 for the great op- 
 portunity of his life, which the war in Europe 
 presented. At last he saw his chance to get his 
 fill of real fighting in what promised to be the 
 most stupendous war of all time. He went to 
 Canada immediately and volunteered. Reach- 
 ing England, he was transferred to the heavy
 
 JOHN P. POE, OF THE BLACK WATCH 79 
 
 artillery. A little experience, however, in this 
 branch of the service was enough for him. 
 Long-range fighting was not to his taste, and he 
 again succeeded in transferring to the First 
 Black Watch, the Scottish regiment famous in 
 Great Britain's military annals, with a record 
 of more than one hundred and fifty years of 
 service. 
 
 Thus in the spring of 1915 Poe was endeavor- 
 ing to make himself at home among the "Ladies 
 from Hell," as the Germans later dubbed these 
 kilted Scots, whom they found to be fierce 
 fighters a member of A Company, 3d Platoon, 
 First Black Watch, stationed in the trenches in 
 northern France. Late in the summer of the 
 same year Andrew C. Imbrie, secretary of the 
 Princeton class of '95, received a letter from 
 Poe, dated July 24, in which he acknowledged 
 the receipt of no fewer than one hundred and 
 thirty post-cards, "so far," from his classmates, 
 the suggestion for such a demonstration of the 
 affection and esteem in which Johnny Poe was 
 held by his fellows having been made by Imbrie 
 in the previous spring. Poe wrote: "I am try- 
 ing to feel more at home in a kilt; and while
 
 80 WITH FAMOUS BRITISH REGIMENTS 
 
 they are cool, the legs get dirty for quite a way 
 above the knees." He went on as follows: 
 
 Of course we are going to win; but the 
 "Limburgers" are putting up a great fight. 
 What business have the "Square Heads" to 
 start on the downward course the Empire which 
 weathered the Spanish Armada, the Dutch 
 under De Ruyter and Von Trump, the " Grand 
 Monarch" and Napoleon? 
 
 Aren't you sorry I'm such a shark on history ? 
 
 The Black Watch carried a German trench 
 on May 9th after several regiments had tried 
 and failed. It was taken with the piper play- 
 ing the "Hieland Laddie." 
 
 A month after this letter was written Johnny 
 Poe was killed in a charge of the Black Watch 
 before Hullock, in northern France, eight or 
 ten miles east of Bethune, a part of the great 
 drive of the Allies in the last week of Septem- 
 ber. A letter to Poe's brother, Edgar Allan 
 Poe, from the captain, D. Lumsden, of Poe's 
 company, dated November 25, 1915, and repro- 
 duced in the Princeton Alumni Weekly, gave 
 some details as to how Poe met his end : 
 
 In reply to your letter of the llth of No- 
 vember, I have made inquiries about your
 
 JOHN P. POE, OF THE BLACK WATCH 81 
 
 brother's death. He was killed on September 
 25 in the big engagement, while he was work- 
 ing with brigade bombers. He was advancing 
 with bombs to another regiment when he was 
 hit by a bullet and killed instantly. This hap- 
 pened roughly at 7 a.m., soon after the great 
 advance began, and he is buried with several of 
 his comrades on the left of the place called 
 "Lone Tree," and a mound marks the grave. 
 
 I was greatly grieved to hear that he had 
 been killed, as he was all that a good man and 
 soldier could be. He was the most willing 
 worker in my company and was in my platoon 
 before I took command of the company when 
 our captain was killed. 
 
 I offer you and all his relatives and friends 
 my deepest sympathies on your great loss. But 
 it is a comfort to think that he had lived a fine 
 life in the finest way a man can. 
 
 The evidence of another officer is quoted that 
 Poe "was the most popular fellow in the com- 
 pany, having been offered promotion, but he 
 refused it," preferring as always to fight in the 
 ranks. Poe Field at Princeton, with its memo- 
 rial flagstaff, from which the national colors 
 always fly, attests Poe's popularity among his 
 college mates. His relation to football was such 
 that there was a peculiar appropriateness in 
 the Memorial Football Cup which in 1916 his
 
 82 WITH FAMOUS BRITISH REGIMENTS 
 
 mother presented to Princeton, to be given 
 each year to that member of the team who 
 exemplified in the highest degree the traits 
 which were conspicuous in Poe himself (1) 
 loyalty and devotion to Princeton's football in- 
 terests; (2) courage, manliness, self -control, and 
 modesty; (3) perseverance and determination 
 under discouraging conditions, and (4) obser- 
 vance of the rules of the game and fairness 
 toward opponents.
 
 IX 
 
 DILLWYN P. STARR, OF THE COLDSTREAM 
 GUARDS 
 
 IT is doubtful if any one of the American 
 youths who entered the war in its early 
 stages in behalf of the Allies saw more varied 
 service than did Dillwyn Parrish Starr, of Phila- 
 delphia, whose father, Dr. Louis Starr, has had 
 printed for private circulation a memorial vol- 
 ume, "The War Story of Dillwyn Parrish 
 Starr." For at first Starr drove an ambulance 
 in Richard Norton's corps in northern France 
 and in Flanders; then he served with an English 
 armored motor-car squadron, under the com- 
 mand of the Duke of Westminster, in Flanders; 
 then, from early in the summer of 1915 until 
 November, he was in charge of a motor-car 
 squadron in Gallipoli; finally on his return he 
 joined the Coldstream Guards, accepted a com- 
 mission as second lieutenant, and was killed 
 while gallantly leading two platoons in a charge 
 
 88
 
 84 WITH FAMOUS BRITISH REGIMENTS 
 
 on September 15, 1916, having seen two years 
 of varied service. At the time of his death he 
 had reached the rank of first lieutenant. 
 
 Starr's desire at the outset was, as he ex- 
 pressed it, "to see the war," and so great was 
 his eagerness to get to the field of operations 
 that he shipped as a sailor on the liner Hamburg, 
 which the American Red Cross sent abroad the 
 middle of September, 1914. By the end of 
 October he was driving an ambulance, a power- 
 ful Mercedes, on the Belgian frontier. Starr's 
 experience in the ambulance service opened his 
 eyes to the nature of the struggle upon which 
 the Allies had entered and to the real character 
 of their enemy, and made him long, as he said 
 later, "to get at them with cold steel." 
 
 When, therefore, an opportunity came to 
 effect a transfer to the British Armored Car 
 Division, he grasped it eagerly. Early in 
 March, 1915, Starr was near the British front 
 lines in northern France, as one of the crew of a 
 heavy armored car carrying a three-pound gun, 
 in the squadron under the Duke of Westmin- 
 ster. An entry in his diary, with its amusing 
 anticlimax in the last sentence, describes the
 
 DILLWYN PARRISH STARR 85 
 
 work of his car in a fight near Neuve Chapelle, 
 southeast of Armentieres : 
 
 March 13. Hot day! Up at 3 A. M. and 
 on guard. Shells still passing over and falling 
 in town [Laventie]. The Duke came at 9 
 o'clock to take us out. Went in same direction 
 as yesterday afternoon but to more advanced 
 post. Heavy fighting going on. Took up po- 
 sition 200 yards south of cross-roads at Fau- 
 quissart, behind some buildings that were half 
 battered down. Got range of house occupied 
 by Germans who were holding up our advance 
 and fired forty-two shells, all telling and driving 
 them out. They were shot down by our in- 
 fantry, who occupied what was left of the 
 building a short time afterward. Enemy artil- 
 lery found us, and their shells began dropping 
 all about us; also under rifle fire and had to 
 keep cover. Shells were striking ten yards 
 away in the mud, and one splashed water into 
 the car. Finally obliged to back away, as road 
 too cramped to turn; moved very slowly and it 
 seemed we were going to get it sure close 
 squeeze! Got back to Laventie at 11 o'clock, 
 and in afternoon painted car and had my hair cut. 
 
 Like Johnny Poe of the Black Watch, Dill 
 Starr, as he was called by his classmates at 
 Harvard, where he was graduated in 1908, was 
 a football player of note, having won a place
 
 86 WITH FAMOUS BRITISH REGIMENTS 
 
 on the university team. A far-away echo of his 
 gridiron days is heard occasionally in his diary. 
 Thus he notes, in anticipation of immediate 
 active service: 
 
 In afternoon were told to get some sleep and 
 I did, sitting in chair. At four o'clock had tea. 
 Thinking of going out gives me the same feeling 
 as before a football match. 
 
 Nearly a year and a half later, when he was 
 a lieutenant in the Coldstream Guards, in 
 France, a match game of soccer, of which Starr 
 knew little or nothing, was arranged with a 
 team from the crack rival regiment in the 
 British service, the Grenadier Guards. Starr 
 was persuaded, much against his will, to play 
 with his fellow Coldstreamers, with this result: 
 
 The match with the Grenadiers came out a 
 tie. I was lucky enough to make a goal for 
 our side in the last thirty seconds. The score 
 was three all. 
 
 In May Starr was gazetted sublieutenant in 
 the Royal Navy Volunteer Reserves, and in 
 June, after a period of further study in gunnery, 
 he sailed, with another officer and twenty-five
 
 DILLWYN PARRISH STARR 87 
 
 i 
 
 men, for Gallipoli. The evidence of Starr's let- 
 ters and diary will be valuable to the historian 
 who seeks the causes for the ghastly failure of 
 that campaign. They were, in a sentence, 
 according to Starr, bad organization, bad man- 
 agement, lack of foresight and lack of energy. 
 Having landed, the middle of July, 1915, at 
 Cape Helles, he outlined the situation as it 
 appeared to him a week later: 
 
 This is the most wonderful looking place I 
 ever saw, the whole ground is covered with 
 dugouts, and even the mules have their little 
 shelters. The hill, Achi Baba, is only about 
 three miles away, so you can imagine how far 
 we have advanced. On the first day of the 
 landing we were further advanced than we are 
 now; the troops, you see, had no food, water, 
 etc., so they had to fall back after the first rush. 
 The Turks shell the Peninsula very often, but 
 don't do an awful lot of damage. 
 
 Of the costly and futile attack by the British 
 on the hill of Achi Baba, early in the following 
 August, Starr wrote: 
 
 Well, the attack has been made and was a 
 complete failure here. Almost four thousand 
 men went out and very few came back. Some
 
 88 WITH FAMOUS BRITISH REGIMENTS 
 
 monitors and ships bombarded Achi Baba for 
 two hours. The Turks during this moved 
 down into a gully and came back after it to 
 their second line and massed four deep to meet 
 our men. I was on higher ground with four 
 guns and could clearly see our charges of the 
 6th and the morning of the 7th. The men 
 went out in a hail of bullets and it was a won- 
 derful sight to see them. Many of them fell 
 close to our parapets, though a good number 
 reached the Turkish trenches, there to be killed. 
 On the morning of the 7th the Turks made a 
 counter attack and drove our men out of the 
 lightly-held trenches they had taken. Our 
 guns fortunately took a lot of them; my two 
 guns fired a thousand rounds into their closely 
 formed mass. 
 
 Under orders Starr returned to England late 
 in November, to find that the Armored Car 
 Division had been disbanded. At the sugges- 
 tion of his college mate, Walter G. Oakman, 
 Jr., who had been with him in both the ambu- 
 lance service and the Armored Car Division, 
 and w T ho was then in the Coldstream Guards, 
 Starr decided to accept a commission, which 
 had been offered to him, as second lieutenant in 
 the same regiment, one of the most famous in 
 the British Army. He thereupon went into
 
 DILLWYN PARRISH STARR 89 
 
 strict training which lasted six months, until 
 midsummer, 1916. Having similar tastes, espe- 
 cially in sports, he fraternized cordially with his 
 fellow officers, fell in easily with the traditions 
 of the regiment, and looked forward with eager- 
 ness to the time when he could lead his men 
 in a charge. To do this was the highest point 
 which his ambition as a soldier touched. 
 
 The regiment saw some trench work in Au- 
 gust and early in September, but was in no 
 serious engagement until the middle of the 
 month. Under date of September 11, four 
 days before he was killed, Starr wrote a letter 
 to his friend, Harold S. Vanderbilt, in the 
 course of which he said: 
 
 I came out to France on the llth day of 
 July and am now in the 2nd Battalion Cold- 
 stream Guards. We expect to have a very hot 
 time within the next few days. I believe we 
 are going to hop the parapet, so there is a good 
 chance of my getting back to England with a 
 "blighty" within the next week. There is a 
 lot of hell popping about here and the artillery 
 fire is something stupendous. 
 
 Things are looking a little better for the Allies 
 now, although it is not over yet by a long 
 shot.
 
 90 WITH FAMOUS BRITISH REGIMENTS 
 
 The last letter from him was written the fol- 
 lowing day, September 12. In it Starr said: 
 
 They hope here that we shall break through 
 the German lines, but I have my doubts. There 
 is a chance, however, and if we do it will make 
 all the difference in the world. 
 
 They didn't break through, but they attained 
 their immediate objective, making possible the 
 capture of Les-Bceufs the next day. 
 
 On the 15th the three battalions of the Cold- 
 stream Guards attacked the enemy near Ginchy, 
 a few miles east of Albert. They drove the 
 Germans out of their three lines of trenches, 
 but at heavy cost, a nest of machine-guns, 
 which the British tanks had failed to silence, 
 taking a frightful toll of lives. Lieutenant 
 Starr, leading his two platoons, was caught by 
 this enfilading fire and killed as he sprang upon 
 the parapet of the first German trench. 
 
 In a letter written from the hospital to Dr. 
 Starr, Corporal Philip Andrews, of Starr's pla- 
 toon, described this charge: 
 
 The order then came to charge the trench; 
 in that he got hit while leading us in the charge.
 
 91 
 
 I did not see him fall, but was told while in the 
 captured trench that he had been shot through 
 the heart. We all knew we had lost a splendid 
 leader who knew no fear. He knew, and so 
 did I, that we should have a terrible fight to 
 gain the trench, but he was cool and cheered 
 up all his men, and I am sorry he did not live 
 to see the spirit he had put into them in the 
 final charge. He died a hero, always in front 
 of us. 
 
 Colonel Drummond-Hay, commanding the 
 Coldstream Guards, wrote to Dr. Starr: 
 
 Previously to the War we had ties which kept 
 the Regiment in very friendly touch with the 
 U. S. A., but now we are bound to you by a 
 very much closer bond, your son, and others 
 like him, who never rested till they were able 
 to give us their active assistance in upholding 
 the honor of the Regiment in this tremendous 
 War, and this will never be forgotten in the 
 Regiment, as long as its name endures. 
 
 To have voluntarily given his life as your son 
 has done for the cause of right and in support 
 of an abstract principle, is quite the noblest 
 thing a man can do. It is far higher than giv- 
 ing it in fighting to safeguard one's own Hearth 
 and Home, and for the maintenance of the 
 Empire of which one is one's self a unit. And, 
 believe me, we greatly appreciate this spirit in 
 which so many Americans are fighting on our 
 side.
 
 PART HI 
 THE AMERICAN RED CROSS IN SERVIA
 
 X 
 
 DR. RYAN UNDER FIRE AT BELGRADE 
 
 young American volunteers in the 
 * trenches held no monopoly of the quality 
 of high courage in the face of great danger. 
 The surgeons and nurses of the American Red 
 Cross possessed this trait also. They had occa- 
 sion to show it in Servia when, at the outbreak 
 of the war, the Austrians fell upon that unfor- 
 tunate little country, which sent out a cry for 
 help that the American Red Cross was quick 
 to answer. Early in September, 1914, the 
 first of three Servian units sailed from New 
 York and, reaching Greece, went direct to Bel- 
 grade. The surgeon in charge was Dr. Edward 
 W. Ryan, of Scranton, a graduate of the Ford- 
 ham University Medical School and a man of 
 wide experience in administrative as well as in 
 hospital work. Dr. Ryan's two assistants, also 
 graduates of the same medical school, were Dr. 
 James C. Donovan and Dr. William P. Ahera. 
 
 95
 
 96 THE AMERICAN RED CROSS IN SERVIA 
 
 They were accompanied by twelve trained 
 nurses and carried abundant hospital supplies. 
 Under date of October 20, four days after 
 the arrival of the unit in Belgrade, Dr. Ryan 
 wrote to the Red Cross headquarters in Wash- 
 ington as follows of the conditions as he found 
 them: 
 
 We arrived at this place on October 16 and 
 were immediately put in charge of the big hos- 
 pital here. Since starting we have had no time 
 for anything but work and sleep. Many of the 
 wounded had not been dressed for several days, 
 and as we have about 150 and it is necessary 
 to dress them every day, it is 11 o'clock before 
 we get through and some nights later. . . . 
 The cases turned over to us are in many in- 
 stances of long standing and require constant 
 attention. New cases are arriving steadily and 
 we will be overrun in a very short time. Sur- 
 geons are scarce here, and as we have about 
 50,000 wounded scattered about the country, 
 you can readily see what the conditions are. 
 
 Belgrade contained about 120,000 inhabi- 
 tants. In the early months of the war the city* 
 which lies on the south bank of the Danube, 
 changed hands several times before the Ser~ 
 vians evacuated it finally, being subjected to
 
 DR. RYAN UNDER FIRE AT BELGRADE 97 
 
 three bombardments. The military hospital, of 
 which Dr. Ryan took charge on his arrival, was 
 on a high hill overlooking the city and was 
 frequently under fire. 
 
 The following weeks were full of exciting ex- 
 periences for the American surgeons and their 
 nurses. In a letter written from Nish, under 
 date of December 26, and published in the 
 Red Cross Magazine, Dr. Ryan described what 
 had occurred. Since November 25, he said, he 
 had had under his care in Belgrade five hospi- 
 tals with about forty buildings, being assisted 
 by about nine Servian doctors and one hundred 
 and fifty nurses, and having about one thou- 
 sand two hundred patients. He was also in 
 charge of the insane hospital and the civil, sur- 
 gical, and medical hospitals in the city. He 
 continued: 
 
 When the Servians evacuated Belgrade they 
 turned everything over to me. When you 
 think that they came to me at 2 o'clock in the 
 morning and said they were all going away and 
 I was supposed to remain and take charge of 
 all the hospitals, you can imagine my feelings. 
 I did the best I could for and with them. When 
 the Austrians came in, the non-combatant Ser-
 
 98 THE AMERICAN RED CROSS IN SERVIA 
 
 vians all came to me for food. I had to get 
 bread for about 6,000 poor people every day, 
 some of which I bought, but the greater part of 
 which was given to me by the Austrians. 
 
 When the Servian troops left they took with 
 them about 200 of our patientsf leaving 100 
 behind. Five days after the Austrians arrived 
 I had 3,000 patients, all very seriously wounded 
 and many with frozen hands and feet that neces- 
 sitated amputation. Many of them had been 
 on the road six or seven days before we got 
 them, and many did not even have the first 
 dressing. 
 
 Before the Servians retook Belgrade 6,000 
 wounded passed through my hands- As it was 
 impossible to handle them, I told the Austrians 
 they would have to send them into the interior 
 of Hungary, which they did. When they left 
 they took with them all of their wounded with 
 the exception of 514 which I still have. 
 
 In addition to these men, Dr. Ryan had in 
 his care when he wrote about 250 Servian 
 wounded. "The Servians," he added, "are 
 very grateful, and when you remember that 
 they have about 60,000 wounded of their own, 
 every little helps."
 
 XI 
 FIGHTING TYPHUS AT GEVGELIA 
 
 IN view of the conditions in Servia two more 
 units of the American Red Cross were des- 
 patched the middle of November to the as- 
 sistance of Dr. Ryan. They were under the 
 charge of Dr. Ethan Flagg Butler and of 
 Dr. Ernest P. Magruder, both of Washington, 
 D. C., Dr. Butler having general control of the 
 force. Assisting them were Drs. James F. 
 Donnelly, of Brooklyn, Clapham P. King, of 
 Annapolis, and Morton P. Lane, of New Or- 
 leans, with twelve trained nurses. As the 
 Servian Government had established itself at 
 Nish, it was decided that these two new sur- 
 gical units should make their headquarters at 
 Gevgelia, a town of about 7,000 inhabitants on 
 the railway running south from Nish to Saloniki 
 on the Greek coast. 
 
 Dr. Butler and his staff reached Gevgelia in 
 December, and found themselves face to face 
 
 99
 
 100 THE AMERICAN RED CROSS IN SERVIA 
 
 with a difficult situation. The following ex- 
 tract from a private letter from Dr. Butler, 
 dated Christmas day, which was published in 
 the Princeton Alumni Weekly Dr. Butler was 
 graduated at Princeton in 1906 defined the 
 situation: 
 
 Now we have on our hands some thousand 
 or so wounded, both Servian and Austrian, in 
 a large tobacco factory. There is no need to 
 say more than that Sherman must just have 
 come from a military hospital when he uttered 
 his trite description of war. We are, however, 
 taking over an old storage house wherein 
 there have been no patients and which, there- 
 fore, conies into our hands sweet and clean. 
 In this we hope to establish a couple of oper- 
 ating rooms, and ward space for 175 patients, 
 choosing for this building the more severely 
 wounded. 
 
 The greatest need that confronted Dr. Butler 
 was for an abundant supply of pure water. 
 Even the surgeons and nurses were under the 
 necessity of making "an occasional run for a 
 hot bath and a glass of water" to Saloniki, a 
 morning's ride on the railway-train. At this 
 time no infectious or contagious disease had 
 made its appearance, but Dr. Butler saw
 
 FIGHTING TYPHUS AT GEVGELIA 101 
 
 clearly that the conditions were such as to 
 breed a veritable pestilence. In a second let- 
 ter he wrote: 
 
 Yet we are going to stick to the game and 
 beat them in spite of themselves. We will just 
 hammer, hammer at the local authorities and 
 at the Government in Nish, until they let us 
 make a clean place of this and keep it clean. 
 
 Not many weeks passed after this before the 
 situation became desperate, owing to the out- 
 break and rapid spread of the dreaded typhus 
 and typhoid fevers in and around Gevgelia, 
 where the sanitary conditions were about as 
 bad as they could be. The pestilence attacked 
 the members of the two American units. Dr. 
 Butler himself was the only one of the Ameri- 
 can surgeons who escaped an attack, more or 
 less severe, of typhus, and at one time no fewer 
 than nine of his twelve nurses were typhus pa- 
 tients at Gevgelia. Although he was author- 
 ized by cable to transfer his entire staff to 
 Saloniki, Dr. Butler stuck resolutely and cou- 
 rageously to his post in Gevgelia, and, with four 
 of his party in the delirium that accompanies 
 typhus, could write in this admirably restrained
 
 102 THE AMERICAN RED CROSS IN SERVIA 
 
 temper to the home office of the American Red 
 Cross : 
 
 In regard to the present personnel of the 
 units, I do not advise withdrawal or even 
 change of location within Servia, but I feel that 
 before other members are sent to this country 
 your office should weigh seriously the risks that 
 everyone will have to run risks from disease 
 that are considered rightfully preventable in 
 our home country and decide whether or not 
 the units are to be kept up to their full quota 
 or allowed to gradually decrease in number as 
 one after another the original members become 
 sick and are invalided home. I am sure, from 
 the events of the past two weeks, that it is 
 only a question of time before each member 
 contracts some sickness of sufficient gravity to 
 make his or her return to America necessary. 
 
 Two of the American surgeons succumbed to 
 the disease. Dr. Donnelly died on February 
 22, and Dr. Magruder, who had been trans- 
 ferred to Belgrade to assist Dr. Ryan, died 
 early in April. It was the privilege of Sir 
 Thomas Lipton, who saw Dr. Donnelly when 
 he was ill, to carry out his last wishes. One of 
 these was that if he did not pull through he 
 should be buried with the American and Red
 
 FIGHTING TYPHUS AT GEVGELIA 103 
 
 Cross flags wrapped around his body. A recent 
 financial report of the American Red Cross 
 records a substantial sum as set aside for pen- 
 sions to the widows of these two surgeons who 
 gave their lives to the cause of humanity. 
 
 Meanwhile help was being sent to Dr. Butler 
 by the American Red Cross. In response to a 
 call for volunteers Dr. Reynold M. Kirby- 
 Smith, of Sewanee, Tennessee, and three nurses 
 left their station at Pau, France, and hastened 
 to Gevgelia. In February Dr. Earl B. Downer, 
 of Lansing, Michigan, left the United States, 
 also under Red Cross auspices, to go to the aid 
 of Dr. Butler, and in March more trained 
 nurses were despatched on the same mission. 
 Typhus, however, had become too virulent and 
 too wide-spread to be combated successfully by 
 so small a force, and steps were at once taken to 
 organize and to send to Servia a sanitary com- 
 mission for the express purpose of stamping out 
 the plague from which thousands had already 
 died. 
 
 Dr. Kirby-Smith, Dr. Butler, and Dr. Downer, 
 leaving Gevgelia to be taken care of by the 
 Sanitary Commission, went to Belgrade to the
 
 104 THE AMERICAN RED CROSS IN SERVIA 
 
 assistance of Dr. Ryan, who meanwhile had 
 fallen ill with typhus. Summarizing later the 
 work of the American Red Cross in Belgrade, 
 Dr. Downer stated that in little over a year 
 20,000 sick and wounded, including all nation- 
 alities, had been cared for. "During the recent 
 German invasion," he said, "we cared for 4,000 
 wounded in a period of thirty days." Describ- 
 ing the daily routine of himself and Dr. Butler, 
 he said: 
 
 In the month of April Dr. Ethan F. Butler 
 and myself did all the surgical and medical 
 work of the hospital. We operated each day 
 from 8 A. M. to 2 p. M., and after that visited 
 800 patients. This was our daily routine. 
 Each day we made a rigid search of the wards 
 for new typhus cases, which were promptly sent 
 to the isolation hospital. At this time most of 
 our nurses and doctors, including the director, 
 Dr. Ryan, were ill from typhus. Dr. Reynold 
 M. Kirby-Smith, who was in charge at this 
 time, took care of the executive work of the 
 hospital. 
 
 / 
 
 With the Servians Dr. Ryan had become a 
 popular hero. To him they gave the credit 
 for saving the city of Belgrade from being pil- 
 laged and burned by the Austrian troops. The
 
 FIGHTING TYPHUS AT GEVGELIA 105 
 
 London Times confirmed this view, saying that 
 it was due to his "fearless, determined interven- 
 tion that the city was not destroyed and that 
 an even greater number of women and children 
 were not carried off into captivity." He kept 
 on good terms, moreover, with the invaders, 
 who sent him no fewer than 3,000 wounded 
 soldiers in one day for treatment !
 
 XII 
 
 CONQUERING THE PLAGUE OF TYPHUS 
 
 npHE story of how the plague of typhus in 
 -* Servia was conquered by American scientific 
 knowledge, organization, and energy, the cost 
 of practically the whole undertaking being met 
 by American money, forms one of the most 
 dramatic chapters in the history of modern 
 sanitary science. The disease became epidemic 
 in January, 1915, in the northwestern part of 
 Servia among the Austrian prisoners of war, 
 who were greatly crowded together and who 
 were compelled to live under the most insani- 
 tary conditions. As these prisoners were sent 
 and as infected native Servians travelled to other 
 parts of the country, the disease spread rapidly, 
 reaching its height in April, when no fewer than 
 nine thousand new cases a day were reported. 
 
 In this emergency the American Red Cross 
 organized a sanitary commission, for the leader- 
 ship of which Dr. Richard P. Strong, professor 
 of tropical diseases in the Medical School of 
 
 106
 
 CONQUERING THE PLAGUE OF TYPHUS 107 
 
 Harvard University, was selected. Dr. Strong, 
 who was a graduate of Yale of the class of 1893, 
 had proved, in the Philippines and in Man- 
 churia, his capacity for just this sort of work. 
 The commission was financed by contributions 
 from the Rockefeller Foundation, the American 
 Red Cross, and private sources, chiefly at Har- 
 vard and at Yale. The membership consisted 
 of twelve physicians and sanitary experts, who 
 sailed for Naples early in April, Dr. Strong hav- 
 ing preceded them by several weeks. 
 
 All sorts of supplies were taken, one item in 
 the list being fifty-four tons of sulphur for dis- 
 infecting purposes. Later, in May, in response 
 to appeals from Dr. Strong for more assistance, 
 a supplementary force of twenty-five sanitary 
 experts under Dr. Edward Stuart, of Oklahoma, 
 was despatched to Servia, and by July the total 
 American membership of the commission had 
 been increased to forty-three. A great mass 
 of additional supplies was also forwarded, in- 
 cluding 125 tons of sulphur and fifteen tons of 
 artesian-well apparatus. 
 
 England, France, and Russia were as keenly 
 alive as was America to the danger to all Europe
 
 108 THE AMERICAN RED CROSS IN SERVIA 
 
 which lay in the dreaded typhus epidemic and 
 had sent sanitary experts and physicians to 
 Servia. Reaching Nish, Dr. Strong, with the 
 co-operation of the medical men from these 
 countries and of such Servian doctors more 
 than a hundred native physicians succumbed 
 to the disease before it was conquered as 
 could be spared for the work, organized an 
 International Health Board, of which he be- 
 came the medical director. With full authority 
 from the Servian Government to take any 
 measures necessary to stamp out the plague, 
 Dr. Strong divided the country for sanitary 
 purposes into fourteen districts. The French, 
 English, and Russian physicians took charge of 
 seven of these districts; the Americans the re- 
 mainder. 
 
 The methods that modern sanitary science 
 employs when it becomes necessary to save 
 not a community but a whole people from the 
 ravages of a pestilence, are well illustrated by 
 Dr. Strong's report to the American Red Cross: 
 
 As typhus is conveyed from man to man by 
 vermin (the bite of the body louse) the bathing 
 and disinfection of very large numbers of
 
 Copyright liy Cm/rriroorf <t L'mlerwood. 
 
 Doctor Richard P. Strong.
 
 CONQUERING THE PLAGUE OF TYPHUS 109 
 
 people and immediate disinfection of their 
 clothing in a short period of time was an im- 
 portant problem in combating the disease. For 
 this purpose sanitary trains consisting each of 
 three converted railroad cars were fitted up. 
 One car contained a huge boiler which supplied 
 the steam for disinfection of the clothing. In 
 a second car fifteen shower baths were con- 
 structed. A third car was converted into a 
 huge autoclave (disinfector), into which steam 
 could be turned under automatic pressure. In 
 this manner the vermin were immediately de- 
 stroyed and the clothes thoroughly disinfected. 
 
 Large tents were erected beside the railroad 
 sidings on which the cars were placed. The 
 people were marched by the thousands to these 
 tents, their hair was clipped, and a limited 
 number undressed themselves, carried their 
 clothes to the disinfecting car, and then passed 
 to the car containing the shower baths. After 
 a thorough scrubbing with soap and water they 
 were sprayed with petroleum as an extra pre- 
 caution for destroying the vermin. They then 
 received their disinfected clothing. In many 
 instances in which the clothing was very badly 
 soiled fresh clothing was supplied. Many of 
 these people stated that they had not bathed 
 for ten months or longer. Their faces in some 
 instances betrayed surprise and in others fear 
 when the water touched their bodies. 
 
 In the larger cities and in those situated 
 away from the railway, disinfecting and bath- 
 ing plants were established and separate hours
 
 110 THE AMERICAN RED CROSS IN SERVIA 
 
 were arranged for bathing women and men in 
 large numbers. 
 
 In many towns the clothes were disinfected 
 by baking them in ovens, either specially con- 
 structed for this purpose or those which had 
 been built previously for the baking of bricks 
 or for other purposes. As all the hospitals 
 were infected, it was necessary to systematically 
 disinfect these and the inmates. 
 
 As cholera threatened to develop, vaccination 
 against cholera and typhoid fever was made 
 compulsory in Servia, and vaccination trains 
 and parties travelled all over the country for 
 this purpose. Dr. Strong's activity during this 
 campaign was prodigious. Here is a letter in 
 which he describes his experiences one night 
 late in May, while returning, with several com- 
 panions and a guard, from a visit by horseback 
 and carriage to a hospital in Pech, in Monte- 
 negro, the carriages having been sent on ahead 
 of the party: 
 
 I forgot to mention that I had an escort of 
 six gendarmes with me because we were passing 
 through a territory which is on the Albanian 
 border, and the Albanians are very unfriendly 
 to the Montenegrins. The gendarme in com- 
 mand begged me not to camp in the open, say-
 
 CONQUERING THE PLAGUE OF TYPHUS 111 
 
 ing it was very dangerous to do so. However, 
 as I had not slept for twenty-eight hours, I did 
 not feel like going on at that hour of the night 
 and spending it at an infected hotel. We there- 
 fore insisted on remaining that night in the 
 open. A camp-fire was started and Mr. Brink 
 made some coffee and fried some bacon. This 
 we ate, together with a tin of salmon and some 
 biscuits. 
 
 Our meal had hardly been finished before a 
 curious incident happened. A man, screaming 
 with all his lung-power, came running into our 
 vicinity, chased by an Albanian with a rifle in 
 his hands. This man claimed, as we found out 
 later, that the Albanian was trying to kill him. 
 It seems the Albanian had seen our camp fire 
 and had crossed the border to find out what 
 it meant. We gave him something to eat and 
 he at once became very friendly. By signs he 
 intimated to us we should put the camp fire 
 out and lie down and go to sleep. In fact he 
 several times tried to put the fire out himself, 
 and kept pointing to the Albanian frontier, 
 every once in a while raising his rifle as if about 
 to fire, indicating, we presumed, that we were 
 in danger. 
 
 As the rain was now pouring down we de- 
 cided to go to bed. We had no tents with us, 
 but had the canvas covers for our hammocks. 
 We spread our bedding on the ground and then 
 climbed under the canvas. The rain fell heavily 
 all night long. I was wet through, and found 
 next morning that my pocketbook had been so
 
 112 THE AMERICAN RED CROSS IN SERVIA 
 
 badly soaked that my passport which it con- 
 tained was damaged and that the pigment on 
 the red seal had smeared on the paper. We 
 heard some shooting in the night, but no shots 
 were exchanged. A little before 4 A. M. we 
 crawled out of our beds. It was still raining. 
 We rolled up the water-soaked bedding and left 
 it there on the plain to be sent for and started 
 on our walk to the town of Djakovitza, w T hich 
 we reached about 5.45 o'clock. The command- 
 ing officer in the town was scandalized to hear 
 that we had camped in the open on the Alba- 
 nian border. He said it not only was very un- 
 safe but that no one had done such a thing for 
 many years; that our experience would go down 
 in history. We, however, preferred to take the 
 risk of being shot to sleeping in a typhus- 
 infected hotel. 
 
 The battle lasted fully six months before the 
 scourge was finally conquered. Dr. Strong's 
 estimate was that from 135,000 to 150,000 per- 
 sons died in Servia from the disease. In the 
 end science won. On his return to the United 
 States in the autumn Dr. Strong announced 
 that in the last three weeks of his stay in Ser- 
 via not a single new case of typhus had been 
 reported.
 
 PART IV 
 AMERICAN AMBULANCES IN FRANCE
 
 XIII 
 
 RICHARD NORTON'S MOTOR-AMBULANCE 
 CORPS 
 
 foremost figure among the scores of 
 -^- American university men who, in 1914, 
 1915, and 1916, gave their services to the am- 
 bulance corps in France, Belgium, and the 
 Near East, was Richard Norton. Graduated 
 at Harvard in 1892, the son of Professor Charles 
 Eliot Norton, he had become an archaeologist 
 of note, and for eight years was director of the 
 American School of Classical Studies at Rome. 
 The Great War summoned him from these scho- 
 lastic pursuits into active field-work in behalf 
 of humanity; and his response to this summons 
 was immediate. Soon after the war began he 
 went to London and organized the American 
 Volunteer Motor-Ambulance Corps. By Octo- 
 ber, 1914, ten of his ambulances were at work, 
 at first under the auspices of the British Red 
 Cross and the St. John Ambulance, the drivers 
 being recent graduates of American colleges. 
 
 115
 
 116 AMERICAN AMBULANCES IN FRANCE 
 
 From this modest beginning the number of 
 the ambulances over which Mr. Norton exer- 
 cised supervision was gradually increased as 
 more funds were forthcoming. Finally it was 
 found to be desirable to associate the corps 
 with the American Red Cross and to place its 
 cars under the direct control of the French 
 Army. 
 
 To the young Americans who drove these 
 ambulances Mr. Norton, being their senior by 
 many years, was more like an elder brother 
 than a commanding officer. In his relations 
 with them his principal task was of a double 
 character to teach them to keep out of un- 
 necessary danger and at the same time to in- 
 spire them, by example as well as by precept, 
 with a high courage to run any risk in the per- 
 formance of a real duty. That he succeeded in 
 this by no means easy task is evident from the 
 feeling of loyalty, devotion, and admiration 
 which all the young men who served under him 
 brought back to America. 
 
 An anecdote is told of him which illustrates 
 admirably the manner in which he controlled 
 and tempered the overeager spirits of the
 
 RICHARD NORTON'S MOTOR CORPS 117 
 
 youths under him. One evening, so the story 
 goes, Norton found one of his young ambulance 
 drivers a considerable distance from the head- 
 quarters of the section absorbed hi watching a 
 French battery near by in action. Taken to 
 task by his chief, the boy admitted frankly that 
 he had been drawn thither by a great curiosity 
 to see the big guns in action. 
 
 "Yes," commented Norton, in effect, "that 
 was natural. I've had that feeling myself. 
 But consider, for a moment, the possible conse- 
 quences. Sooner or later the Germans will find 
 this battery, and a shell may blow you to 
 pieces, or a fragment destroy your eyesight or 
 cause the loss of an arm or a leg. And if that 
 happens the French officials will merely shrug 
 their shoulders and say, * Another one of those 
 reckless Americans throwing away his life for 
 nothing' ; and that will be the end of you. 
 
 "On the other hand, if you are wounded 
 while in the performance of duty you will be 
 cited for bravery and may receive the Croix de 
 Guerre; and if you are killed, the French will 
 pay you every honor at their command. Which 
 seems to be the sensible choice to make?"
 
 118 AMERICAN AMBULANCES IN FRANCE 
 
 Put in this dramatic way, the lesson of avoid* 
 ing unnecessary risk was quickly learned. 
 
 From the several letters from Mr. Norton to 
 his brother Eliot in New York, which are 
 printed in Mr. M. A. De Wolfe Howe's volume, 
 "Harvard Volunteers in Europe," it is possible 
 to construct a reasonably complete picture of 
 the important work which Norton was able to 
 do in the early years of the war. 
 
 Writing from La Croix, Champagne, under 
 date of October 14, 1915, Norton summarized 
 the work which his corps of ambulances had 
 done during the year: 
 
 As it is just a year since the Corps came 
 into being, it is worth remembering what we 
 started from and what we have developed into. 
 Notwithstanding errors of judgment or acci- 
 dents, we have accomplished good work. A 
 year ago we started from London with our cars, 
 and not much more than hope for a bank bal- 
 ance. We were wanderers searching for work. 
 During this year we have grown into a corps 
 consisting now of some sixty cars, to which the 
 St. John Ambulance and Red Cross Societies 
 render any assistance we ask, and instead of 
 wondering where we were to find occupation 
 the French authorities have intrusted us with the 
 wJwle ambulance service of the llth Army corps.
 
 RICHARD NORTON'S MOTOR CORPS 119 
 
 . . . We have carried during the year just 
 under twenty-eight thousand cases, and during 
 the days from the 25th of September to the 
 9th of October, our cars relieved the sufferings 
 of over six thousand individuals. . . . 
 
 The period referred to in the last sentence 
 was that of the great French drive in Cham- 
 pagne, in which, as we have seen, young Farns- 
 worth, of the Foreign Legion, was killed. Se- 
 lections from Norton's description in the same 
 letter of the work of his ambulance corps dur- 
 ing this battle follow: 
 
 For three days before the 25th of Septem- 
 ber, an incessant cannonade, continued by night 
 and day, showed that the region round Tahure 
 was the one selected for attacking the Germans. 
 It was on the twenty-fourth that we received 
 final orders to move up to the lines, and to 
 station our cars at the field hospitals and the 
 trenches. . . . 
 
 Before we actually took up our positions I 
 I had been over the ground to get the lay of the 
 land, to see where the various trails they were 
 scarcely more led to, in order to know how 
 best to direct the ambulances on their various 
 errands. The country was absolutely packed; 
 I can scarcely find any word to suggest a pic- 
 ture of how packed it was with troops and 
 munition trains. There was every sort and
 
 120 AMERICAN AMBULANCES IN FRANCE 
 
 description. On the rolling land, over which 
 the trenches, cut in through chalk soil, ran like 
 great white snakes, the batteries of every sized 
 gun were innumerable. I cannot tell you how 
 many guns there were, but, in a radius of half 
 a mile from where my ambulances stood the 
 first night, there were at least a dozen batteries 
 of various calibers, and they were no thicker 
 there than anywhere else. We tried to sleep 
 on the stretchers for an hour or two before 
 dawn of the twenty-fifth, but when you have 
 a battery of "150's" coughing uninterruptedly 
 within less than one hundred yards of where 
 you are resting, to say nothing of other guns to 
 right and to left of you, one's repose is decidedly 
 syncopated. On the morning of the twenty- 
 fifth the cannonade slackened, and we knew 
 afterward that the three previous days' work 
 had battered the German lines into a shapeless 
 mass, and that the French infantry had made 
 good the chance they had been patiently wait- 
 ing for all summer of proving to the world 
 their ability to beat the Germans. . . . 
 
 It is curious that only three or four inci- 
 dents of the twelve hard days' work stand out 
 clearly in my mind. The rest is but a hazy 
 memory of indistinguishable nights and days, 
 cold and rain, long rows of laden stretchers 
 waiting to be put into the cars, wavering lines 
 of less seriously wounded hobbling along to 
 where we were waiting, sleepy hospital order- 
 lies, dark underground chambers in which the 
 doctors were sorting out and caring for the
 
 RICHARD NORTON'S MOTOR CORPS 121 
 
 wounded, and an unceasing noise of rumbling 
 wagons, whirring aeroplanes, distant guns cough- 
 ing and nearby ones crashing, shells bursting 
 and bullets hissing. Out of this general jum- 
 ble of memory one feature shines out steadily 
 clear; it is of the doctors. Patient, indefatiga- 
 ble, tender, encouraging and brave in the most 
 perfect way, they were everywhere in the fore- 
 front and seemingly knew not what fatigue 
 meant. . . . 
 
 After describing a few of the incidents that 
 impressed themselves upon his memory, Mr. 
 Norton continued: 
 
 Still another picture that rises in my mind, 
 as I write, is of one cloudy morning, when, after 
 a very tiring night, I was sitting on the road- 
 side watching a rather heavy bombardment 
 near by, and suddenly through the din rose the 
 sweet clear notes of a shepherd's pipe. It was 
 the same reed-pipe I have heard so often on 
 the hills of Greece and Asia Minor, and the 
 same sweetly-sad, age-old shepherd music tell- 
 ing of Pan and the Nymphs, and the asphodel 
 meadows where Youth lies buried. The piper 
 was an ordinary piou-piou, a simple fantasin, 
 mon vieux Charles, with knapsack on back, rifle 
 slung over his shoulder and helmet on head 
 strolling down to the valley of death a few hun- 
 dred yards beyond. Nor is this the only music 
 I have heard. One night a violin sounded
 
 122 AMERICAN AMBULANCES IN FRANCE 
 
 among the pines which shelter our tents, and I 
 strolled over to find a blue-clad Orpheus easing 
 the pain of the wounded and numbing the 
 fatigue of the brancardiers with bits of Chopin 
 and Schubert and Beethoven. 
 
 Such are some of the impressions of the 
 battle seen from this side of the line. Others I 
 have formed since the main fight ceased, in the 
 lines previously held by the Germans. I went 
 over some of their trenches the other day and 
 have never seen anything so horrible. Al- 
 though, as prisoners have told us, they knew 
 they were to be attacked, they had no idea that 
 the attack would be anything like so severe as 
 it was. Those I have talked to said it was 
 awful, and that they were glad to be out of it. 
 Their trenches were very elaborately con- 
 structed, many of the dugouts being fitted up 
 with considerable furniture, the dwellers evi- 
 dently having no notion they would be hur- 
 riedly evicted. After the bombardment there 
 was nothing left of all this careful work. The 
 whole earth was torn to pieces. It looked as 
 though some drunken giant had driven his 
 giant plough over the land. In the midst of an 
 utterly indescribable medley of torn wire, bro- 
 ken wagons, and upheaved timbers, yawned 
 here and there chasms like the craters of small 
 volcanoes, where mines had been exploded. It 
 was an ashen gray world, distorted with the 
 spasms of death like a scene in the moon. 
 Except for the broken guns, the scattered 
 clothing, the hasty graves, the dead horses and
 
 RICHARD NORTON'S MOTOR CORPS 123 
 
 other signs of human passage, no one could 
 have believed that such a place had ever been 
 anything but dead and desolate. The rubbish 
 still remained when I was there, but masses of 
 material had been already gathered up and 
 saved. 
 
 Mr. Norton gave the text of the notice issued 
 to the army on October 1, describing the vast 
 quantities of material captured in this battle, 
 and added this evidence that six years before 
 the present war began the Germans had decided 
 to use gas in warfare: 
 
 In this notice no mention is made of some 
 very interesting gas machines that were taken. 
 They were of two sorts, one for the production 
 of gas, the other to counteract its effects. The 
 latter were rather elaborate and heavy but very 
 effective instruments consisting of two main 
 parts; one to slip over the head, protecting the 
 eyes and clipping the nose, the other an arrange- 
 ment of bags and bottles containing oxygen, 
 which the wearer inhaled through a tube held 
 in the mouth. There were several forms of 
 these apparatuses, but the most interesting 
 point to note about them is that one had 
 stamped upon it the words: "Type of 1914 
 developed from type of 1912, developed from 
 type of 1908," thus showing that seven years 
 ago the Germans had decided to fight with gas.
 
 124 AMERICAN AMBULANCES IN FRANCE 
 
 Eight months later Norton and his corps 
 were at Verdun, the scene of the great but un- 
 successful offensive of the army of the Crown 
 Prince of Germany in the spring of that year, 
 1916. Another letter from him to his brother 
 Eliot, reprinted in "Harvard Volunteers in 
 Europe" from the Springfield Republican of 
 July 8, 1916, shows the perils of the work in 
 which he and his men were then engaged, and 
 the spirit in which they faced these perils. The 
 letter was dated Verdun, June 15, 1916: 
 
 It is some time since I wrote, but we first 
 were moving up here, and since arriving have 
 had strenuous times. We are camped some 
 five miles outside Verdun, where we have our 
 permanent post; another is at a hospital be- 
 tween us and Verdun; while every night, as 
 soon as it is dark, we send out eight cars to 
 evacuate the advanced posts. This is extremely 
 risky work and can only be done at night, 
 owing to the road being in view of the Germans, 
 who are not a kilometre distant. At night I 
 have my office, as it were, at Verdun, where 
 L'hoste has his main post. Thence, as there is 
 need, he and I go up and down the line of posts 
 to keep the work moving. 
 
 The advanced posts can be reached only at 
 night, so, as there are only four hours of dark-
 
 RICFAUD NORTON'S MOTOR CORPS 125 
 
 ness, we are extremely busy. Two days ago 
 we were ordered to evacuate one of these posts 
 by day a thing heretofore unheard of. Of 
 course, I obeyed and sent the five cars de- 
 manded, following them up a short time after- 
 ward. I arrived at the starting point to find 
 the first car had been steadily shelled as it went 
 along the road, that the second, containing 
 Jack Wendell and a chauffeur named Hollinshed, 
 had not returned from the trip, and that another 
 car had gone to see what the trouble was. 
 
 I started at once to go after the missing 
 cars, but at that moment Hoskier, who had 
 gone after Wendell, came hurrying round the 
 corner. He told me that both Wendell and 
 Hollinshed had been wounded, but not seri- 
 ously, as they were putting some wounded in 
 their car; that they were being cared for at the 
 poste; that they begged me not to come up till 
 dark; that the authorities at the poste begged 
 us to keep away for fear the poste would be 
 shelled, and, lastly, he said it was obvious the 
 Boches were laying for us, for they were shell- 
 ing our road steadily. I 
 
 This was obviously the right thing to do, 
 but Lawrence MacCreery at once asked to be 
 allowed to go by the boyau with his chauffeur; 
 they would reach the poste as dark fell and 
 would bring Wendell and Hollinshed out on 
 their car if that had not been destroyed. This 
 they very pluckily did. I, meanwhile, had to 
 report to the authorities, and got back just as 
 Wendell and Hollinshed had been fixed up by
 
 126 AMERICAN AMBULANCES IN FRANCE 
 
 the doctors. Wendell has a slight wound in 
 the back, Hollinshed a rather more severe one 
 in the shoulder. They behaved in a way to 
 give cause to their families to be extremely 
 proud of them, absolutely refusing to return 
 with Hoskier, but insisting on his taking the 
 four bad cases they had gone to get. They will 
 both be given the Croix de Guerre, and they 
 well deserve it. 
 
 Since then we have had one car blown to 
 pieces and five others hit. Our Verdun post is 
 shelled every evening, and one of the others was 
 heavily peppered last night. The division has 
 suffered heavily, and I do not think can stay 
 more than a few days more. We can't either, 
 if we go on losing men and cars at this rate. 
 
 Till to-day it has rained steadily, which has 
 added to our difficulties. However, we are 
 sticking to it and I think will pull off the work 
 all right. 
 
 The officials of the French Army showed a 
 high appreciation of the value of Mr. Norton's 
 services. Early in the war he received the 
 Croix de Guerre, the Journal Officiel, in the 
 announcement signed by General Petain, the 
 commander of the 2d Army, referring to his 
 services as follows: 
 
 He gave proof of the greatest devotion and 
 finest courage, by himself driving his cars day
 
 RICHARD NORTON'S MOTOR CORPS 127 
 
 and night, through dangerous zones and by 
 giving to all his section an example of endur- 
 ance carried to the point of complete exhaus- 
 tion of his strength. 
 
 After the work of Mr. Norton's corps at Ver- 
 dun was completed, the members as a body 
 were cited in the army orders of the day for 
 their bravery and devotion in caring for the 
 wounded. "II n'est plus un seul de ses mem- 
 bres," concluded the citation, "qui ne soit un 
 modele de sang-froid et d'abnegation. Plusieurs 
 d'entre eux ont etc blesses." Finally in the 
 spring of 1917 the Cross of the Legion of Honor, 
 the highest decoration to be won in France by 
 a foreigner, was presented to Mr. Norton. 
 
 When the United States entered the war Mr. 
 Norton had charge of more than a hundred am- 
 bulances on the western battle-front, and was 
 arranging for two additional sections of forty 
 men each. He was urged to accept a commis- 
 sion as major in the United States Army and 
 to continue in control of the ambulance corps 
 which he had created and which he had man- 
 aged with untiring devotion and with admira- 
 ble results for two and a half years. He de-
 
 128 AMERICAN AMBULANCES IN FRANCE 
 
 clined the offer, however, and in September, 
 1917, retired from the service. Early in Au- 
 gust, 1918, he died suddenly in Paris of menin- 
 gitis.
 
 XIV 
 THE WORK OF MR. ANDREW'S CORPS 
 
 T7NTIRELY distinct from the Motor-Ambu- 
 *' lance Corps, of which Richard Norton was 
 the chief, was the Field Service of the American 
 Ambulance, of which A. Piatt Andrew was the 
 Inspector-General. Mr. Andrew was one of the 
 contingent of American volunteers who arrived 
 in Paris early in 1915. He was a man of ex- 
 perience and culture. After being graduated 
 at Princeton in 1893 he had studied in Ger- 
 many and in Paris, and from 1900 to 1909 he 
 was an instructor and assistant professor of 
 economics at Harvard. For the two following 
 years he was Assistant Secretary of the United 
 States Treasury. 
 
 To the energy and administrative skill of Mr. 
 Andrew were mainly due the organization and 
 development of the Field Service of the Ameri- 
 can Ambulance in France, the full story of 
 which, told in detail by the men themselves 
 who formed the corps, is to be found in "Friends 
 
 129
 
 130 AMERICAN AMBULANCES IN FRANCE 
 
 of France." In recognition of his services to 
 France, Mr. Andrew, early in 1917, received the 
 Cross of the Legion of Honor, he and Mr. Nor- 
 ton being the only two Americans engaged in 
 ambulance work upon whom this distinction 
 had been conferred up to that time. 
 
 By the spring of 1915 a sufficient number of 
 cars and drivers had been assembled in Paris 
 to justify the request that the French authori- 
 ties give the American Ambulance a place at 
 the front. The request was complied with, and 
 by the end of April three sections, each compris- 
 ing about twenty American cars, and all with 
 American volunteer drivers, were in operation, 
 one stationed at Dunkirk, another hi Lorraine 
 and a third in the Vosges. 
 
 From these small beginnings the Field Ser- 
 vice of the American Ambulance developed 
 rapidly, until nearly two years later, in Janu- 
 ary, 1917, only a short time before the United 
 States entered the war, Mr. Andrew, summariz- 
 ing the work done, could write as follows to the 
 Princeton Alumni Weekly: 
 
 We have already more than 200 cars driven 
 by American volunteers, mostly university men,
 
 THE WORK OF MR. ANDREW'S CORPS 131 
 
 grouped in sections which are attached to divi- 
 sions of the French army. These sections have 
 served at the front in Flanders, on the Somme, 
 on the Aisne, in Champagne, at Verdun (five 
 sections, including 120 cars at the height of the 
 battle), in Lorraine and in reconquered Alsace, 
 and one of our veteran sections has received the 
 signal tribute from the French army staff of 
 being attached to the French Army of the 
 Orient in the Balkans. We are now on the 
 point of enlarging our service for the last lap 
 of the war, and a considerable number of new 
 places are available. 
 
 Every American has reason to be proud of 
 the chapter which these few hundred American 
 youths have written into the history of this 
 prodigious period. Each of the several sections 
 of the American Ambulance Field Service as a 
 whole and fifty-four of their individual members 
 have been decorated by the French army with 
 the Croix de Guerre or the Medaille Militaire 
 for valor in the performance of their work. 
 
 It was obvious that young college men formed 
 the most available class for this service, which 
 called for leisure and certain financial resources, 
 in addition to initiative and intelligence. A 
 knowledge of the mechanics of a motor-car and 
 the ability to speak French were of course addi- 
 tional and valuable assets. Mr. Norton even 
 considered it essential that his men should
 
 132 AMERICAN AMBULANCES IN FRANCE 
 
 know some French. In a letter to the secretary 
 and treasurer of his corps in London, Mr. 
 H. D. Morrison, he wrote: 
 
 Many of the writers whose letters I have 
 sent you express a delightful confidence that 
 they can learn enough of the vernacular on 
 their voyage out to render their service effec- 
 tive. It is a shame to dash cold water on such 
 pleasing beliefs, but the fact is they are hope- 
 lessly wrong. They are like the man who, 
 when asked if he played the violin, replied "I 
 don't know; I have never tried." Still the gen- 
 eral spirit of the letters is fine. 
 
 The young college men of the country made 
 a splendid response to Mr. Andrew's appeals. 
 As given in the list at the end of "Friends 
 of France," the members of the American Am- 
 bulance who had been in the Field Service down 
 to October, 1916, numbered 349. Of this num- 
 ber 264 men were representatives of forty-eight 
 American universities, colleges and schools, and 
 of two foreign universities, Paris and Cam- 
 bridge. Of these 264 men there were 89 from 
 Harvard, 31 from Princeton, 30 from Yale, 11 
 from Dartmouth, 8 from the University of 
 Pennsylvania, 7 from Columbia, 6 from the
 
 THE WORK OF MR. ANDREW'S CORPS 133 
 
 Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 5 from 
 Amherst, and from 1 to 4 from dozens of other 
 institutions, from the University of California 
 in the West to Bowdoin in the East. Eighteen 
 of these men were American Rhodes Scholars 
 from Oxford. The non-college men in the 
 group, eighty-five in number, were, almost 
 without an exception, of the same high spirit 
 and of the same fine type as their fellows. 
 
 The duties which all the men in the Field 
 Service of the American Ambulance were re- 
 quired to perform involved hardships, depriva- 
 tions, and often great dangers. Three of them 
 were killed in service Richard N. Hall, of Ann 
 Arbor, Mich., Henry M. Suckley, of Rhine- 
 beck, N. Y., and Edward J. Kelley, of Phila- 
 delphia. Many of them were wounded, two so 
 severely and under such circumstances as to 
 win for them the most coveted decoration that 
 the French Army has to bestow, the Medaille 
 Militaire, which carried with it the Croix de 
 Guerre avec Palme. They were William M. 
 Barber, of Toledo, Ohio, and Roswell S. San- 
 ders, of Newburyport, Mass.
 
 XV 
 
 THE DEATH OF RICHARD HALL 
 
 THE first section of the American ambu- 
 lance to reach the front in April, 1915, 
 had its headquarters at the beginning at the 
 town of Saint-Maurice, on the headwaters of 
 the Moselle, about fifteen miles north of Bel- 
 fort, near the Swiss frontier. At first number- 
 ing only ten ambulances, the section was soon 
 increased to twenty, when it was found that the 
 light but strong American cars could replace the 
 mules and farm-wagons which up to that time 
 had been used to transport the wounded over the 
 mountain roads, with their heavy grades, from 
 the dressing-stations behind the firing-lines to 
 the hospitals. Later the headquarters of the 
 section were moved nearer the firing-lines to 
 Moosch, in the valley of the river Thur, which, 
 flowing in a southeasterly direction, emptied 
 into the Rhine. From the mountain heights- 
 the front-line French trenches overlooked the 
 
 134
 
 THE DEATH OF RICHARD HALL 135 
 
 broad Rhine valley to the east, Mulhausen and 
 Colmar being within full view. The ten miles 
 or so between Saint-Maurice and the valley of 
 the Thur included the watershed between the 
 Moselle and the Rhine and the boundary-line 
 between France and Germany. 
 
 One of the most popular men in this Alsace 
 section was Richard N. Hall, of Ann Arbor, 
 Michigan. Immediately after being graduated 
 at Dartmouth in June, 1915, Hall had gone to 
 France and had joined the American Ambulance 
 Field Service, becoming a member of the third 
 section in Alsace. Under the title "Christmas 
 Eve, 1915," Waldo Peirce, of Bangor, Maine, 
 in "Friends of France," described the circum- 
 stances under which Hall met his death, and 
 indicated the affection in which he was held by 
 his mates: 
 
 All this time, as in all the past months, 
 Richard Nelville Hall calmly drove his car up 
 the winding, shell-swept artery of the mountain 
 of war, past crazed mules, broken-down artil- 
 lery carts, swearing drivers, stricken horses, 
 wounded stragglers still able to hobble, past 
 long convoys of Boche prisoners, silent, de- 
 scending in twos, guarded by a handful of men,
 
 136 AMERICAN AMBULANCES IN FRANCE 
 
 past all the personnel of war, great and small 
 (for there is but one road, one road on which to 
 travel, one road for the enemy to shell), past 
 abris, bomb-proofs, subterranean huts, to arrive 
 at the posies de secours, where silent men moved 
 mysteriously in the mist under the great trees, 
 where the cars were loaded with an ever-ready 
 supply of still more quiet figures (though some 
 made sounds), mere bundles in blankets. 
 
 Hall saw to it that those quiet bundles were 
 carefully and rapidly installed, right side up, 
 for instance, for it is dark and the brancardiers 
 are dull folks, deadened by the dead they carry; 
 then rolled down into the valley below, where 
 little towns bear stolidly their daily burden of 
 shells wantonly thrown from somewhere in 
 Bocheland over the mountain to somewhere in 
 France the bleeding bodies in the car a mere 
 corpuscle in the full crimson stream, the ever- 
 rolling tide from the trenches to the hospital, 
 of the blood of life and the blood of death. 
 
 Once there, his wounded unloaded, Dick 
 Hall filled his gasolene tank and calmly rolled 
 again on his way. Two of his comrades had 
 been wounded the day before, but Dick Hall 
 never faltered. He slept where and when he 
 could, in his car, at the poste, on the floor of our 
 temporary kitchen at Moosch dry blankets- 
 wet blankets blankets of mud blankets of 
 blood; contagion was pedantry microbes a 
 myth. 
 
 At midnight Christmas Eve, he left the val- 
 ley to get his load of wounded for the last time.
 
 Richard Hall.
 
 THE DEATH OF RICHARD HALL 137 
 
 Alone, ahead of him, two hours of lonely driv- 
 ing up the mountain. Perhaps he was thinking 
 of other Christmas Eves, perhaps of his distant 
 home, and of those who were thinking of him. 
 
 Matter, the next American to pass, found 
 him by the roadside halfway up the mountain. 
 His face was calm and his hands still in posi- 
 tion to grasp the wheel. Matter, and Jennings, 
 who came a little later, bore him tenderly back 
 in Matter's car to Moosch, where his brother, 
 Louis Hall, learned what had happened. 
 
 A shell had struck his car and killed him 
 instantly, painlessly. A chance shell in a thou- 
 sand had struck him at his post, in the morn- 
 ing of his youth. 
 
 The body of Richard Hall was buried with 
 all the honors of war in the valley of Saint- 
 Amarin, his grave being next to that of a 
 French officer who fell the same morning. At 
 the end of the service Hall's citation was read 
 and the Croix de Guerre was pinned to his 
 coffin. A translation of the latter half of the 
 address of the surgeon-in-chief of the 66th 
 Division, Dr. Georges, follows: 
 
 Barely graduated from Dartmouth College, 
 in the noble enthusiasms of his youth he brought 
 to France the invaluable cooperation of his
 
 138 AMERICAN AMBULANCES IN FRANCE 
 
 charitable heart coming hither to gather up 
 on the battlefields of Alsace those of our gallant 
 troops who were wounded fighting for their 
 beloved country. 
 
 He died like a "Chevalier de la Bienfaisance," 
 like an American, while engaged in a work of 
 kindness and Christian charity ! 
 
 To the dear ones whom he has left in his 
 own land, in Michigan, to his grief-stricken 
 parents, to his older brother who displays here 
 among us such stoicism in his grief, our respect 
 and our expressions of sorrow are most sincere 
 and heartfelt. 
 
 Driver Richard Hall, you are to be laid to 
 rest here, in the shadow of the tri-colored flag, 
 beside all these brave fellows, whose gallantry 
 you have emulated. You are justly entitled to 
 make one of their consecrated battalion ! Your 
 body alone, gloriously mutilated, disappears; 
 your soul has ascended to God; your memory 
 remains in our hearts imperishable ! French- 
 men do not forget ! 
 
 Driver Richard Hall farewell !
 
 XVI 
 
 AROUND BOIS-LE-PRfeTRE, THE "FOREST OP 
 DEATH" 
 
 PONT-A-MOUSSON, which became the 
 headquarters for ten months of Section 2 
 of the Field Service of the American Ambulance, 
 is near the Lorraine border, at the apex of a tri- 
 angle at the base of which are Nancy and Toul. 
 It is on the Moselle River, and lies only a dozen 
 or so miles east of Seicheprey, where the Ameri- 
 can soldiers first came in conflict with the Ger- 
 mans. The section consisted of twenty cars, 
 and the Americans in charge of them numbered 
 twenty-four, under the leadership of Edward 
 Van D., or, as he was more commonly called, 
 Ned, Salisbury, of Chicago. Constant and vio- 
 lent fighting in the near-by region in and around 
 Bois-le-Pretre, the "Forest of Death," the Ger- 
 mans called it, kept the section busy during the 
 summer of 1915, Pont-a-Mousson and the 
 neighboring towns and villages being frequently 
 
 139
 
 140 AMERICAN AMBULANCES IN FRANCE 
 
 under shell-fire. The section began its work 
 in April, at first under the direction of French 
 orderlies. The Americans, however, were so 
 quick to learn, and adapted themselves to their 
 new duties so readily, that in a short tune the 
 French section was transferred to another post 
 and the Americans were left in sole charge of 
 the work. 
 
 Two of the members of this section have left 
 a full record of its personnel and of its daily 
 activities James R. McConnell, of Carthage, 
 North Carolina, and Leslie Buswell, of Glouces- 
 ter, Massachusetts. McConnell's narrative was 
 printed in the Outlook for September, 1915, with 
 an introduction by Colonel Roosevelt; and the 
 paper was so full of information and was written 
 with such vividness, freshness and humor, that 
 it deserved all the praise it received. The article 
 was reprinted in "Friends of France." Here 
 is McConnell's picture of the scene when the 
 shelling was active: 
 
 It was a day when the shelling seemed to be 
 general, for shrapnel and small 77 shells were 
 also bursting at intervals over and in a little 
 town one passes through in order to avoid a
 
 AROUND THE "FOREST OF DEATH" 141 
 
 more heavily bombarded outer route on the 
 way to the postes de secours. It was magnifi- 
 cent descending the hill from the postes that 
 afternoon. To the left French 75 shells were 
 in rapid action; and one could see the explosion 
 of the German shells just over the crest of the 
 long ridge where the batteries were firing. It 
 was a clear, sparkling day, and against the 
 vivid green of the hills, across the winding 
 river, the little white puffs of shrapnel explod- 
 ing over the road below were in perfect relief, 
 while from the red-tiled roofs of the town, 
 nestling in the valley below, tall columns of 
 black smoke spurted up where the large shells 
 struck. Little groups of soldiers, the color of 
 whose uniforms added greatly to the picture, 
 were crowded against the low stone walls lining 
 the road to observe the firing; and one sensed 
 the action and felt the real excitement of the 
 sort of war one imagines instead of the uninter- 
 esting horror of the cave-dweller combats that 
 are the rule in this war. 
 
 In contrast with the foregoing is McConnelFs 
 description of the night-work of the American 
 ambulance drivers: 
 
 The work at night is quite eerie, and on 
 moonless nights quite difficult. No lights are 
 allowed, and the inky black way ahead seems 
 packed with a discordant jumble of sounds as 
 the never-ending artillery and ravitaillement
 
 142 AMERICAN AMBULANCES IN FRANCE 
 
 trains rattle along. One creeps past convoy 
 after convoy, past sentinels who cry, "Halte la ! " 
 and then whisper an apologetic "Passez" when 
 they make out the ambulance; and it is only 
 in the dazzling light of the illuminating rockets 
 that shoot into the air and sink slowly over the 
 trenches that one can see to proceed with any 
 speed. 
 
 It is at night, too, that our hardest work 
 comes, for that is usually the time when attacks 
 and counter-attacks are made and great num- 
 bers of men are wounded. Sometimes all 
 twenty of the Section cars will be in service. 
 It is then that one sees the most frightfully 
 wounded: the men with legs and arms shot 
 away, mangled faces, and hideous body wounds. 
 It is a time when men die in the ambulances 
 before they reach the hospitals, and I believe 
 nearly every driver in the Section has had at 
 least one distressing experience of that sort. 
 
 Through all the excitement, however, these 
 young Americans preserved their characteristic 
 traits. Thus McConnell notes: 
 
 No matter how long the war lasts, I do not 
 believe that the members of Section Y will lose 
 any of their native ways, attitudes, or tastes. 
 They will remain just as American as ever. 
 Why, they still fight for a can of American 
 tobacco or a box of cigarettes that comes from 
 the States, when such a rare and appreciated
 
 AROUND THE "FOREST OF DEATH" 143 
 
 article does turn up, and papers and magazines 
 from home are sure to go the rounds, finding 
 themselves at length in the hands of English- 
 reading soldiers in the trenches. I never could 
 understand the intense grip that the game of 
 baseball seems to possess, but it holds to some 
 members of the Section with a cruel pertinacity. 
 One very dark night, a few days ago, two of us 
 were waiting at an advanced paste de secours. 
 The rifle and artillery fire was constant, illu- 
 minating rockets shot into the air, and now 
 and then one could distinguish the heavy dull 
 roar of a mine or torpille detonating in the 
 trenches. War in all its engrossing detail was 
 very close. Suddenly my friend turned to me 
 and, with a sigh, remarked, " Gee ! I wish I 
 knew how the Red Sox were making out !" 
 
 Thursday, the 22d of July, 1915, was a mem- 
 orable day for the Americans in Pont-a-Mous- 
 son. The town was heavily shelled, and it was 
 only by the narrowest margin that some of 
 them were not killed. As it was, they lost their 
 faithful orderly and general servant, Mignot, 
 to whom they were all greatly attached. 
 
 A graphic narrative of the occurrences of that 
 day is to be found in one of the letters that 
 make up the book called "Ambulance No. 10," 
 by Leslie Buswell, of Gloucester, Massachusetts,
 
 144 AMERICAN AMBULANCES IN FRANCE 
 
 a member of the section. Under date of Pont-a- 
 Mousson, July 24, 1915, Buswell wrote: 
 
 . . . We got back to lunch about 12 o'clock, 
 and Mignot, our indefatigable friend in the 
 position of a general servant, upbraided us for 
 our unpunctuality, etc. 
 
 We had hardly finished lunch when a shell 
 burst some twenty metres away and we hur- 
 riedly took to the cellar, while eleven more 
 shells exploded all around our headquarters, 
 or "caserne," as we call it. We then went for 
 a round of inspection and found that the twelve 
 shells had all fallen on our side of the road and 
 were all within forty or fifty metres of us. 
 This made us feel pretty sure that the shells 
 were meant for us or for our motors. Schroder* 
 and I discussed the matter, and came to the 
 conclusion that we did not like the situation 
 very much, and that if the Germans sent per- 
 haps six shells, all at once, we should many of 
 us get caught. I was very tired, and at about 
 one-thirty went to sleep and slept until five- 
 thirty, when I went to dinner at the caserne. 
 
 The evening meal over, an argument started 
 about the merits of a periodical called Le Mot 
 (do you know it?) a kind of futurist paper. 
 After a rapid-fire commentary from one and 
 then another of us, which continued until 
 about eight-thirty, Schroder and I decided to 
 go to our rooms to bed. We were walking 
 
 * Bernard N. P. Schroder, the only representative in the American 
 Ambulance Field Service of Northwestern University.
 
 AROUND THE "FOREST OF DEATH" 145 
 
 home when I reminded him that he had been 
 asked to tell four of our fellows who slept in a 
 house near by to be sure that no light could be 
 seen through the shutters; so turning back we 
 rapped on the window and heard merry laugh- 
 ter and were greeted with a cheery invitation 
 to join the nine w T ho had gathered inside. It 
 seems that one of them, who had been on duty 
 at Montauville, had managed to get some fresh 
 bread and butter and jam, and they were cele- 
 brating the event! We had to decline their 
 friendly hospitality, however, as we wanted to 
 get some sleep. 
 
 I had just got my boots off when whish-sh- 
 sh-bang! bang! bang! bang! four huge shells 
 burst a little way down the road towards our 
 caserne. Thirty seconds after came two more 
 five minutes later six more and then we 
 heard a screaming woman ejaculating hysteri- 
 cally "C'est les Americains." Schroder and I 
 looked at each other without speaking. We 
 hurriedly dressed and started to run to the 
 caserne women and soldiers shouting to us to 
 stay where we were; but rushing on through 
 the fog, smoke and dust, we reached head- 
 quarters. There we found the rest of the Sec- 
 tion in the cellar, and hurriedly going over those 
 present, realized that two were absent Mignot 
 and the mechanic of the French officer attached 
 to us. 
 
 Mignot, it was found, had been killed by one 
 of the shells; also two women, while several
 
 146 AMERICAN AMBULANCES IN FRANCE 
 
 others, including the mechanic, were badly 
 wounded. The narrative continues: 
 
 Ogilvie* got his car and we got our stretchers 
 out to take away the blesses. There were a 
 few of us grouped about some seven or eight 
 and near with the wounded just put on 
 stretchers, when "Look out!" Bang! Bang! 
 Bang ! three more shells. 
 
 We had already thrown ourselves on the 
 ground, and then, finding we were still alive, 
 feverishly loaded the car. "Good God! I've 
 stalled it," said the driver then the cranking 
 would it never start try again thank Heaven, 
 it was off ! Hardly thirty seconds after, whish- 
 sh-bang ! bang I two more came. We retired to 
 a cellar for a few minutes, as the three dead 
 could stay there while it was so terribly dan- 
 gerous. At last we emerged and were about 
 to lift Mignot's body when both arms moved. 
 Was he alive, after all? No, it was only the 
 electric wires he was lying on that had stimu- 
 lated his muscles. The car turned the corner 
 with the three dead, and we ran back to the 
 caserne. 
 
 There we found the rest of our Section very 
 shaken indeed. A shell had burst just outside 
 of the house where the nine were making merry 
 and the violence of the impact had hurled all 
 of them to the ground. Two feet nearer and 
 the whole lot would have been killed. 
 
 * Francis D. Ogilvie, of Liadfield, Sussex, England.
 
 AROUND THE "FOREST OF DEATH" 147 
 
 As a result of this bombardment and of an 
 attack by the Germans on the town, the head- 
 quarters of Section 2 were moved the next day 
 to Dieulouard, five or six miles to the south of 
 Pont-a-Mousson.
 
 XVII 
 IN THE GREAT BATTLE FOR VERDUN 
 
 WHEN in February, 1916, the German army 
 of the Crown Prince began its attack 
 upon the French troops protecting Verdun, the 
 men composing Section 2 of the American Am- 
 bulance were hastily transferred from the neigh- 
 borhood of Pont-a-Mousson to Verdun. In the 
 previous month Section 3 had been moved from 
 its station in Alsace to the Lorraine front, and 
 the men of this section were also at Verdun. 
 The need of more ambulances finally became so 
 great that two additional American sections 
 were sent to the neighborhood of Verdun. 
 
 Frank Hoyt Gailor, of Memphis, Tennessee, 
 a member of Section 2, contributed to the 
 Cornhill Magazine for July, 1916, a vivid de- 
 scription of the journey of the section to a vil- 
 lage near Verdun, by way of Bar-le-Duc. From 
 this paper as it appears in full in "Friends of 
 France," a few paragraphs may be quoted: 
 
 We started from Bar-le-Duc about noon [on 
 February 22, 1916], and it took us six hours 
 
 148
 
 IN THE GREAT BATTLE FOR VERDUN 149 
 
 to make forty miles through roads covered with 
 snow, swarming with troops, and all but blocked 
 by convoys of food carts and sections of trucks. 
 Of course, we knew that there was an attack in 
 the neighborhood of Verdun, but we did not 
 know who was making it or how it was going. 
 Then about four o'clock in the short winter 
 twilight we passed two or three regiments of 
 French colonial troops on the march with all 
 their field equipment. I knew who and what 
 they were by the curious Eastern smell that I 
 had always before associated with camels and 
 circuses. They were lined up on each side of 
 the road around their soup kitchens, which were 
 smoking busily, and I had a good look at them 
 as we drove along. 
 
 It was the first time I had seen an African 
 army in the field, and though they had had a 
 long march, they were cheerful and in high 
 spirits at the prospect of battle. They were all 
 young, active men, and of all colors and com- 
 plexions, from blue-eyed blonds to shiny blacks. 
 They all wore khaki and brown shrapnel casques 
 bearing the trumpet insignia of the French 
 sharpshooter. We were greeted with laughter 
 and chaff, for the most part, in an unknown 
 chatter, but now and again some one would 
 say, "Hee, hee, Ambulance Americaine," or 
 "Yes, Ingliish, good-bye." . . . 
 
 At about six in the evening we reached our 
 destination some forty miles northeast of Bar- 
 le-Duc. The little village where we stopped 
 had been a railroad centre until the day before,
 
 150 AMERICAN AMBULANCES IN FRANCE 
 
 when the Germans started bombarding it. 
 Now the town was evacuated, and the smoking 
 station deserted. The place had ceased to 
 exist, except for a hospital which was estab- 
 lished on the southern edge of the town in a 
 lovely old chateau, overlooking the Meuse. 
 We were called up to the hospital as soon as 
 we arrived to take such wounded as could be 
 moved to the nearest available rail-head, which 
 was ten miles away, on the main road, and four 
 miles south of Verdun. We started out in con- 
 voy, but with the then conditions of traffic, it 
 was impossible to stick together, and it took 
 some of us till five o'clock the next morning to 
 make the trip. That was the beginning of the 
 attack for us, and the work of "evacuating" the 
 wounded to the railway stations went steadily 
 on until March 15. It was left to the driver 
 to decide how many trips it was physically pos- 
 sible for him to make in each twenty-four 
 hours. There were more wounded than could 
 be carried, and no one could be certain of keep- 
 ing any kind of schedule with the roads as they 
 then were. 
 
 Sometimes we spent five or six hours wait- 
 ing at a cross-road, while columns of troops 
 and their equipment filed steadily by. Some- 
 times at night we could make a trip in two 
 hours that had taken us ten in daylight. Some- 
 times, too, we crawled slowly to a station only 
 to find it deserted, shells falling, and the hospi- 
 tal moved to some still more distant point of 
 the line. Situations and conditions changed
 
 IN THE GREAT BATTLE FOR VERDUN 151 
 
 from day to day almost from hour to hour. 
 One day it was sunshine and spring, with roads 
 six inches deep in mud, no traffic, and nothing 
 to remind one of war, except the wounded in 
 the car and the distant roar of the guns, which 
 sounded like a giant beating a carpet. The 
 next day it was winter again, with mud turned 
 to ice, the roads blocked with troops, and the 
 Germans turning hell loose with their heavy 
 guns.
 
 XVIII 
 WILLIAM BARBER'S M^DAILLE MILITAIRE 
 
 BEGINNING on February 21, 1916, the 
 battle for Verdun, with the repeated Ger- 
 man attacks and the French counter-attacks, 
 lasted for weeks and even months. One of the 
 most thrilling experiences of the American Am- 
 bulance drivers was that of William Barber, of 
 Toledo, Ohio, who was the only representative 
 of Oberlin in the section which had come to 
 Verdun from Alsace. The story begins with 
 the following selections from the letter of a 
 Harvard ambulance driver to his uncle, which 
 was printed anonymously in the Red Cross 
 Magazine for October, 1916. Accompanying 
 the letter, which was in the form of a diary- 
 vivid memoranda of incidents during six suc- 
 cessive June nights was an injunction "not to 
 let dad know about this, for it would w 
 him." Here is the writer's description of one 
 night's experience: 
 
 Fourth Night: Filled up gas and oil and off 
 again: headquarters changed into Verdun be- 
 
 152
 
 BARBER'S MfiDAILLE MILITAIRE 153 
 
 cause of bombardment of suburb. Black as 
 pitch and heavy rain. Heavy traffic of all 
 kinds on road. Terrible driving. Heavy fir- 
 ing; dead horses and smashed wagons, etc., 
 strewed all along. O. K. to post. On way 
 back met great tangle in road: six horses killed 
 in one spot; dead and wounded men and busted 
 wagons all mixed up in middle of road. Got 
 out; was in act of cutting dead horses' traces 
 with knife; "bang" without warning and another 
 in the same spot. Thrown down among the 
 tangle; face in a pool of horses' gore; showered 
 with rocks and stuff of every kind. Sharp pain 
 in shoulder. Thought had got one; turned out 
 to be only a bruise. Another man in back of 
 me same; more wounded, groaning all around; 
 don't know how many dead; could not hear 
 for two hours, and still have ringing in my 
 ears. Saw there was nothing to do but wait 
 until firing was over. Ran back in ditch in 
 side of road and got behind tree and big rock. 
 More came, but I was O. K. . . . Let up for 
 a minute; ran through debris to stop other cars 
 coming in opposite direction. Met two just on 
 other side; dove under car; shell went off pretty 
 near. Some one jumped off car and followed 
 me; it was Paul. We stayed there a couple of 
 minutes and talked; will never forget it- 
 He got back to headquarters safely, running 
 at high speed, "low not working," with two 
 shrapnel dents in his helmet and many scan
 
 154 AMERICAN AMBULANCES IN FRANCE 
 
 on his car. The next night he rescued a 
 wounded comrade, young Barber, as thus nar- 
 rated: 
 
 Fifth Night. Got to post O. K. Heavy 
 traffic; firing; road stinking of dead flesh. Orr 
 way back heard forlorn cry of Barber. Stopped 
 and found him in arms of Frenchman by side 
 of road. Nerves gone so he couldn't talk 
 straight. Car had been hit; he was wounded; 
 pumping hell out of road ahead where his car 
 was. He had crawled back; was afraid to let 
 him wait. Dragged him into front alongside 
 of me and made a dash; never drove so fast in 
 all my life. Passed his car; whole back shot 
 off and wheels gone. Got to last bridge and 
 found artillery coming across in opposite direc- 
 tion. Crawled across one side on remains of a 
 railroad track. Grabbed leading horses of a 
 battery by bridle, and jammed them over on 
 one side of road, commanding riders to wait; 
 must have thought I was an officer; because 
 they did; hurried back and drove across. Got 
 to headquarters O. K. and got Barber into 
 dressing room. Worst wound was on his back, 
 but a glancing one. He will pull through. 
 
 The sequel to this drama, which came so 
 near having a tragic ending, is to be found in 
 the following selections from a letter dated 
 June 30, which Barber wrote from the hospital
 
 BARBER'S MEDAILLE MILITAIRE 155 
 
 to his family and which is printed entire in 
 "Friends of France": 
 
 Four nights ago I had a pretty narrow es- 
 cape. I can mention no names here, but this 
 is the gist of the story: 
 
 I was driving my car with three wounded 
 soldiers in it along a road that was being shelled. 
 Well, I got in the midst of a pretty hot shower, 
 so I stopped my car and got under it. A few 
 minutes later I supposed it was blowing over, 
 so I got out. I had no sooner done so than I 
 heard one of those big obus coming, the loudest 
 I had ever heard. I ran to the front of my 
 car, crouching down in front of the radiator. 
 When it burst it struck the car. My three 
 soldiers were killed. I was hurt only a little. 
 I am not disfigured in any way. It just tore 
 my side and legs a bit. 
 
 The French treated me wonderfully. I suc- 
 ceeded in getting the next American Ambu- 
 lance driven by Wheeler (a great boy) who 
 
 took me to the City of where our poste is. 
 
 Here I was given first aid, and the Medecin chef 
 personally conducted me in an American Am- 
 bulance, in the middle of the night, to a very 
 good hospital. They say I have the best doc- 
 tor in France in Paris. 
 
 Well, I woke up the next day in a bed, and 
 have been recuperating ever since. Every one 
 is wonderful to me. General Petain, second to 
 Joffre, has stopped in to shake hands with me, 
 and many are my congratulations, too, for above
 
 156 AMERICAN AMBULANCES IN FRANCE 
 
 my bed hangs the Medaille Militaire t the greatest 
 honor the French can give any one. Really, I 
 am proud, although I don't deserve it any more 
 than the rest. Please excuse my egotism. 
 
 This letter identifies the rescuer of Barber as 
 Walter H. Wheeler, of Yonkers, N. Y., who had 
 been with Barber in Alsace before coming to 
 Verdun. After he had turned Barber over to 
 the medical men, Wheeler was sent back to get 
 the wounded from Barber's car. But he found 
 that the same shell that had wrecked the car 
 and had injured Barber had killed the three 
 wounded soldiers who were in the car. 
 
 For their courageous work through these 
 dreadful nights the entire section received an 
 army citation and as a body the Croix de 
 Guerre. Wheeler and three of his companions 
 received individual citations and each the Croix 
 de Guerre. The Medaille Militaire which was 
 awarded to Barber carried with it the Croix de 
 Guerre avec Palme. The only other driver in 
 the American Ambulance Field Service upon 
 whom the Medaille Militaire had been bestow r ed, 
 up to November, 1916, was Roswell S. Sanders, 
 of Newburyport, Mass.
 
 XIX 
 
 TWO YALE MEN AT VERDUN 
 
 AMONG the Americans who won distinction 
 L *- by their devotion to their difficult and 
 dangerous duties as drivers of ambulances at 
 Verdun were several Yale men, brief records of 
 whom are available. Elmore McNeill Bost- 
 wick, of St. Louis, having completed his year's 
 work at college by Christmas, 1915, sailed for 
 France, and with a classmate, George K. 
 Haupt, of Buffalo, became an ambulance driver 
 in what was called the "Formation Harjes," to 
 which was awarded the Croix de Guerre for its 
 services at Verdun. Here is a paragraph from 
 a letter from Bostwick, which appeared in the 
 Yale Alumni Weekly, describing his sensations 
 during an enemy attack from the air: 
 
 After breakfast, just before we started out, 
 I was treated to my first air attack. Eight 
 German aeroplanes came over the town and 
 attempted to destroy the military headquarters. 
 As we were right next door to them, it was 
 rather disturbing. An air attack is the most 
 
 157
 
 158 AMERICAN AMBULANCES IN FRANCE 
 
 nerve racking thing in the world. You see 
 these little things, looking for all the world like 
 hornets, apparently exactly over your head. 
 You hear a whistling sound, lie on the ground 
 flat on your face and wait for the explosion 
 which comes about three seconds after you first 
 hear the bomb coming. I can tell you you do 
 a lot of thinking in those three seconds, and 
 each time you feel as though the bomb was 
 going to hit you right in the small of the back. 
 They dropped sixteen bombs that morning, 
 but no one was hurt, though one dropped within 
 fifty feet of where I was lying. 
 
 This reference to the "Formation Harjes" 
 calls for a word of explanation. The first lot of 
 ambulances which the American Red Cross sent 
 abroad consisted of seventeen Ford cars, the 
 cost of which was met by contributions from 
 students at Yale and Harvard, twelve being the 
 gift of Yale and five of Harvard. Writing in 
 the spring of 1916 of the work which these cars 
 had accomplished, Mr. H. Herman Harjes, 
 president of the American Relief Clearing 
 House in Paris and the official representative 
 for France of the American Red Cross, said: 
 
 The original American Red Cross ambulance 
 unit is doing very good and sacisiartory work
 
 TWO YALE MEN AT VERDUN 15P 
 
 in every respect. It has transported up to 
 date about 16,000 wounded. All the men are 
 very devoted and full of energy, and the service 
 they are rendering is much appreciated. 
 
 The French authorities having expressed a 
 desire that the general control of all the Ameri- 
 can ambulances and drivers be placed in the 
 hands of the American Red Cross, the arrange- 
 ment was made, the cars remaining, of course, 
 under the immediate direction of the French 
 army officers for service at the front. Mr. 
 Harjes, in the same letter to the American Red 
 Cross, explained the transfer under this arrange- 
 ment, of Mr. Norton's Motor Ambulance Corps, 
 as follows: 
 
 A unit known as the "American Volunteer 
 Motor Ambulance Corps," having Mr. Richard 
 Norton at its head, has now come under the 
 American Red Cross. His section was, up to 
 quite recently, under the British Red Cross, 
 and has been doing excellent work. . . . All 
 the volunteer American work in the field has 
 been really splendidly done and is extremely 
 appreciated by everybody. 
 
 The following paragraph from a letter from 
 W. P. Clyde, Jr., of the Yale class of 1901,
 
 160 AMERICAN AMBULANCES IN FRANCE 
 
 which also appeared in the Yale Alumni Weekly, 
 gives a glimpse of the spirit which these Ameri- 
 can volunteers brought to their arduous and 
 often perilous work: 
 
 Under these conditions your eyes smart 
 and your throat becomes dry from dust, the 
 fumes and the strain. The air at night on 
 roads near the front is heavy with the smell of 
 burnt powder and also that other odor with 
 which all Verdun reeks of the dead hastily 
 buried, or left as they died, or burned beneath 
 the fallen walls and ruins. We carried wounded, 
 we carried those gone mad from shell-shock, 
 we carried the dying, even the dead. Among 
 the thousands of wounded in our cars were 
 some Germans, and they received from us and 
 in the French dressing stations and field hos- 
 pitals the same care as the others. For the 
 Allies do not hate the poor, half-starved, bullied, 
 and driven German Yokels who now compose 
 the bulk of the German soldiery. Even we 
 whose work is a work of mercy have come to 
 have the greatest hatred for the Heads of the 
 Huns and all that Hundom stands for; besides 
 helping the wounded it is a great satisfaction 
 to every member of our corps to feel that, as 
 perfectly good Americans, we are doing more 
 than just "watching and waiting" by helping 
 the Allies defeat for all tune the attempt of 
 the Hun to enslave the world.
 
 XX 
 
 HENRY SUCKLEY KILLED BY A BOMB 
 
 BY some odd decree of chance an unusual 
 number of Harvard men found themselves 
 in the Vosges section of the American Ambu- 
 lance Field Service; and as one form of diver- 
 sion it amused these young men to call them- 
 selves the Harvard Club of Alsace Reconquise. 
 The club came into being on the night before 
 the Harvard-Yale football game in November, 
 1915, and its official life seems to have ended 
 when the health of the Harvard team was 
 drunk after the result of the game was known. 
 
 First and last there were twenty-five Har- 
 vard men in the membership list of this "club." 
 One of them was Henry M. Suckley, of the 
 class of 1910. Hailing from Rhinebeck, N. Y., 
 Suckley had joined the American Ambulance 
 Field Service in February, 1915, and by good 
 work had become an assistant to his classmate, 
 Levering Hill, when in July, 1915, Hill suc- 
 ceeded Richard Lawrence as the commander of 
 
 161
 
 162 AMERICAN AMBULANCES IN FRANCE 
 
 Section 3. By his coolness and courage in cany- 
 ing the wounded over the shell-swept roads in 
 the Vosges he had won his Croix de Guerre, 
 and he was destined to receive, on the eve of 
 his death, even greater honors. 
 
 In the autumn of 1916 he returned to the 
 United States for the purpose of recruiting a 
 new ambulance section. He succeeded in secur- 
 ing from his friends in the New York Stock Ex- 
 change sufficient funds to purchase and equip 
 twenty motor-ambulances, and with these he 
 returned to France. Meanwhile his old chief, 
 Lovering Hill, had been sent at the head of 
 Section 3 to Saloniki to serve with the French 
 Army in the Orient, the section containing 
 eleven Harvard men, three men from Yale and 
 Princeton respectively, and one each from the 
 universities of Pennsylvania and Virginia. 
 
 The work of this section around Saloniki 
 gave such satisfaction that General Sarrail 
 asked for another; and the cars which Suckley 
 had procured and which were unofficially known 
 as the New York Stock Exchange Unit were 
 formed into Section 10, and under his leader- 
 ship were sent to Saloniki.
 
 HENRY SUCKLEY KILLED BY A BOMB 163 
 
 In the following March [1917] Suckley was 
 killed at a camp near Saloniki by the explosion 
 of a bomb dropped by a German aviator. Two 
 others were killed and several were wounded 
 by the same bomb. Describing the occurrences 
 following the explosion, which took place on the 
 18th, Gordon Ware, a college mate of Suckley 's, 
 wrote in part as follows, his letter intended for 
 private reading only, appearing in the Harvard 
 Alumni Bulletin of May 24, 1917: 
 
 W. cranked up his car and took Henry, 
 smiling and smoking, to K. "If I'm going to 
 pass out, I'll have a cigarette first," he said, the 
 calmest of the lot. The lieutenant's chauffeur, 
 who is the butt of every one, proved himself a 
 real hero and refused aid and transportation 
 until Henry had been attended to. At K. 
 everything possible was done for him, but only 
 his strong constitution enabled him to last the 
 night, an artery having been severed. He suf- 
 fered little and was always conscious, not realiz- 
 ing until the end that he was going. Bright 
 and cheerful, even the doctor broke down when 
 he went. It gives an idea of the man's charm 
 that he could so grip strangers, and it is difficult 
 to measure our regard for him after three 
 months' close association. As a section-leader 
 he worked like a dog, and asked nothing of 
 anyone which he would not do himself. The
 
 164 AMERICAN AMBULANCES IN FRANCE 
 
 hardest thing is that he must go before the sec- 
 tion can make or break itself. The Legion of 
 Honor was wired him. 
 
 Suckley was buried with all military honors. 
 Shortly after, oddly enough, the same German 
 airship which had dropped the bomb that killed 
 Suckley was forced by fire or by engine trouble 
 to descend on the same French camp that had 
 been bombarded, the two Germans surrendering. 
 The air-ship was capsized in landing and burned. 
 Of the two occupants, Mr. Ware wrote: 
 
 The men were white and frightened, uncer- 
 tain as to their reception. As their French was 
 not good they could hardly have been re-assured 
 by a lieutenant's threat to shoot them empha- 
 sizing the point with drawn revolver should 
 their denial that there were bombs in the ma- 
 chine prove false. The officer was a good-look- 
 ing young chap with a keen, American-like 
 face. His non-com, was of the caricatured 
 Prussian type, bull-necked, bullet-headed and 
 brutal in appearance. The officer had three 
 decorations, including the inevitable Iron Cross. 
 " Le moteur est est en panne" he said hesitat- 
 ingly, and claimed that it had been going 
 badly all the morning and at length, catching 
 fir^, had forced his descent, accidentally unsuc- 
 cessful. I think he deliberately capsized it so 
 as to destroy it.
 
 XXI 
 
 A PRINCETON MAN'S EXPERIENCES 
 
 WHEN the war broke out Clarence V. S. 
 Mitchell, of New York, was in the Har- 
 vard Law School, having been graduated from 
 Princeton, in 1913, and from St. Paul's School, 
 Concord, four years earlier. He sailed for Eng- 
 land on the Olympic in September, 1914, to join 
 the American Ambulance service in France. 
 From the letters that he sent to his parents, his 
 father, Clarence Blair Mitchell, has compiled a 
 small volume which he has had privately printed 
 under the title, "With a Military Ambulance 
 in France, 1914-15." A large part of the value 
 of this intimate personal record lies in the fresh- 
 ness and spontaneity of these letters, informal 
 in character and, of necessity, unstudied in 
 form. 
 
 Young Mitchell was exceptionally equipped 
 for his job, for he spoke French fluently and 
 preserved his American sense of humor as a 
 means of counterbalancing the tragic sadness of 
 
 165
 
 166 AMERICAN AMBULANCES IN FRANCE 
 
 many of the scenes and incidents of his daily 
 life. Finding on reaching London that he must 
 be inoculated against typhoid, he notes: 
 
 I saw Dr. D after lunch and he put 
 
 500,000,000 more typhoid germs into me for 
 the sum of one guinea, which is not very much 
 per germ, but seems quite a bit for the labor 
 involved. 
 
 While waiting for his ambulance Mitchell 
 became an orderly in Dr. Blake's hospital at 
 Neuilly. One of his adventures in a Paris sub- 
 way-station is thus described: 
 
 I was sitting next to a woman with a small 
 baby. All of a sudden she let out a yelp, threw 
 the kid to me and ran to the other end of the 
 platform, where she fell on the neck of a sol- 
 dier. I did not know if I was to become an 
 adopted father or not, but I could not drop the 
 kid and sat there very much fussed, trying to 
 amuse it. By evil luck a crowd ol ouvrieres 
 came along and burst into shrieks of laughter. 
 Their remarks were considerably more witty than 
 polite ! By the time the mother came back I 
 was the centre of an amused crowd. Now, if 
 I see any babies around, I don't sit down ! 
 
 By November Mitchell got his ambulance, a 
 big six-cylindered Packard, and was assigned
 
 A PRINCETON MAN'S EXPERIENCES 167 
 
 to a section of the Formation Harjes, with 
 headquarters at the Chateau d'Ayencourt, near 
 Montdidier, under the immediate leadership of 
 Paul Rainey, the big-game hunter, who became 
 his roommate. Four of the party were Prince- 
 ton men, two of whom were doctors. Their 
 principal work was the transportation of 
 wounded soldiers from the railway-station to 
 the military hospital of Val de Grace. Mitchell 
 brought a serene philosophy to bear upon his 
 job. "This ought to be a very healthy life," 
 he notes; "no end of work, and no rum or late 
 hours." He did not escape altogether, how- 
 ever. For early in 1915 he wrote that while he 
 was convalescent from an attack of jaundice, a 
 
 Mrs. H substituted jonquils for the roses 
 
 which she found in his room, in order to make 
 the color scheme in harmony with his com- 
 plexion ! 
 
 Not infrequently Mitchell was near the fir- 
 ing-line. Under a November (1914) date he 
 wrote : 
 
 Thursday Night I am writing this on a 
 board laid on my steering wheel while I'm 
 waiting outside the station for orders. I'm
 
 168 AMERICAN AMBULANCES IN FRANCE 
 
 stuck here till 12 p. M. It's a damp, foggy 
 night, but the sight of the few lights gives a 
 rather Whistler-like touch, and the cannons 
 are booming at short intervals. They worked 
 us for fair this P. M. I made any number of 
 trips to a farm behind the firing line and to 
 Wassy and Dannescourt, two villages, and 
 brought in 40 wounded. Our cars brought 
 in over 200. Off on another trip now, so so- 
 long. 
 
 Back again from a trip to the civil hospital 
 with a couple of wounded. This P. M. on my 
 last trip to Wassy when it was almost dark I 
 passed a battalion of artillery. They were 
 coming over a ridge with the full moon rising 
 behind them, and it was a most gorgeous sil- 
 houette. I also saw the Germans shelling aero- 
 planes. You'd hear a boom and then see a 
 puff of brown smoke burst way up high, but 
 they hit nothing. I didn't get nearer than two 
 miles from our line, but every little bit helps. 
 Our machines are the envy and admiration of 
 every French doctor who sees them. They 
 carry 6 couches, and the stretchers run in on 
 pulleys, which is a new idea to these people. 
 
 There are 1,400 wounded in this station 
 the result of having taken the village of Oncy 
 and having it retaken by the Germans this 
 morning. The French intend making another 
 attack to-night, so to-morrow ought to be a 
 busy day. An old fellow rode in beside me to- 
 day who had been in Algiers four years and we
 
 A PRINCETON MAN'S EXPERIENCES 169 
 
 had a great talk. He was shot lying down, the 
 bullet going in above his shoulder and stopping 
 just above his knee. He was also hit by a 
 spent bullet on his Morocco medal, which 
 pleased him no end, and he was very gay. The 
 station beggars description stretchers every- 
 where and smells and groans rising in chorus. 
 I've just been through giving them chocolate 
 and cigarettes and doing any little thing I 
 could, like taking letters, etc. They seem very 
 grateful, and I enjoy doing it no end. 
 
 It is safe to say that it was Mitchell's custom 
 to bring something besides newspapers with 
 him on his return from trips to Paris, if one 
 may judge from his reception at the hospital 
 on one occasion: 
 
 I have been a good deal in Ward 3, bringing 
 the men papers, etc., and the evening I came 
 back from Paris I went in to see them and was 
 quite pleased to have them let out yells of de- 
 light. In fact they yelled so loud that the doc- 
 tors and three nurses came running in to see if 
 a lamp had upset, and I felt rather foolish, 
 though it was nice to be welcomed back. 
 
 Perhaps the most effective page in Mitchell's 
 letters is the one in which he gives a picture, 
 full of color and ending in a dramatic climax, of
 
 170 AMERICAN AMBULANCES IN FRANCE 
 
 a midnight mass which he and a few of his com- 
 panions attended on Christmas Eve in 1914 in 
 Montdidier: 
 
 We sat around in the smoking-room till 
 
 11.30 P. M., when I took Dr. B , Miss L , 
 
 Miss L , T and myself into midnight 
 
 mass at St. Pierre. I think it was the most 
 impressive service I've ever attended, and only 
 those who have seen the chapel at St. Paul's 
 on "Last Night" can begin to picture it. The 
 church is an old fourteenth century one, with 
 fair vaulting and very massive columns and a 
 good organ with an echo high up at the end of 
 the centre aisle. 
 
 The place was jammed, and I stood with 
 my aviator friends near the back. It must 
 have been a picturesque sight from the altar. 
 The chairs crowded with women and then the 
 aviators, some in the new light-blue uniforms, 
 others in bearskin coats; then two of us in gray- 
 green alongside and the dark splash of the two 
 nurses' cloaks standing out against the red of 
 the soldiers' trousers as they stood behind us in 
 a crowd ten deep the whole width of the church. 
 The lights on the columns and vaulting were 
 beautiful, and when the organ came in to 
 accompany the priest's chanting it seemed 
 almost as if someone were picking the notes 
 out of the moss-grown cracks in the arched 
 roof. War seemed a long way off, but when 
 the bells rang midnight and everything was as
 
 A PRINCETON MAN'S EXPERIENCES 171 
 
 silent as possible, you could hear sobbing all 
 around; and as the last few strokes tolled, three 
 " Err-roums ! " from the 120s at La Boissiere 
 came as clear as could be, and you woke with 
 a start.
 
 PART V 
 
 RELIEF WORK IN BELGIUM AND IN 
 NORTHERN FRANCE
 
 XXII 
 
 HERBERT HOOVER AND "ENGINEERING 
 EFFICIENCY " 
 
 BEFORE 1915 the name of Herbert Hoover 
 was unknown in the United States save 
 to a few mining engineers and financial men 
 interested in mining ventures, and save also to 
 the home circle in the little village of West 
 Branch, Iowa, where he was born in 1874. 
 Educated as a mining engineer at Leland Stan- 
 ford University, where he was graduated in 
 1895, he passed his apprenticeship days in the 
 service of the United States Geological Survey 
 in Arkansas and in the Sierra Nevada Moun- 
 tains, then became an assistant manager of 
 mines in New Mexico and California, and finally 
 acquired a large and varied experience in man- 
 aging mines in West Australia and as chief 
 engineer to the Chinese Bureau of Mines, 
 finally reaching London in 1902. This was 
 quick work to go from college to a partner- 
 ship in a great London mining house in seven 
 
 175
 
 176 RELIEF WORK IN BELGIUM 
 
 years; but Hoover, as the whole world has since 
 come to know, was an exceptional man. He 
 has written a chapter in the history of the 
 Great War which will be read with the deepest 
 interest for hundreds of years to come. 
 
 It is no part of the task of the present writer 
 to describe in detail the work of the Commis- 
 sion for Relief in Belgium which Mr. Hoover 
 organized and directed. The full story may be 
 read in Professor Vernon Kellogg's "Fighting 
 Starvation in Belgium,*' and in his "Headquar- 
 ters Nights." Originally a pacifist and a hu- 
 manitarian by conviction, Mr. Kellogg left 
 Stanford University, where he was Professor 
 of Entomology when the war started, and went 
 abroad to do what he could to help relieve 
 human suffering. He soon joined his friend of 
 many years, Herbert Hoover, in the Commission 
 for Relief in Belgium, and, except for a brief 
 period when he was obliged to resume his uni- 
 versity duties, he remained with the "C. R. B.," 
 as it was called, until the Americans left Bel- 
 gium. After being graduated in 1889 at the 
 university of his native State of Kansas and 
 after having studied at Cornell, Professor Ke!-
 
 "ENGINEERING EFFICIENCY" 177 
 
 passed several years in further study in 
 Leipsic and in Paris. His consequent com- 
 mand of the German tongue made him espe- 
 cially raluable as the representative of the 
 commission at the German headquarters in 
 Belgium, and, when necessary, at the Great 
 Headquarters of the General Staff of the Ger- 
 man Annj. 
 
 Onlj the briefest survey can be made here of 
 the problems that the commission had to solve 
 and of the means that were adopted to solve 
 them. First, however, it may be advanta- 
 geous to quote a paragraph from an address 
 which Mr. Hoover delivered before the New 
 York Chamber of Commerce in February, 1917, 
 for the light that it throws upon the motives 
 of the American volunteers who gave their ser- 
 vices to this great cause: 
 
 The rights or wrongs of neither of these 
 fierce contentions are for me to discuss. It is 
 enough for an American that here, ground be- 
 tween millstones, are millions of helpless people 
 whom America, and America alone, could save. 
 Not only was it our duty, but it was our privi- 
 lege. It was our privilege to forfend infinite 
 suffering from these millions of people, to save
 
 178 RELIEF WORK IN BELGIUM 
 
 millions of lives, and it was our opportunity to 
 demonstrate America's ability to do it in a 
 large, generous and efficient way, befitting our 
 country; but far beyond this, it was our oppor- 
 tunity to demonstrate that great strain of 
 humanity and idealism which built up and in 
 every essential crisis saved our Republic. We 
 could throw a gleam of sunshine into the swel- 
 tering dungeon into which Europe has been 
 plunged. 
 
 The three tenets of the organization were: 
 first, volunteer service; second, high ideals, and 
 third, decentralization. The difficulties involved 
 in the problems of the purchase, transporta- 
 tion and distribution of huge food-supplies to 
 the nine and a half million hungry people of 
 Belgium and northern France are thus outlined 
 by Professor Kellogg in his "Fighting Starva- 
 tion in Belgium": 
 
 Rice from Rangoon, corn from Argentina, 
 beans from Manchuria, wheat and meat and 
 fats from America; and all, with the other 
 things of the regular programme, such as sugar, 
 condensed milk, coffee and cocoa, salt, salad 
 oil, yeast, dried fish, etc., in great quantities, to 
 be brought across wide oceans, through the 
 dangerous mine-strewn Channel, and landed 
 safely and regularly in Rotterdam, to be there
 
 "ENGINEERING EFFICIENCY" 179 
 
 speedily transferred from ocean vessels into 
 canal boats and urged on into Belgium and 
 northern France, and from these taken again 
 by railroad cars and horse-drawn carts to the 
 communal warehouses and soup kitchens; and 
 always and ever, through all the months, to 
 get there in time these were the buying and 
 transporting problems of the Commission. One 
 hundred thousand tons a month of food-stuffs 
 from the world over, in great shiploads to Rot- 
 terdam; one hundred thousand tons a month 
 thence in ever more and more divided quanti- 
 ties to the province and district storehouses, to 
 the regional storehouses and mills, to the com- 
 munal centres, and finally to the mouths of the 
 people. And all to be done economically, 
 speedily, and regularly; to be done, that is, with 
 "engineering efficiency. " 
 
 As all of these vast supplies of food were 
 procured, controlled and distributed by the 
 neutral American members of the commission, 
 the people of Belgium not unnaturally looked 
 upon them as the gift of the American people or 
 of the American Government. As a matter of 
 fact, the financial help which America gave the 
 commission was so comparatively insignificant 
 as almost to be negligible. Their own govern- 
 ments were incurring heavy debts in order to 
 feed the people of Belgium and northern France.
 
 .80 RELIEF WORK IN BELGIUM 
 
 Up to June 1, 1917, the commission had received 
 from all sources $297,000,000 to carry on this 
 work $89,500,000 from the British Govern- 
 ment and $66,000,000 from the French Gov- 
 ernment in the form of loans to the Belgian 
 Government for relief work in Belgium; $108,- 
 000,000 from the French Government for relief 
 work in the German-occupied provinces of 
 northern France; $17,000,000 and $11,500,000 
 respectively as charity from private sources in 
 Great Britain and in the United States; and 
 finally $5,000,000 in profits in its commercial 
 transactions, which were transferred to the 
 commission's benevolent account. In June, 
 1917, the United States Government undertook 
 to finance the work of the commission in the 
 form of periodic loans to the French and Bel- 
 gian Governments.
 
 XXIII 
 AMERICAN VOLUNTEERS IN FIELD SERVICE 
 
 A? first Mr. Hoover turned naturally for 
 executive assistants in his work to his 
 American friends and associates in the engineer- 
 ing profession in London, Brussels and other 
 near-by centres. He did not, however, confine 
 himself to men of any one class. In time he 
 secured the services, in Professor Kellogg's 
 words, of "half a dozen college professors, a 
 lawyer of large practice, two clergymen of prac- 
 tical turn of mind, a well-known explorer and 
 sportsman, a dietetic expert, an architect of 
 high repute, a magazine editor, a famous for- 
 ester, a stock broker, a consul, an expert in 
 children's diseases; altogether a wholesome va- 
 riety!" Professor Kellogg himself was one of 
 this group, several of whom also worked with 
 the younger men as provincial delegates. The 
 list of the American volunteers, mostly young 
 men, who came in more or less direct contact 
 with the Belgian and French people in this 
 
 181
 
 182 RELIEF WORK IN BELGIUM 
 
 relief work, successive resident directors, assis- 
 tant directors, head delegates and assistants, 
 numbers in all hardly a hundred and fifty, no 
 more than forty of whom were ever on duty at 
 one time in both Belgium and northern France. 
 Of these men, "representatives of an Ameri- 
 can type," Professor Kellogg, who as director at 
 Brussels knew them well, says, in his "Fighting 
 Starvation in Belgium": 
 
 They came from forty-five different Ameri- 
 can colleges and universities; more from Har- 
 vard than any other one. Twenty of them 
 had been selected by their colleges and their 
 States to be Rhodes Scholars in Oxford Univer- 
 sity. These twenty had been thus already 
 selected on a basis of scholarship, youthful 
 energy, general capacity, and good-fellowship. 
 They had not, however, been selected on a 
 basis of experience in business or least of all 
 relief work. And the rest of the one hundred 
 and fifty were selected by us on about the same 
 general grounds, adding the more special one 
 of a usable, or buddingly usable, knowledge of 
 the French language. Several could read Ger- 
 man, a few speak it. That was also useful. 
 But the Commission asked primarily for in- 
 telligence, character, youthful vigor, and en- 
 thusiasm, rather than specific attainments or 
 experience.
 
 AMERICANS IN FIELD SERVICE 183 
 
 In his "Journal from Our Legation in Bel- 
 gium," Hugh Gibson, the First Secretary of the 
 Legation, under date of December 20, 1914, has 
 this to say of these young volunteers: 
 
 The first group of Americans to work on the 
 relief came into Belgium this month. They 
 are, for the most part, Rhodes scholars who 
 were at Oxford and responded instantly to 
 Hoover's appeal. They are a picked crew, and 
 have gone into the work with enthusiasm. 
 And it takes a lot of enthusiasm to get through 
 the sort of pioneer work they have to do. 
 They have none of the thrill of the fellows who 
 have gone into the flying corps or the ambu- 
 lance service. They have ahead of them a 
 long winter of motoring about the country in 
 all sorts of weather, wrangling with millers and 
 stevedores, checking cargoes and costs, keeping 
 the peace between the Belgians and the Ger- 
 man authorities, observing the rules of the 
 game toward everybody concerned, and above 
 all keeping neutral. It is no small undertaking 
 for a lot of youngsters hardly out of college, 
 but so far they have done splendidly. 
 
 Of the work that these young Americans did 
 Professor Kellogg speaks in the highest terms: 
 
 Its members have crossed the channel in con- 
 voyed English despatch boats, passed through 
 closed frontiers, scurried about in swift motors
 
 184 RELIEF WORK IN BELGIUM 
 
 over all the occupied territory in which few 
 other cars than German military ones ever 
 moved, visited villages at the front under shell 
 fire, lived at the very Great Headquarters of all 
 the German armies of the West, been trusted 
 on their honor to do a thousand and one things 
 and be in a thousand and one places prohibited 
 to all other civilians, and have lived up to the 
 trust. They have suffered from the mistakes 
 of uninformed or stupid soldiers, and spent 
 nights in jail; they have taken chances under 
 bombing airmen, and been falsely but danger- 
 ously accused as spies; but despite obstacles 
 and delays and danger they have carried the 
 little triangular red-lettered white C. R. B. 
 flag to every town and hamlet in the imprisoned 
 land, and have gulped and passed on wet-eyed 
 as the people by the roads uncovered to the 
 little flag, with all its significance of material 
 and spiritual encouragement. Under this flag 
 they have been protector and protected at 
 once. 
 
 The conditions in the German-occupied por- 
 tions of northern France differed greatly, of 
 course, from those in Belgium, but the conduct 
 of the Americans was equally to their credit. 
 On this point Professor Kellogg says: 
 
 It is gratifying to be able to say that in the 
 whole history of the stay of the Commission's 
 men in northern France, during which at least
 
 AMERICANS IX FIELD SERVICE 185 
 
 thirty different men were used, no single com- 
 plaint of dishonorable or unneutral conduct on 
 their part was made by the German military 
 authorities. Some of the escort officers occa- 
 sionally had complaints to make of the imma- 
 turity of some of the Americans, or of their 
 manner, not sufficiently stiff or precise properly 
 to impress other German officers dining with 
 them, and one complained rather bitterly I 
 remember, to my amazement that his Ameri- 
 can persisted in wearing a ragged overcoat ! 
 But despite the strain of sympathy and anger 
 imposed on them by being compelled to see 
 the sufferings of the helpless French under the 
 rigors of military control, and, too often, mili- 
 tary brutality, our men held their strong feel- 
 ings in check. They were not only bound in 
 honor, but they knew that their mission could 
 be accomplished only by the maintenance of a 
 correct behavior; they could help the imprisoned 
 people much more by limiting themselves to 
 the all-important work of the ravitaillement than 
 by giving way to any temptation, however 
 strong, of unneutral acts or speech.
 
 XXIV 
 
 AMERICAN IDEALISM AND HUMOR 
 
 PROFESSOR KELLOGG observes that most 
 of the young Americans in Belgian relief 
 work were fortunate in having two things that 
 were of the greatest value to them: "a support- 
 ing idealism and a saving sense of humor." 
 In illustration of the unexpected revelation in a 
 single German of this latter trait, he tells, in 
 his "Fighting Starvation in Belgium," a story 
 of Edward D. Curtis, of Chestnut Hill, Boston. 
 Curtis, a graduate of Harvard, was at Cam- 
 bridge University, England, when the war be- 
 gan. He immediately joined Mr. Hoover's 
 London committee to help stranded Americans 
 get home, and followed his chief to Belgium, 
 remaining in the service of the commission until 
 the end, in April, 1917. Of him Professor Kel- 
 logg says: 
 
 Curtis, the first of our Brussels-Holland 
 couriers, had to have these qualities to stand 
 his seventeen arrests by German sentries, and 
 
 186
 
 Warren* his three days in a military prison at 
 Antwerp, and yet keep unconcernedly on with 
 their work. Curtis's sense of humor was for- 
 tunately well matched by a German's a single 
 German's when the young American, a little 
 annoyed by an unusual number of stoppings on 
 the road one day, handed his pass to the tenth 
 man who demanded it, with a swift, highly un- 
 complimentary personal allusion to his tor- 
 mentor, in pure Americanese. The sentry 
 handed it back with a dry, "Much obliged, the 
 same to you." He was probably a formerly-of- 
 Chicago reservist who knew the argot. 
 
 A Yale man, Scott Hurtt Paradise, a Rhodes 
 scholar at Oxford, experienced a similar surprise 
 once which he described in the Yale Alumni 
 Weekly: 
 
 It is only fair to say that in Belgium one 
 hears much less about atrocities than one does 
 in the United States or England. The old 
 Landsturmers, with their dingy uniforms, their 
 ilong beards and their gentle eyes, seem sadly 
 out of place guarding the railroad tracks in the 
 cold rainy nights. One of them once remarked 
 to us, to our great astonishment, as he read our 
 passes, "Haven't you any English or American 
 newspapers? I'm so damned lonely I don't 
 know what to do," and this in perfect Yankee. 
 
 * Robert H. Warren, an American Rhodes scholar at Oxford, who dka 
 at Bordeaux in November, 1916.
 
 188 RELIEF WORK IN BELGIUM 
 
 In the same communication Paradise called 
 attention to the curious coincidence that Horace 
 Fletcher, the apostle of mastication, should 
 have been in Brussels when the colossal problem 
 of feeding the whole Belgian people was being 
 solved : 
 
 In fact, Horace Fletcher, the great advocate 
 of mastication, a merry, rosy, little old gentle- 
 man comfortably ensconced in Brussels, attrib- 
 utes the unusually good health which prevails 
 in Belgium this winter [1914-15] to the neces- 
 sity for sleeping much, eating little and chew- 
 ing that little very much, and is quite jubilant 
 over this conclusive vindication of his theories. 
 
 In the list at the end of Professor Kellogg's 
 book Mr. Fletcher is recorded as having been 
 in the service of the commission from February 
 to November, 1915. 
 
 Incessantly harassed and annoyed as they 
 were by the number and variety of regulations 
 which the Germans imposed upon them, the 
 Americans kept their tempers and even man- 
 aged to see the humorous side of some of the 
 situations. Thus, according to Professor Kel- 
 logg, the delegate at Liege, being in a facetious
 
 AMERICAN IDEALISM AND HUMOR 189 
 
 mood, is said to have written his confrere at 
 Namur as follows: 
 
 DEAR DELEGATE: 
 
 I started three canal boats last week for 
 Namur. I thought it safer to send three in 
 order that one should finally reach you. The 
 "Attends Je Viens" has already been stopped 
 the towing horse had no passport. I hear that 
 the "Marchons Ton jours" is also not likely to 
 get through, as the skipper's wife has given birth 
 to a baby en voyage whose photo is, naturally, 
 not on the passport. Betting is strong, how- 
 ever, on the "Laisse-moi Tranquille." Be sure 
 to take up the bottom planks when she arrives, 
 as I understand Rotterdam thinks she may be 
 carrying contraband. 
 
 At first the Germans were utterly unable to 
 understand the humanitarian idealism which 
 had prompted the Americans to undertake so 
 huge a task as the feeding of the destitute Bel- 
 gians. Professor Kellogg narrates this incident 
 in illustration of their sceptical attitude: 
 
 In an interview Mr. Hoover had with one 
 of the most important officers of von Bissing's 
 staff, this official broke off the general discussion 
 to say abruptly: 
 
 "Now, we are all just human here, and I 
 want to ask you, as man to man, one question:
 
 190 RELIEF WORK IN BELGIUM 
 
 What do you Americans get out of this busi- 
 ness? Why are you doing it?" 
 
 "I tried to explain first with evenness of 
 temper and then more emphatically," writes 
 Mr. Hoover in his memorandum of the con- 
 versation, "that the whole thing was simply a 
 humane effort; and that not only did none of 
 us get anything out of it, but that most of us 
 lost something by it. But I found it too diffi- 
 cult to be emphatic enough about this to make 
 any real impression on him." 
 
 Educated for years in a school which taught 
 that in time of war any act however treacherous 
 or dishonorable was justifiable, if it was com- 
 mitted in the interest of the State, the Germans 
 were utterly unable to believe that the Ameri- 
 can delegates would not act as spies or as car- 
 riers of contraband, if the opportunity pre- 
 sented itself. This characteristically Teutonic 
 attitude of mind was met by a frank honesty 
 that was baffling though by no means convinc- 
 ing. Thus Hugh Gibson, in speaking in his 
 "Journal" of Edward Curtis in his relations 
 with the Germans, says: 
 
 He exudes silence and discretion, but does 
 not miss any fun or any chance to advance the 
 general cause. Of course it is taking the Ger-
 
 AMERICAN IDEALISM AND HUMOR 191 
 
 mans some time to learn his system. He is ab- 
 solutely square with them, and gets a certain 
 amount of fun out of their determined efforts 
 to find some sort of contraband on him. They 
 can hardly conceive of his being honest, and 
 think his seeming frankness is merely an un- 
 usually clever dodge to cover up his transgres- 
 sions.
 
 XXV 
 
 NARRATIVES OF PRINCETON MEN 
 
 FROM the start Princeton men took a promi- 
 nent part in the work of the Commission 
 for Relief in Belgium, and the narratives of 
 their experiences and observations will be ma- 
 terial of interest to the historian of the future. 
 Early in 1916 the Princeton Alumni Weekly 
 printed a lively account, received through Dean 
 Howard McClenahan, who had been in Belgium, 
 of some of the experiences of three young Prince- 
 ton graduates who had been engaged in the 
 field-work of the commission. They were Gil- 
 christ B. Stockton, 1914, William H. Tuck, 
 1912, and Richard R. Lytle, Jr., 1913, Lytle 
 and Stockton having been among the Rhodes 
 scholars at Oxford who dropped their work in 
 response to Mr. Hoover's call for American 
 volunteers. Selections *rom this communica- 
 tion follow: 
 
 Stockton was Ed. Curtis's successor as 
 courier. That means he raced back and forth 
 
 192
 
 NARRATIVES OF PRINCETON MEN 193 
 
 from Brussels to Bergen-op-Zoom carrying the 
 mail and confidential messages. His "G. G. 
 pass" was an extraordinary monstrosity con- 
 ceived and executed by the Germans, and worn 
 in a celluloid case about his neck. The exact 
 dimensions of the "G. G. pass" I do not know, 
 but it looked about a yard square. It bore his 
 photograph in a soft shirt and was signed per- 
 sonally by Governor-General von Bissing. One 
 adventure of Stockton's which I remember was 
 his finding a German soldier, on the Putte 
 frontier, who came from Jacksonville, Fla., [Mr. 
 Stockton's home] and he spoke the same kind 
 of English that Stockton speaks. From the 
 position of Mercury to the Commission he was 
 promoted to the Antwerp staff, where I was his 
 chief. 
 
 The day he arrived I sent him out to take 
 the inventory of all of the regional warehouses 
 and mills in the province. Stockton can speak 
 almost no French, but by the sign language 
 and by use of certain well conned phrases he 
 managed to bring in a perfect report by eve- 
 ning. He evolved a system of questionnaires, 
 and very methodically and easily kept track of 
 the communes in his charge. His brief describ- 
 ing the method for using these questionnaires 
 went to all the provincial delegates in Belgium 
 as a model for their work. 
 
 After two months' service in Antwerp 
 from August 1st to the last week in September 
 [1915] he was transferred to St. Quentin in the 
 North of France, where his daily life is carefully
 
 194 RELIEF WORK IN BELGIUM 
 
 supervised by a German official whom we call 
 a nurse, and where his professional life is closely 
 looked after by a whole staff of army people. 
 He works there with a French committee in- 
 stead of with Belgians, but every conversation, 
 every telegram, every letter and every note 
 book is carefully censored. 
 
 Tuck had just arrived a short time before I 
 left. Everyone was very much impressed with 
 his maturity and his familiarity with the French 
 language. He was sent to Mons in the province 
 of Hainault to take charge of that large and 
 important province, and we all feel sure that he 
 will make good. 
 
 Before Tuck was sent to Mons, however, 
 he was "rushed" by about every province in 
 Belgium. It was really amusing to see how we 
 fell over each other in our frantic attempts to 
 get Tuck, and how like a freshman being rushed 
 for a college fraternity he proved to be. 
 
 Lytle plunged headlong into the work of the 
 Commission in the province of Luxemburg. 
 Immediately after the veteran delegate Welling- 
 ton had gone back to Oxford he had a hard 
 time. Worst of all he got finally into an auto- 
 mobile accident, in which his car smashed a 
 car belonging to the Kreischef of one of the 
 principal regions of Luxemburg. Lytle's letter 
 to the Governor of the province of Luxemburg 
 was not calculated to smooth the feelings of the 
 Governor, and the Governor wrote back stating 
 that Mr. Lytle's letter and his bearing at the 
 time of the examination and detention were
 
 NARRATIVES OF PRINCETON MEN 195 
 
 such that he, the Governor, felt called upon to 
 "proceed against him for insult " unless Lytle 
 personally apologize. Lytle preferred to leave 
 the country and so the matter rested. 
 
 For three months, from January until the 
 end of March, 1917, another Princeton man, 
 Arthur Bartlett Maurice, formerly editor of 
 The Bookman, was in the service of the com- 
 mission in Belgium and northern France. Mr. 
 Maurice contributed to several issues of the 
 Princeton Alumni Weekly, in the following May 
 and June, a detailed narrative of his experiences 
 and those of the men with whom he was asso- 
 ciated during this period. This paragraph de- 
 scribes how he and his companions were housed 
 in Brussels: 
 
 Some of the men of the C. R. B. stayed in 
 pensions. But most of us lived in houses which 
 had been placed at the disposal of the Commis- 
 sion by the owners for the double motive of 
 appreciation of the work that was being done 
 and in order to keep them from being occupied 
 by the "Boches." It was at No. 126 Avenue 
 Louise, a broad thoroughfare Bned by some of 
 the city's finest residences and running from 
 the circle of Boulevards to the Bois de la 
 Cambre, that I went to live. The owner of the
 
 196 RELIEF WORK IN BELGIUM 
 
 house had been lucky enough to cross into 
 France before the occupation and was living in 
 Paris. In the house, which had been left in 
 charge of two servants, eight of us,* Leach, 
 Maverick, Wickes, Kittredge, Arrowsmith, Cur- 
 tis, Sperry and I, had some sort of headquar- 
 ters. It was seldom that more than four or 
 five appeared at the breakfast table. Maverick 
 was a North of France man. Wickes spent the 
 greater part of the week in Namur. Sperry 
 usually had an engagement elsewhere. But no 
 matter what the number present, here was no 
 chance to complain of the monotony of exist- 
 ence. "The life of an American delegate is a 
 hard life," Maverick one day said whimsically. 
 "Here we are forced to live in a place quite as 
 humble as the average house that you see on 
 Fifth Avenue overlooking Central Park. I am 
 reduced to the humiliation of riding about in an 
 Overland car with a chauffeur only in half 
 livery. To-night I shall probably be obliged 
 to dine at the Taverne Roy ale." But in a way 
 Maverick's flippancy was designed to cheer us 
 up. When the words were spoken the ther- 
 mometer at the side of the mantelpiece regis- 
 tered 8 above zero Fahrenheit. It was the 
 bitterest winter in recent history and coal was 
 not to be had. 
 
 * Dr. Charles N. Leach, of San Francisco; Robert V. Maverick, of 
 San Antonio, Tex.; Francis C. Wickes, of Rochester, N. Y.; Tracy B. 
 Kittredge, of Berkeley, Cal.; Robert Arrowsmith, of Orange, N. J.; 
 Edward D. Curtis, of Chestnut Hill, Boston, and William H. Sperry, of 
 Redwood City, Cal. Of this group of eight, seven were college men, 
 there being two representatives of Princeton and one each of Stanford, 
 California, Williams. Columbia, and Harvard.
 
 NARRATIVES OF PRINCETON MEN 197 
 
 Of the daily life of the delegates Mr. Maurice 
 wrote: 
 
 In Belgium last winter there were about 
 thirty men, who were C. R. B. delegates in the 
 strict sense of the term. A delegate gave his 
 services. His transportation from the United 
 States to Belgium was provided, and he was 
 allowed a certain daily sum to cover the actual 
 expenses of habitation and food. First among 
 the delegates were the director, Warren Greg- 
 ory, and the assistant director, Prentiss Gray. 
 Both Californians. I am not going to tell what 
 I think of them, because it would sound like 
 fulsome flattery of Mr. Hoover, who selected 
 them. Under their direction the delegates were 
 assigned and shifted. There were the North of 
 France men. A North of France man was 
 sent to Lille, or Sain t-Quen tin, or Valenciennes, 
 or Charleville, or Longwy. Day and night he 
 was in the company of a German officer. The 
 two had desks in the same office and occupied 
 adjoining bedrooms. Somehow or other the 
 officer always got the best desk and the best 
 bedroom. They breakfasted, lunched, dined 
 together. They sat side by side in the back 
 seat of the motor car. If the officer wished to 
 hold nightly revel in some cafe, he had to per- 
 suade the delegate to accompany him. The 
 American was supposed to hold no communica 
 tion with any unit of the civil population save 
 in the presence of his officer. It was a Siamese 
 twins kind of existence.
 
 198 RELIEF WORK IN BELGIUM 
 
 The German formula for the creation and 
 maintenance of a great nation ruled from the 
 top, "organization and obedience," could not, 
 of course, be made to fit a democracy like 
 America. How this German point of view was 
 impressed upon the American delegates was 
 illustrated by an incident which Mr. Maurice 
 described: 
 
 But there are certain memories which we all 
 of us took away, no matter how slight and 
 short-lived was the acquaintance. We recall, 
 save in one or two cases, an artificial politeness, 
 an attempt at bonhommie which hardly con- 
 cealed the sneer. "What is German militarism ? " 
 I will tell you. "It is order, discipline, obedi- 
 ence." That is always and ever the refrain. 
 That covers all, explains all, justifies all. To 
 them these virtues exist nowhere else in the 
 world. We, in particular, are barbarians. 
 There had been some slight infraction of one 
 of the ninety and nine thousand rules that 
 govern life in Belgium by a member of the 
 C. R. B. and at the headquarters in the Place 
 Roy ale Major B. was storming at Sperry of 
 California. Sperry was not the offender, but 
 as he was the passport man, official abuse usu- 
 ally descended upon his head. But a sense of 
 humor had Sperry, and he bore it all stoically. 
 "You come from a country and a wild western 
 state where you have no laws," so ran the in-
 
 NARRATIVES OF PRINCETON MEN 199 
 
 dictment. "You don't understand what laws 
 are or what they are made for. Don't you 
 know there is a war?" "It seems to me," re- 
 plied Sperry softly, "that I have heard of it." 
 "Heard of it!" Major B. exploded. "I think 
 we have heard of it. We have lost a million 
 men." 
 
 Mr. Maurice was in the first group of seven 
 Americans connected with the commission who- 
 left Brussels on March 29, 1917; the othei 
 Americans followed a few days later. The 
 roundabout journey from Brussels to Paris 
 along the Rhine and through Switzerland con- 
 sumed six nights and five days.
 
 XXVI 
 
 EFFECT ON THE AMERICANS OF GERMAN 
 METHODS 
 
 /^RIGINALLY, as we have seen, a pacifist, 
 V / with humanitarian impulses, Professor 
 Kellogg joined Mr. Hoover's forces in Belgium 
 with an open, unprejudiced mind. His intimate 
 contact with the Germans as the conquerors of 
 Belgium, and his observations of their attitude 
 of mind and of their methods as rulers, turned 
 him from a pacifist into a would-be belligerent. 
 Of the effect upon the active members of the 
 commission as a whole who came in constant 
 contact with the wheels and cogs, big and little, 
 of the German war-machine, he says, in his 
 * ' Headquarters Nights " : 
 
 The experience of our Relief Commission 
 with this machine has been wearing. It has 
 also been illuminating. For it has resulted in 
 the conversion of an idealistic group of young 
 Americans of open mind and fairly neutral 
 original attitude into a band of convinced men, 
 most of whom, since their forced retirement 
 
 200
 
 EFFECT OF GERMAN METHODS 201 
 
 from Belgium, have ranged themselves among 
 four armies devoted to the annihilation of that 
 machine and to the rescue and restoration of 
 that one of the victims, the sight of whose 
 mangling and suffering brought unshed tears 
 to the eyes and silent curses to the lips of those 
 Americans so often during the long two and a 
 hah* years of the relief work. 
 
 We were not haters of Germany when we 
 went to Belgium. We have simply, by ines- 
 capable sights and sounds and knowledge forced 
 on us, been made into what we have become. 
 
 The greatest single incident in bringing about 
 this change of mind was the action of "the 
 highest military authority " not Von Bissing's 
 Belgium government, Professor Kellogg says 
 in deporting something more than a hundred 
 thousand able-bodied Belgian men to Ger- 
 many. The world, he says, needs the whole 
 story. He goes on: 
 
 Unfortunately it cannot yet be written. 
 Among other things lacking' 'is the knowledge 
 of just how many of the hundred thousand 
 Belgian slaves have died or are to die in Ger- 
 many. Some have been sent back hastily, so 
 that they would not die in Germany; they die 
 on the returning trains, or soon after they get 
 back. Or, what is worse, some do not die, but 
 continue to live, helpless physical wrecks.
 
 202 RELIEF WORK IN BELGIUM 
 
 The deportations were not hazy to us. They 
 were the most vivid, shocking, convincing sin- 
 gle happening in all our enforced observation 
 and experience of German disregard of human 
 suffering and human rights in Belgium. . . . 
 
 The deportations occurred near the end of 
 the period of our stay in Belgium. They were 
 the final and fully sufficient exhibit, prepared 
 by the great German machine, to convince ab- 
 solutely any one of us who might still have 
 been clinging to his original desperately main- 
 tained attitude of neutrality, that it was high 
 time that we were somewhere else on the 
 other side of the trench-line, by preference.
 
 PART VI 
 AMERICAN VOLUNTEER AIRMEN
 
 XXVII 
 THE LAFAYETTE, OR AMERICAN, ESCADRILLE 
 
 NO development of the Great War has pos- 
 sessed for American youth the novelty, 
 the picturesqueness, or the fascination of the 
 air-ship service. It isn't many years ago that 
 the feat of sailing an air-ship across the Channel 
 from France to England, a distance of less than 
 twenty-five miles, was hailed as an exploit of 
 extraordinary skill and daring. At the present 
 writing there are those who seriously advocate 
 sending the fleet of huge American -built, Hand- 
 ley Page bombing air-ships, with their spread of 
 a hundred feet, to the battle front in France 
 under their own power by a zigzag course to 
 Newfoundland, the Azores, and Spain. The 
 longest leg of this journey, from Newfoundland 
 to the Azores, could be made by one of these 
 ships, barring accidents, in about thirteen hours. 
 Up to the outbreak of the war the monoplane 
 and the biplane were regarded as wonderful toys 
 of problematical commercial value. Even the 
 Germans, to the diabolical ingenuity of whom 
 
 205
 
 206 AMERICAN VOLUNTEER AIRMEN 
 
 the development of the poison-gas bomb and the 
 flame-throwers was due, seem to have had no idea 
 of the prominent part which the heavier-than-air 
 flying-machines were to play in the conduct of 
 war. They had great hopes that the Zeppelins 
 which they possessed would give them the mas- 
 tery of the air for unrestricted bombing pur- 
 poses, but these monsters proved to be too 
 unwieldy and generally too untrustworthy for 
 this purpose. The latest attempt of Zeppelins 
 to bomb English cities, in August, 1918, was 
 a complete fiasco. 
 
 At first the air-ships were used by both the 
 French and the Germans for observation pur- 
 poses only. It is a legend of the service, which 
 ought to be true even if it is not, that at the 
 first meeting over the fighting lines of two 
 French and German air-ships, the pilots greeted 
 each other pleasantly. At the next meeting 
 one we may safely assume that it was the 
 German ! scowled and shook his fist at the 
 other. At the third encounter one threw a 
 bottle at his adversary, and at the next meet- 
 ing fired a pistol. The transition to the quick- 
 firing gun was then rapid.
 
 THE LAFAYETTE ESCADRILLE 207 
 
 The air service appealed with especial force 
 to the sporting instincts of the young Ameri- 
 cans who were eager to help France in her dire 
 extremity. Its chief fascination lay in the fact 
 that it offered practically free play in a limitless 
 medium to individual initiative, judgment, and 
 skill. This was a form of warfare which har- 
 monized perfectly with American traditions and 
 with the American temperament. 
 
 Any narrative of the exploits of American 
 volunteer airmen in the Great War must begin 
 with the formation of the Lafayette Escadrille. 
 The full story of the organization, after months 
 of ceaseless effort of this corps, was told by 
 one of its two surviving members, Elliott C. 
 Cowdin, in an article which he published in 
 the Harvard Alumni Bulletin for March 7, 
 1918. Cowdin gave the full credit for the 
 formation of this flying corps and for its incor- 
 poration in the French flying service to the 
 energy and persistence of Norman Prince. He 
 said: 
 
 Norman Prince had spent many years and 
 made many friends in France, and felt it his 
 privilege and duty to serve her in the hour of
 
 208 AMERICAN VOLUNTEER AIRMEN 
 
 her need. Prince arrived in Paris by way of 
 England early in January, 1915. Knowing 
 there were many Americans in the Foreign 
 Legion and the various ambulance units, and 
 being one of the pioneer aviators of the United 
 States, he conceived the idea of forming an 
 aero squadron, composed exclusively of Ameri- 
 cans, to join the French Army. He consulted 
 with his French friends, of whom Lieutenant 
 Jacque de Lesseps was the most enthusiastic 
 and was instrumental in getting the French 
 War Department to listen to Prince's ideas and 
 plans. He solicited the aid of several promi- 
 nent Americans then residing in Paris, but they 
 all declined to be identified in any way with the 
 scheme, so that Prince had to fight his own 
 battle, single-handed. The French Government 
 told him they could not use his services, as avia- 
 tion was so popular among the soldiers and so 
 many were seeking to be admitted to this ser- 
 vice that they had more aviators than they 
 could use. 
 
 This decision was finally reversed through the 
 influence of M. de Sillac, who was connected 
 with the Department of Foreign Affairs and to 
 whom Prince had been introduced by John J. 
 Chapman, the father of Victor Chapman. Of 
 the original group of young American airmen 
 who formed the Lafayette Escadrille, Cowdin 
 wrote as follows:
 
 THE LAFAYETTE ESCADRILLE 209 
 
 Early in May [1916] we were all mobilized 
 at the Alsatian front as the "Lafayette Squad- 
 ron " with French officers, Captain Thenault and 
 Lieutenant de Laage, in command. The origi- 
 nal members, besides those officers, were: Nor- 
 man Prince, William Thaw, Victor Chapman 
 and Kiffin Rockwell, of the Foreign Legion; 
 James McConnell, who had already done good 
 work in the American Ambulance before join- 
 ing the French Aviation; Bert Hall and myself. 
 Five of the original nine have been killed at the 
 front. 
 
 We remained but a short time in Alsace and 
 were then transferred to the Verdun Sector, 
 where we were joined by such men as Lufbery, 
 Masson, Clyde Balsley (who was severely 
 wounded the first week) , Dudley Hill, Lawrence 
 Rumsey and Chouteau Johnson. 
 
 The Squadron has increased steadily, so that 
 at the end of last year [1917] a total of 325 
 men had joined it, counting those training in 
 various schools. Of this number, some 25 have 
 given their lives, several have been wounded, 
 and several are prisoners. 
 
 Norman Prince, Victor Chapman, Kiffin 
 Rockwell, Jim McConnell and Lieutenant de 
 Laage gave their lives gloriously for the great 
 cause, and the only surviving member of the 
 original squadron left at the front is William 
 Thaw, now a Major with the American Force, 
 still flying and doing great work for his country. 
 
 Norman Prince fortunately lived long enough 
 to see his long-cherished ideas successfully
 
 210 AMERICAN VOLUNTEER AIRMEN 
 
 carried out and the Lafayette Squadron at the 
 height of its success. 
 
 The best collection of pen-portraits of these 
 early members of the Lafayette, or, as it was as 
 often called, the American, Escadrille and the 
 most vivid and entertaining description of the 
 life they led on the ground and in the air, are to 
 be found in a paper which one of their number, 
 James McConnell, contributed to the World's 
 Work for November, 1916, and which was later 
 incorporated in his book, "Flying for France.'* 
 To McConnell and to those of his companions 
 who for many long months had been trench- 
 diggers in the Foreign Legion or drivers of 
 ambulances, the transition to the choicest 
 branch of the French military service was as 
 startling as it was welcome. "For us all," says 
 McConnell, "it contained unlimited possibilities 
 for initiative and for service to France, and for 
 them [Rockwell and Chapman] it must have 
 meant, too, the restoration of personality lost 
 during those months in the trenches with the 
 Foreign Legion." 
 
 As a good air-pilot was considered to be of as 
 much value to the army as a battalion of troops,
 
 THE LAFAYETTE ESCADRILLE 211 
 
 nothing was left undone to make the Americans 
 comfortable and contented. McConnell is most 
 amusing in his serene contemplation of the 
 comparative luxury of his new surroundings. 
 Met at the railway-station at Luxeuil, perhaps 
 twenty miles northwest of Belfort, by a motor- 
 car which took him to the aviation-field, he re- 
 called, as he lolled back against the soft leather 
 cushions, how in his apprenticeship days at 
 Pau he had had to walk six miles for his laun- 
 dry ! When he arrived at the headquarters of 
 the escadrille his surprise was even greater: 
 
 The equipment awaiting us at the field was 
 even more impressive than our automobile. 
 Everything was brand new, from the fifteen 
 Fiat trucks to the office, magazine, and rest 
 tents. And the men attached to the Esca- 
 drille ! At first sight they seemed to outnum- 
 ber the Nicaraguan army mechanicians, chauf- 
 feurs, armorers, motor cyclists, telephonists, 
 wireless operators, Red Cross stretcher bearers, 
 clerks ! Afterward I learned they totalled sev- 
 enty-odd, and that all of them were glad to be 
 connected with the American Escadrille. 
 
 In their hangars stood our trim little Nieu- 
 ports. I looked mine over with a new feeling 
 of importance and gave orders to my mechani- 
 cians for the mere satisfaction of being able to.
 
 AMERICAN VOLUNTEER AIRMEN 
 
 To find oneself the sole proprietor of a fighting 
 airplane is quite a treat, let me tell you. One 
 gets accustomed to it, though, after one has 
 used up two or three of them at the French 
 Government's expense. 
 
 Rooms were assigned to us in a villa adjoin- 
 ing the famous hot baths of Luxeuil, where 
 Caesar's cohorts were wont to besport them- 
 selves. We messed with our officers, Captain 
 Thenault and Lieutenant de Laage de Mieux, 
 at the best hotel in town. An automobile was 
 always on hand to carry us to the field. I 
 began to wonder whether I was a summer 
 resorter instead of a soldier. 
 
 When on his arrival McConnell's attention was 
 called to eight little boxes on the table and he was 
 informed that each contained a Croix de Guerre 
 which was to be sent to the family of a man 
 that had been killed on the last bombing expedi- 
 tion, his surroundings acquired a different mean- 
 ing, and he noted, with a touch of grim humor: 
 
 I thought of the luxury we were enjoying: 
 our comfortable beds, baths, and motor cars; 
 and then I recalled the ancient custom of giving 
 a man selected for the sacrifice a royal time of 
 it before the appointed day. 
 
 Of the seven members of the American Esca- 
 drille who were together at Luxeuil, three
 
 THE LAFAYETTE ESCADRILLE 213 
 
 McConnell, Chapman, and Rockwell were nov- 
 ices in flying, just arrived from the assembly - 
 station for aviators near Paris. The other four 
 had had more or less experience with air-ships 
 of various types. McConnell calls William 
 Thaw, of Pittsburgh, the pioneer of them all, 
 because he had been in the French flying service 
 since early in 1915, and by the autumn of that 
 year he was pilot of a Caudron biplane, doing 
 good work as an observer. Meanwhile Norman 
 Prince, of Boston, and Elliott Cowdin, of New 
 York, who were the first Americans to enter the 
 French aviation service, coming direct from the 
 United States, had been at the front on Voisin 
 air-ships with a "cannon" mounted in the bow. 
 Finally Bert Hall, whose home was in Texas, 
 had got himself transferred, according to Mc- 
 Connell, from the Foreign Legion to aviation 
 soon after Thaw did, and learning the art 
 quickly, had been flying a Nieuport fighting 
 machine. 
 
 Of the men mentioned by Cowdin who joined 
 the American Escadrille after its headquarters 
 were shifted to the Verdun sector, Raoul Luf- 
 bery, "American citizen and soldier, but dweller
 
 214 AMERICAN VOLUNTEER AIRMEN 
 
 in the world at large," as McConnell calls him, 
 hailed from Wallingford, Conn. Didier Masson 
 had been a flier for exhibition purposes in the 
 United States, Clyde Balsley was from El Paso, 
 Dudley Hill from Peekskill, Lawrence Rumsey 
 from Buffalo, and Chouteau Johnson from New 
 York. All of the men of this group, except 
 Lufbery and Masson, had been in the ambu- 
 lance service, but in McConnell's expressive 
 phrase, they were "tired of being non-comba- 
 tant spectators.*' McConnell himself was born 
 in Chicago, was educated at the University of 
 Virginia, and was in business in Carthage, North 
 Carolina, until January, 1915, when he sailed 
 for France and entered the American Ambu- 
 lance service. Chapman's home city was New 
 York, and Kiffin Rockwell came from Atlanta, 
 Georgia. 
 
 The members of the American Escadrille were 
 provided, to their great joy, with Nieuport air- 
 ships, which meant that they were to form a 
 fighting unit. The Nieuport was then the best 
 type of fighting airplane the French possessed. 
 It was a one-man air-ship, with a maximum 
 speed of about 110 miles an hour and wkh a
 
 THE LAFAYETTE ESCADRILLE 215 
 
 machine-gun mounted on its roof. The pilot 
 fired the gun with one hand and controlled his 
 ship with the other and with his feet. Each of 
 the machines bore, as the distinguishing mark 
 of the Escadrille, the head in profile of an 
 American Indian; and on the side of the car 
 of each was an individual identification mark, 
 that on Hall's being the large letters BERT, 
 and on MacConnell's the letters MAC. 
 
 Flying in one of these Nieuports, while the 
 squadron was still at Luxeuil, Rockwell brought 
 down the Escadrille's first German airplane. 
 McConnell described the combat as follows: 
 
 He was flying alone when, over Thann, he 
 came upon a German on reconnaissance. He 
 dived and the German turned toward his own 
 lines, opening fire from a long distance. Rock- 
 well kept straight after him. Then, closing to 
 within thirty yards, he pressed on the release 
 of his machine gun, and saw the enemy gunner 
 fall backward and the pilot crumble up side- 
 ways in his seat. The 'plane flopped downward 
 and crashed to earth just behind the German 
 trenches. Swooping close to the ground, Rock- 
 well saw its debris burning away brightly. He 
 had turned the trick with but four shots and 
 only one German bullet had struck his Nieu- 
 port. An observation post telephoned the news
 
 216 
 
 before Rockwell's return, and he got a great 
 welcome. All Luxeuil smiled upon him par- 
 ticularly the girls. But he couldn't stay to 
 enjoy his popularity. The Escadrille was or- 
 dered to the sector of Verdun.
 
 XXVIII 
 THE FIRST AMERICAN AVIATOR TO FALL 
 
 VICTOR CHAPMAN'S passion, as we have 
 seen, was for color and scenery, with an 
 admixture of danger. His flying papers admitted 
 him, after ten wasted months in the Foreign 
 Legion, into the French aviation service, and by 
 the end of August, 1915, he was enjoying the 
 scenery and a modicum of danger from a bomb- 
 ing machine. Here is his description, from one 
 of his letters, of the method of dropping a bomb 
 from an air-ship: 
 
 We must be nearing the spot, for the Lieu- 
 tenant motioned me to load the projectile. 
 This is by far the most difficult operation, for 
 the 155 shell with its tin tail looking like a tor- 
 pedo four feet long, is hung under the body and 
 without seeing its nose even one has to reach 
 down in front of the pilot, put the detonateur in, 
 then the percuteur and screw it fast. After 
 which I pulled off a safety device. You may 
 imagine how I scrambled round in a fur coat 
 and two pair of leather trousers and squeezed 
 myself to get my arm down the hole. I really 
 
 217
 
 218 AMERICAN VOLUNTEER AIRMEN 
 
 had a moment's nervousness that the detonateur 
 would not stay in the hole but fly back into the 
 helice. However, all went well and the Lieu- 
 tenant handed me the plan of the town of Dil- 
 lingen where there were said to be huge casting 
 works. Bad map it was and I got nothing out 
 of the inaudible explanation and gestures. We 
 were just passing over the river Saar by Pach- 
 ten. Everything on the detail map was red. I 
 still have scruples about dropping on dwelling 
 houses they might be Alsatians. Right under 
 us was a great junction of railway lines, tracks 
 and sidings. "That's a go," I thought, and 
 pulled the handle when it came in the sighter. 
 A slight sway and below me the blue-gray shell 
 poised and dipped its head. Straight away and 
 then it seemed to remain motionless. Pretty 
 soon its tail began to wag in small circles and 
 then I lost sight of it over some tree-tops. 
 "Pshaw," I thought, "there it's going to fall on 
 its side, and into a garden. Tant pis!" When 
 all at once, in the middle of the railroad tracks 
 a cloud of black smoke which looked big even 
 from that height. The Lieutenant said after- 
 wards that I rocked the whole ship when I saw 
 where it had fallen ! 
 
 Experience in a bombing plane filled Chap- 
 man with a desire to qualify as a fighting pilot, 
 and to join the squadron which his friends, 
 Norman Prince and Elliott Cowdin, were try- 
 ing to form. His letters for the next few
 
 FIRST AMERICAN AVIATOR TO FALL 219 
 
 months gave in detail his experiences at the 
 aviation school at Avord, where he was learning 
 to fly. By the following April, 1916, he was at 
 
 Luxeuil with his mates of the American Esca- 
 , 
 
 drille. In one of his letters he said that after 
 their Nieuports arrived, he learned more about 
 flying in five days than he had learned in the 
 previous five months. 
 
 Chapman's first letter from the Verdun sector 
 was dated May 23, 1916. A month later, to a 
 day, he was killed. He wrote few letters in the 
 interval, apparently being too busy flying to 
 have time to write often. Here is his descrip- 
 tion, from a letter dated June 1, of one morn- 
 ing's work: 
 
 This morning we all started off at three, 
 and, not having made concise enough arrange- 
 ments, got separated in the morning mist. I 
 found Prince, however, and we went to Douau- 
 mont where we found two German reglage ma- 
 chines unprotected and fell upon them. A 
 skirmish, a spitting of guns, and we drew away. 
 It had been badly executed, that manoeuvre ! 
 But ho ! another Boche heading for Verdun ! 
 Taking the direction stick between my knees I 
 tussled and fought with the mitrailleuse and 
 finally charged the rouleau, all the while eyeing
 
 AMERICAN VOLUNTEER AIRMEN 
 
 my Boche and moving across Vaux towards 
 Etain. I had no altitude with which to over- 
 take him, but a little more speed. So I got 
 behind his tail and spit till he dived into his 
 own territory. Having lost Norman, I made a 
 tour to the ArgonHe and on the way back saw 
 another fat Boche. "No protection machine in 
 sight." I swooped, swerved to the right, to the 
 left, almost lost, but then came up under his 
 lee keel by the stern. (It's the one position 
 they cannot shoot from.) I seemed a dory 
 alongside a schooner. I pulled up my nose to 
 let him have it. Crr Crr Crr a cartridge 
 jammed in the barrel. He jumped like a frog 
 and fled down to his grounds. Later in the 
 morning I made another stroll along the lines. 
 Met a flock of Nieuports, and saw across the 
 way a squad of white- winged L. V. G. How 
 like a game of prisoner's base it all is ! I scurry 
 out in company, and they run away. They 
 come into my territory and I being alone, take 
 to my heels. They did come after me once 
 too ! Faster they are than I, but I had height 
 so they could but leer up at me with their dead- 
 white wings and black crosses like sharks, and 
 they returned to their own domain. 
 
 Under the stimulus of the tremendous con- 
 flict going on before Verdun, Chapman fought 
 incessantly and fearlessly. In his "With the 
 French Flying Corps" Carroll D. Winslow, 
 who at the time was near the headquarters of
 
 FIRST AMERICAN AVIATOR TO FALL 221 
 
 the American Eseadrille and saw much of his 
 compatriots, describes one incident in Chap- 
 man's career: 
 
 I remember one curious incident that oc- 
 curred while I was in the Verdun sector. Vic- 
 tor Chapman, who was doing combat work 
 with the American Escadrille, after a brush 
 with four German aeroplanes, was forced to 
 descend to our field. Not only had he received 
 a bad scalp wound from a bullet, but his ma- 
 chine had been riddled and nearly wrecked. 
 One bullet had even severed a metal stability 
 control. By all the rules of aviation he should 
 have lost control of his aeroplane and met with 
 a fatal accident. But Chapman was an expert 
 pilot. He simply held on to the broken rod 
 with one hand, while with the other he steered 
 his machine. This needed all the strength at 
 his command, but he had the power and the 
 skill necessary to bring him safely to earth. A 
 surgeon immediately dressed his wound, our 
 mechanics repaired his machine. The repairs 
 completed, he was off and up again in pursuit 
 of some more Boches. I must say that every 
 one considered him a remarkable pilot. He was 
 absolutely fearless, and always willing and able 
 to fly more than was ever required of him. His 
 machine was a sieve of patched-up bullet holes. 
 
 Chapman's head was still in bandages when, 
 a few days later, he was killed, full inn inside
 
 AMERICAN VOLUNTEER AIRMEN 
 
 the German lines. Clyde Balsley, to whom he 
 was taking some oranges when he went to the 
 assistance of several of his hard-pressed com- 
 panions, had been dangerously wounded and 
 was in a near-by hospital. Kiffin Rockwell sent 
 to Chapman's stepmother a long letter, which 
 appears in the memoir prefixed to Chapman's 
 "Letters from France," describing the circum- 
 stances attending his fellow flier's last combat. 
 In the course of that letter Rockwell wrote: 
 
 The following morning [June 23] the weather 
 was good, and he insisted on going out at the 
 regular hour with the rest. There were no 
 machines over the lines, so the sortie was un- 
 eventful. He came in, and at lunch fixed up a 
 basket of oranges which he said he would take 
 to Balsley. We went up to the field, and Cap- 
 tain Thenault, Prince and Lufbery got ready 
 to go out and over the lines. Victor put the 
 oranges in his machine and said that he would 
 follow the others over the lines for a little trip 
 and then go and land at the hospital. The 
 Captain, Prince and Lufbery started first. On 
 arriving at the lines they saw at first two Ger- 
 man machines which they dived on. When 
 they arrived in the midst of them, they found 
 that two or three other German machines had 
 arrived also. As the odds were against the 
 three, they did not fight long, but immediately
 
 started back into our lines and without seeing 
 Victor. 
 
 When they came back we thought that 
 Victor was at the hospital. But later in the 
 afternoon a pilote of a Maurice Farman and his 
 passenger sent in a report. The report was 
 that they saw three Nieupprts attack five Ger- 
 man machines, that at this moment they saw 
 a fourth Nieuport arriving with all speed who 
 dived in the midst of the Germans, that two of 
 the Germans dived towards their field and that 
 the Nieuport fell through the air no longer con- 
 trolled by the pilote. In a fight it is practically 
 impossible to tell what the other machines do, 
 as everything happens so fast and all one can 
 see is the beginning of a fight and then, in a 
 few seconds, the end. That fourth Nieuport 
 was Victor and, owing to the fact that the 
 motor was going at full speed when the machine 
 fell, I think that he was killed instantly. 
 
 Chapman was the first American aviator to 
 fall in battle. To the French, the fact that a 
 young American volunteer of his type had 
 made the supreme sacrifice in fighting in defense 
 of their cause was of deep significance. "The 
 death fight of Victor Chapman," wrote Andre 
 Chevillon, "touches our imagination with fire." 
 "Never," said M. Jusserand, the French Am- 
 bassador to the United States, on Lafayette
 
 224 AMERICAN VOLUNTEER AIRMEN 
 
 Day, September 6, 1916 "Never in my coun- 
 try will the American volunteers of the Great 
 War be forgotten; some, according to their 
 power, offering their pens, or their money, or 
 their help to our wounded, or their lives." 
 The idealism of which young Chapman was the 
 symbol is represented, at the present writing, 
 by more than a million and a half of American 
 soldiers in France, with hundreds of thousands 
 of others preparing to follow them.
 
 XXIX 
 
 KIFFIN ROCKWELL'S LAST COMBAT 
 
 TT7HEN Kiffin Rockwell was writing to 
 * * Chapman's parents of his friend Victor's 
 last fight, he little thought that in a few weeks 
 he too would be out of the great game of war. 
 He was a dashing fighter, as appears from Mc- 
 Connell's narrative already given of the man- 
 ner in which he brought down the American 
 Escadrille's first German airplane while flying 
 over the Vosges. At Verdun he was severely 
 wounded in one of his numerous combats with 
 the Germans, an explosive bullet striking his 
 wind-shield and tearing several gashes in his 
 face. 
 
 Rockwell, however, was no stranger to 
 wounds. When in the Foreign Legion he was 
 wounded at Carency. Chapman met him at 
 the aviation-camp at Avord, and in a letter 
 dated September 27, 1915, referred to him as 
 follows:
 
 I find a compatriot I am proud to own 
 here. A tall, lanky Kentuckian, called Rock- 
 well. He got his transfer about a month ago 
 from the Legion. He was wounded on the 
 ninth of May, like Kisling. In fact one-half of 
 the %me de Marche, 2300, were wounded that 
 day, not counting the killed and missing. He 
 gives much the best account I have heard. 
 Having charged with the third battalion and 
 being wounded in the leg on the last bouck, he 
 crawled back across the entire field in the 
 afternoon. 
 
 By the middle of September, after having 
 been in the Verdun sector since May 20, the 
 American Escadrille started from Bar-le-Duc, 
 as was supposed, for the Paris aviation centre 
 at Le Bourget; and the flying men were like a 
 lot of schoolboys in anticipation of the holiday 
 they were to have. As a matter of fact, they 
 were on the way back to Luxeuil near Belfort 
 to take part in a great air-raid against the 
 Mauser works at Oberndorf. There were ten 
 Americans in the party Lieutenant Thaw, 
 with a wounded arm, Adjutants Prince, Hall, 
 Lufbery and Masson, and Sergeants Rockwell, 
 Hill, Johnson, Rumsey, and Pavelka. McCon- 
 nell was in the hospital with a lame back due
 
 KIFFIN ROCKWELL'S LAST COMBAT 227 
 
 to a smash-up. At Luxeuil they found a great 
 force of British aviators, more than fifty pilots, 
 and a thousand men as helpers, mechanicians, 
 etc. Then followed a long delay while the 
 Americans were waiting to receive a new type 
 of Nieuport air-ship, more powerful and better- 
 armed than the ones they had been using. It 
 was of this loafing period that McConnell in 
 his "Flying for France" wrote: 
 
 It was about as much like war as a Bryan 
 lecture. While I was in the hospital I received 
 a letter written at this time from one of the 
 boys. I opened it expecting to read of an air 
 combat. It informed me that Thaw had caught 
 a trout three feet long and that Lufbery had 
 picked two baskets of mushrooms. 
 
 At last the new planes arrived. McConnell 
 gives the following particulars of Rockwell's 
 first flight in his new machine, of his encounter 
 with a Boche ship and of its fatal ending: 
 
 KifEn Rockwell and Lufbery were the first 
 to get their new machines ready and on the 
 23d of September went out for the first flight 
 since the escadrille had arrived at Luxeuil. 
 They became separated in the air, but each 
 flew on alone, which was a dangerous thing to
 
 228 AMERICAN VOLUNTEER AIRMEN 
 
 do in the Alsace sector. . . . Just before Kif- 
 fin Rockwell reached the lines he spied a Ger- 
 man machine Hnder him, flying at 11,000 feet. 
 I can imagine the satisfaction he felt in at last 
 catching an enemy plane in our lines. Rock- 
 well had fought more combats than the rest of 
 us put together, and had shot down many Ger- 
 man machines that had fallen in their lines, 
 but this was the first time he had had an op- 
 portunity of bringing down a Boche in our 
 territory. 
 
 A captain, the commandant of an Alsatian 
 village, watched the aerial battle through his 
 field glasses. He said that Rockwell approached 
 so close to the enemy that he thought there 
 would be a collision. The German craft, which 
 carried two machine guns, had opened a rapid 
 fire when Rockwell started his dive. He 
 plunged through the stream of lead and only 
 when very close to his enemy did he begin 
 shooting. For a second it looked as though 
 the German was falling, so the captain said, 
 but then he saw the French machine turn rap- 
 idly nose down, the wings of one side broke off 
 and fluttered in the wake of the airplane, which 
 hurtled earthward in a rapid drop. It crashed 
 into the ground in a small field a field of 
 flowers a few hundred yards back of the 
 trenches. It was not more than two and a 
 half miles from the spot where Rockwell, in the 
 month of May, brought down his first enemy 
 machine. The Germans immediately opened 
 up on the wreck with artillery *ire. In spite of
 
 KIFFIN ROCKWELL'S LAST COMBAT 229 
 
 the bursting shrapnel, gunners from a near-by 
 battery rushed out and recovered poor Rock- 
 well's broken body. 
 
 Rockwell was a great favorite with his com- 
 panions. McConnell paid him this tribute: 
 
 No greater blow could have befallen the 
 escadrille. Kiffin was its soul. He was loved 
 and looked up to by not only every man in our 
 flying corps, but by every one who knew him. 
 Kiffin was imbued with the spirit of the cause 
 for which he fought, and gave his heart and 
 soul to the performance of his duty. He said: 
 "I pay my part for Lafayette and Rocham- 
 beau," and he gave the fullest measure. The 
 old flame of chivalry burned brightly in this 
 boy's fine and sensitive being. With his death 
 France lost one of her most valuable pilots. 
 
 Rockwell had won the coveted Medaille Mili- 
 taire and the Croix de Guerre, on which ap- 
 peared four palms, representing the four cita- 
 tions he had received in the orders of the 
 French Army. For he was officially credited 
 with having brought down four enemy airplanes 
 and was believed to have accounted for numer- 
 ous others that had fallen within the enemy's 
 lines. His funeral was a splendid pageant, par- 
 ticipated in by every Frenchman in the avia-
 
 230 AMERICAN VOLUNTEER AIRMEN 
 
 tion service at Luxeuil, by a battalion of French 
 troops, by more than fifty of the British pilots, 
 followed by a detachment of five hundred of 
 their men; and by the little group of his Ameri- 
 can associates.
 
 XXX 
 
 NORMAN PRINCE KILLED BY AN ACCIDENT 
 
 THREE weeks after Kiffin Rockwell was 
 killed Norman Prince, to whose energy 
 and persistence, as we have seen, the organiza- 
 tion of the Lafayette Escadrille was due, met 
 his death by an accident while making a land- 
 ing at night. 
 
 A great lover of out-of-door sports, especially 
 hunting and polo, Prince was a close student of 
 the art of flying long before the war began. 
 Born at Pride's Crossing, Massachusetts, he was 
 educated at Groton and at Harvard, where he 
 was graduated in 1908. After going through 
 the Harvard Law School he went to Chicago to 
 practise his profession. For recreation he took 
 up the study and practice of aviation, then in 
 its infancy; and he found this pursuit so much 
 more congenial than the law that his avocation 
 finally became his vocation, the scientific in- 
 vestigation of the construction and control of 
 aircraft absorbing practically all of his time. 
 
 231
 
 232 AMERICAN VOLUNTEER AIRMEN 
 
 When the war began Prince was thus much 
 more familiar with air-ships than were most 
 young Americans. His sympathy with the 
 cause for which the Allies were fighting, and 
 especially his affection and admiration for 
 France, prompted him to go abroad early in 
 January, 1915, and offer his services to the 
 aviation corps of the French Army. They were 
 accepted, and he was sent to Pau, where he 
 went into training. His previous experience 
 with air-ships brought him quickly into active 
 service. His intimate letters to members of his 
 family, an address which he delivered at the 
 Tavern Club, Boston, on the occasion of his last 
 visit home on a furlough, in December, 1915, 
 and a memoir by George F. Babbitt, are to be 
 found in a memorial volume, published in 1917, 
 called "Norman Prince: A Volunteer Who Died 
 for the Cause He Loved." 
 
 A few paragraphs may be quoted from this 
 volume. Writing on September 6, 1915, from 
 northern France, near Arras, when he was in a 
 French flying corps, Prince said: 
 
 I am happy and in the best of health. I 
 sleep under canvas on a stretcher bed and eat
 
 PRINCE KILLED BY AN ACCIDENT 233 
 
 in the shed of an old farm house near by. I 
 have nothing to complain of. I like it. There 
 are ten American pilots with us in the French 
 service and twelve others in training, with their 
 number constantly increasing. Some day soon 
 we will all be united in one escadrille an Esca- 
 drille Americaine that is my fondest ambi- 
 tion. I am devoting all my spare energies to 
 organizing it, and all the American pilots here 
 are giving me every encouragement and assis- 
 tance in the work of preliminary organization. 
 
 Here is a selection from Prince's address at 
 the Tavern Club, on the Christmas night fol- 
 lowing, describing a bombing expedition to the 
 railway-station at Douai, as a result of which 
 he won his first decoration, the Croix de Guerre: 
 
 I was fortunate enough that day to escape 
 the range of the German flying machines by 
 going further north and passing through the 
 clouds, though I was shelled from a long dis- 
 tance all the way. I succeeded in dropping 
 my bombs on a railroad station, one of which I 
 saw explode in a bunch of freight cars in the 
 railroad yard. As I was returning within our 
 lines the Englishmen, by mistake, opened a 
 brisk fire on me, which necessitated my going 
 up into the clouds again. I proceeded due west 
 until I ran out of gasoline, and I then descended 
 in the dark near the headquarters of the Eng- 
 lish. It was my good fortune to land safely,
 
 234 AMERICAN VOLUNTEER AIRMEN 
 
 and on my arrival at my post I was brought 
 before the English commander, who asked me 
 to tell my story. Mine being one of the four 
 machines out of twenty that had reached Douai 
 in the raid, I was awarded a citation and given 
 the right to wear a War Cross my first deco- 
 ration. 
 
 In the same address Prince gave an account 
 of a perilous adventure which he had had in 
 the midsummer previous, when for a month his 
 headquarters were near Nancy: 
 
 During this month in Lorraine I experienced 
 the hardest knock I had received up to that 
 time. One day six German machines, fully 
 equipped, bombarded Nancy and our aviation 
 field. To retaliate, my squadron was sent out 
 to bombard their field on the same afternoon. 
 We started with thirty machines to a designated 
 rendezvous, and fifty minutes later, after get- 
 ting grouped, we proceeded to our ultimate 
 destination. I had a very fast machine, and 
 reached the German flying field without being 
 hit. When about to let go my bombs and 
 while my observer was aiming at the hangars 
 of the Germans, my machine was attacked by 
 them one on the left and two on the right. 
 I shouted to my observer to drop his bombs, 
 which he did, and we immediately straightened 
 out for home. While I was on the bank the 
 Germans opened fire on me with their machine
 
 PRINCE KILLED BY AN ACCIDENT 235 
 
 guns, which were even more perilous than their 
 shells. 
 
 My motor stopped a few moments after- 
 wards. It had given out, and to make matters 
 worse, a fourth German machine came at us 
 directly in front. My observer, who was an 
 excellent shot, let go at him, with the result 
 that when last seen this German aeroplane was 
 about four hundred feet below and quite out 
 of control. The other Germans behind kept 
 bothering us. If they had possessed ordinary 
 courage they might have got us. Flying with- 
 out any motive power compelled me to stand 
 my machine on end to keep ahead of them. As 
 we were nearing the French lines these Ger- 
 mans left us, but immediately batteries from 
 another direction opened fire on us. As I was 
 barely moving, I made an excellent target. One 
 shell burst near enough to put shrapnel in my 
 machine. It is marvellous how hard we can be 
 hit by shrapnel and have no vital part of our 
 equipment injured. I knew I was now over 
 the French lines which I must have crossed at 
 a height of four hundred metres. I finally 
 landed in a field covered with white crosses 
 marking the graves of the French and German 
 soldiers who had fallen the previous September 
 at this point. 
 
 Prince in February, 1916, was training to fly 
 the fastest combat air-ship that the French then 
 possessed "quite a different instrument," he
 
 says, "from the avion canon, which weighs three 
 times more than these small chasing appareils." 
 A little later, as has already been pointed out, 
 his great ambition was realized in the forma- 
 tion of a purely American corps of fighting air- 
 planes through which he hoped that more credit 
 would redound to the United States than would 
 be the case if these American volunteers were 
 scattered among the various French aviation 
 units. 
 
 He was at Verdun when Chapman was killed. 
 Writing under date of June 26, 1916, he said: 
 
 Poor Victor Chapman ! He had been miss- 
 ing for a week and we knew there was only a 
 very remote chance that he was a prisoner. 
 He was of tremendous assistance to me in get- 
 ting together the Escadrille. His heart was in 
 it to make ours as good as any on the front. 
 Victor was as brave as a lion and sometimes he 
 was almost too courageous attacking German 
 machines whenever and wherever he saw them, 
 regardless of the chances against him. . . . 
 Victor was killed while attacking an aeroplane 
 that was coming against Lufbery and me. 
 Another unaccounted-for German came up and 
 brought Victor down while he was endeavoring 
 to protect us. A glorious death -face a Vennemi 
 and for a great cause and to save a friend !
 
 PRINCE KILLED BY AN ACCIDENT 237 
 
 When Prince and his associates of the Ameri- 
 can Escadrille returned a little later to Luxeuil 
 they found preparations under way for the 
 great Allied raid on the Mauser works at Obern- 
 dorf. Four of the battle-planes that went out 
 on this raid as protection for the bombing ma- 
 chines were from the American Eseadrille 
 those of Lieutenant de Laage de Mieux, Luf- 
 bery, Norman Prince, and Masson. 
 
 The raid was successful in every way, the 
 Germans being takeii by surprise. In the 
 course of it Lufbery downed his fifth enemy 
 machine, and thus qualified for the honor of 
 being called an "Ace" in flying argot. It was 
 when he was returning from this expedition on 
 the night of the 12th of October, 1916, that 
 Prince met with the accident that resulted a 
 few days later in his death. When he was at- 
 tempting to make a landing after dark, within 
 the French lines, his aip-ship struck a wire cable 
 and was wrecked. The fall injured him so 
 severely that he lived only a few days. Up to 
 this time he had been engaged in no fewer than 
 one hundred and twenty-two aerial engage- 
 ments, and was officially credited with having
 
 238 AMERICAN VOLUNTEER AIRMEN 
 
 brought down five Boche planes in battle, and 
 was known to have conquered four others not 
 officially recorded. He had won, as has been 
 noted, the Croix de Guerre and the Medaille 
 Militaire; and the Croix de la Legion d'Honneur 
 was sent to him as he lay in the hospital. He 
 was buried with all military honors.
 
 XXXI 
 
 JAMES McCONNELL, HISTORIAN 
 
 selections already reproduced from 
 James R. McConnelTs book, "Flying for 
 France," must have given the reader a reason- 
 ably clear insight into the traits of character 
 which endeared the writer of those pages to his 
 comrades in the American Escadrille. He may in- 
 deed be called the historian of that organization 
 during the first eventful six months of its career, 
 so vivid are his pen-portraits of his associates 
 and so graphic are his descriptions of their life 
 on the ground and of their adventures in the 
 air. Before entering aviation, as has already 
 been noted, he had driven an ambulance in the 
 American Ambulance Field Service from Feb- 
 ruary to December, 1915, and had contributed 
 to the Outlook the best account printed up 
 to that time of the experiences of the men 
 at Pont-a-Mousson and around Bois-le-Pre'tre, 
 where some of the heaviest fighting of the early 
 
 239
 
 240 AMERICAN VOLUNTEER AIRMEN 
 
 part of the war took place. In all of these 
 writings McConnell showed that he was en- 
 dowed with somewhat of that rare gift which 
 Richard Harding Davis possessed to the full, of 
 distinguishing clearly between the significant 
 and the insignificant in the incidents and events 
 of the day's work or play, and of investing de- 
 tails with color, life, and interest, and often with 
 a charming humor peculiarly American. 
 
 The spirit with which he left his work in 
 North Carolina to enter the ambulance service 
 in France is indicated in this paragraph from 
 the introduction to his book in which the editor, 
 "F. C. P.," describes meeting him one day in 
 January, 1915, in front of the court house in 
 Carthage, when he announced that he was 
 leaving on the following Wednesday: 
 
 And then he went on to tell me, first, that, 
 as he saw it, the greatest event in history was 
 going on right at hand and that he would be 
 missing the opportunity of a life-time if he did 
 not see it. "These sand hills," he said, "will 
 be here forever, but the war won't; and so I'm 
 going." Then, as an afterthought, he added: 
 "And I'll be of some use, too, not just a sight- 
 seer, looking on; that wouldn't be fair."
 
 JAMES McCONNELL, HISTORIAN 241 
 
 As happened in the case of so many other 
 young American volunteers, interest in the war 
 as primarily a great adventure was gradually 
 replaced in McConnelTs mind by an absorbing 
 desire to be of substantial assistance to the 
 French people, who, it was found, were fighting 
 the fight of liberty and justice against enormous 
 odds. McConnell's account of the change is 
 simple and direct: 
 
 All along I had been convinced that the 
 United States ought to aid in the struggle 
 against Germany. With that conviction it was 
 plainly up to me to do more than drive an am- 
 bulance. The more I saw the splendor of the 
 fight the French were fighting, the more I began 
 to feel like an embusque what the British call 
 a "shirker." So I made up my mind to go into 
 aviation. 
 
 McConnell learned to fly at Pau, and qualified 
 as a pilot in season to become, as we have al- 
 ready seen, one of the original members of the 
 Lafayette, or as he preferred to call it, the 
 American, Escadrille, who assembled at Luxeuil, 
 on the Alsatian front, in the spring of 1916. 
 Under date of May 14 he gave, in a private 
 letter, these details of his first expedition over
 
 242 AMERICAN VOLUNTEER AIRMEN 
 
 the enemy's lines in an avion de chasse, the 
 function of which was, in his words, "to shoot 
 down Boches or keep them away from our 
 lines": 
 
 Well, I've made my first trip over the lines 
 and proved a few things to myself. First, I can 
 stand high altitudes. I had never been above 
 7,000 feet before, nor had I flown more than 
 an hour. On my trip to Germany I went to 
 14,000 feet and was in air for two hours. I 
 wore the fur head-to-foot combination they 
 give one and paper gloves under the fur gloves 
 you sent me. I was not cold. In a way it 
 seemed amusing to be going out knowing as 
 little as I do. My mitrailleuse had been 
 mounted the night before. I had never fired 
 it. Nor did I know the country at all even 
 though I'd motored along our lines. I followed 
 the others or I surely would have been lost. I 
 shall have to make special trips to study the 
 land and be able to make it out from my map 
 which I carry on board. For one thing the 
 weather was hazy and clouds obscured the view. 
 
 When the city of Miilhausen seemed directly 
 under him McConnell "noted with keen satis- 
 faction their invasion of real German territory.'* 
 "The Rhine, too," he adds, with a touch of 
 whimsical humor, "looked delightfully accessi- 
 ble."
 
 JAMES McCONNELL, HISTORIAN 243 
 
 After the squadron was transferred to the 
 Verdun front McConnell noted that combats 
 occurred on almost every sortie into the enemy 
 territory. The Germans, as always, played the 
 game cleverly, trusting that the eagerness of 
 the young Americans to get into a fight would 
 bring them beyond the German lines, where a 
 superior force could be brought to bear against 
 them. This is exactly what happened again 
 and again, and accounted in large part for 
 the number of casualties which the Americans 
 suffered. "The Boches," wrote McConnell, 
 "keep well within their lines, save occasion- 
 ally, and we have to go over and fight them 
 there." 
 
 Here is a description of the daily life McCon- 
 nell was leading at Verdun from a private letter 
 dated July 30: 
 
 Weather has been fine and we've been doing 
 a lot of work. Our lieutenant De Laage de 
 Mieux brought down a Boche. I had another 
 beautiful smash-up. Prince and I had stayed 
 top long over the lines. Important day, as an 
 attack was going on. It was getting dark and 
 we could see the tiny balls of fire the infantry 
 light to show the low-flying observation ma- 
 chines their new positions. On return, as I
 
 244 AMERICAN VOLUNTEER AIRMEN 
 
 was over another aviation field my motoi 
 broke. I made for field. In darkness I couldn't, 
 judge my distance well and went too far. At 
 edge of field there were trees and beyond a deep 
 cut where road ran. I was skinning ground at 
 170 kilometers [about 100 miles] an hour and 
 heading for trees. I saw soldiers running to be 
 in at finish and I thought myself that James's 
 hash was cooked, but I went between trees and 
 ended up head-on on the opposite bank of road. 
 My motor took the shock and my belt held me. 
 As my tail went up it was cut in two by some 
 very low 'phone wires. I wasn't bruised even. 
 Took dinner with the officers there, who gave 
 me a car to go home in afterward. 
 
 To-day I shared another chap's machine 
 (Hill of Peekskill, who knows McCord), and 
 got it shot up for him. De Laage, our lieuten- 
 ant, and I made a sortie at noon. When in the 
 German lines near Cote 304 I saw two Bodies 
 under me. I picked out the rear chap and 
 dove. Fired a few shots and then tried to get 
 under his tail and hit him from there. I missed 
 and bobbed up alongside of him. Fine for the 
 Boche but rotten for me. I could see his gun- 
 ner working the mitrailleuse for fair, and felt 
 his bullets darn close. I dove, for I could not 
 shoot from that position, and beat it. He kept 
 plunking away and all together put seven holes 
 in my machine. One was only ten inches in 
 front of me. De Laage was too far off to get 
 to the Boche and ruin him while I was amusing 
 him.
 
 JAMES McCONNELL, HISTORIAN 245 
 
 As the result of a lame back due to another 
 smash-up, McConnell was in the hospital for 
 several weeks, rejoining his fellow Americans of 
 the Lafayette Escadrille some time after they 
 had been transferred from Alsace to the Somme 
 front in October. The winter of 1916-17 was 
 comparatively quiet on the Somme and in the 
 sector from Roye to Soissons. With the early 
 spring, however, the activity increased. 
 
 McConnell's last flight took place on March 
 19, 1917, only a few weeks before the United 
 States declared war against Germany. He 
 made this flight in company with Edmond 
 Genet, who, having been "at school" all the 
 autumn and winter, had joined the American 
 squadron a couple of months before. In a let- 
 ter to his mother, dated March 20, 1917, as it 
 appears in the " War Letters of Edmond Genet," 
 McConnell's flying mate wrote: 
 
 We are all feeling decidedly blue because 
 our oldest pilot of the escadrille one of the 
 four who were its first members (the other 3 
 were Prince, Chapman and Rockwell) has 
 been missing since yesterday morning and un- 
 doubtedly is on the other side of the lines 
 either dead or wounded and a prisoner. He is
 
 246 AMERICAN VOLUNTEER AIRMEN 
 
 McConnell, the one who wrote such a good 
 account of the escadrille which was published 
 in World's Work. He and I were out together 
 yesterday morning over the new territory just 
 captured by the French and English, and about 
 ten o'clock, while well inside the enemy lines, 
 we encountered two German biplane machines. 
 I mounted to attack the nearest and left Mac 
 to take care of the second, and it is the last seen 
 of him. There were plenty of clouds and mist, 
 and after I had finished my scrap with the one 
 I attacked, in which I got one of my main upper 
 wing-supports cut in half, a guiding-rod cut in 
 half, several bullets through my upper wing, 
 and half an explosive bullet in the side of my 
 left cheek, which stunned me for a moment, I 
 went down lower to look for "Mac" and help 
 him if he was hard pressed, and looked all 
 around and waited for fifteen minutes for him 
 to show up, but I could see neither him nor the 
 German machine which must have attacked 
 him. My upper wing was in great danger of 
 breaking off, the support being half cut through, 
 my wound was bleeding and pained quite a bit, 
 so I finally headed back for camp, hoping Mac 
 had perhaps missed me and gone back before 
 me. I had a driving wind to face going back 
 and had to fly very low to get beneath heavy 
 clouds to see my way. 
 
 When I got to ground on our field I looked 
 in vain for Mac's machine. When I asked if 
 he had returned my worst fears were confirmed. 
 He had not, and we have, up to the present
 
 JAMES McCONNELL, HISTORIAN 247 
 
 time, had absolutely no news of him whatso- 
 ever. It's terrible, little Mother. I feel hor- 
 ribly over it, for I was the only one with him. 
 
 A week later Genet was able to report the 
 finding of McConnell's body: 
 
 Jim McConnell has just gallantly earned a 
 lonely grave out behind the present fighting- 
 lines. I wrote to you last Tuesday the day 
 after he and I were out together, when we had 
 to return, wounded, without him and with no 
 definite news of him. Since then the Germans 
 were forced back further and finally French 
 troops came across a badly smashed Nieuport 
 with the body of a sergeant pilot beside the 
 ruins. All identification papers were gone and 
 the d d Boches had even taken off the flying 
 clothes and even the boots and left the body 
 where it had fallen. The number of the ma- 
 chine was sent in and so we knew it was Mac's. 
 
 The following morning, after a flight over 
 the lines, I spiralled down over the location 
 given and found the wreck almost unrecogniz- 
 able as an aeroplane, crushed into the ground at 
 the edge of a shell-torn and wrecked little vil- 
 lage. I circled over it for a few minutes and 
 then back to camp to report. Our captain flew 
 over that way the same morning to see about 
 the body. When he returned he told us about 
 the clothes and shoes having been stolen and 
 said that Mac had been buried beside the road 
 next to which he had fallen. There is no doubt
 
 248 AMERICAN VOLUNTEER AIRMEN 
 
 but that he was killed during the combat in the 
 air and the machine crashed down full speed to 
 the earth. Since that day I've chased two 
 Boche machines, but could get up to neither, 
 but I'll get one yet and more than one, or be 
 dropped myself, to avenge poor Mac.
 
 XXXII 
 
 GENET IN THE AMERICAN ESCADRILLE 
 
 YOUNG Edmond Genet was very happy 
 when, early in June, 1916, he found him- 
 self no longer a Legionnaire, but a student at 
 the French military aviation school at Buc, not 
 far from Paris. "We're treated finely here," he 
 wrote to his brother, "have excellent quarters, 
 the food is good, and, except for the uniform 
 and other personal clothes which we buy our- 
 selves, we're fitted out extremely well." The 
 future looked very bright to him. "This is 
 what one can call the real thing. This is sport 
 w T ith all the fascination and excitement and 
 sporting chances any live fellow could ever 
 wish for." 
 
 Under the stress of war the previous year of 
 1915, however, had witnessed such a marvellous 
 development, both in the construction of air- 
 ships and in the art of controlling them, that a 
 much longer time was required than formerly 
 to qualify a novice for this increasingly difficult 
 
 249
 
 250 AMERICAN VOLUNTEER AIRMEN 
 
 branch of the army service. The consequence 
 was that it was not until about the middle of 
 the following January, in 1917, that Genet at 
 last found himself at the front as a fully quali- 
 fied pilote amateur in the American Escadrille. 
 In the meantime, while learning all the tricks 
 of the pilot of an avion de chasse, Genet, like his 
 fellow compatriots in the different branches of 
 the French service, was deeply interested in the 
 result of the presidential election in the United 
 States, especially in its relation to the war. 
 His elation over the early reports of the election 
 of Hughes was followed, when later news an- 
 nounced that Wilson had been re-elected, by 
 hot indignation and a feeling of bitter humilia- 
 tion. To a friend he wrote, under date of 
 November 15: 
 
 Where has all the old genuine honor and 
 patriotism and humane feelings of our country- 
 men gone? What are those people, who live 
 on their farms in the West, safe from the chances 
 of foreign invasion, made of, anyway? They 
 decided the election of Mr. Wilson. Don't 
 they know anything about the invasion of Bel- 
 gium, the submarine warfare against their own 
 countrymen and all the other outrages which 
 all neutral countries, headed by the United
 
 GENET IN THE AMERICAN ESCADRILLE 251 
 
 States, should have long ago rose up and sup- 
 pressed and which, because of the past admin- 
 istration's "peace at any price" attitude have 
 been left to increase and increase ? They crave 
 for peace, those unthinking, uncaring voters, 
 and what's the reason? Why, they're making 
 money hand over fist because their country is 
 at peace at peace at the price of its honor and 
 respect in the whole civilized world at peace 
 while France and Belgium are being soaked in 
 blood by a barbarous invasion while the very 
 citizens of the United States are being murdered 
 and those same invaders are laughing behind 
 our backs even in our very faces. ... It 
 couldn't be possible for Americans in America 
 to feel the same bitter way as Americans over 
 here among the very scenes of this war's hor- 
 rors. It's not comprehensible over there where 
 peace reigns supreme. Come over here and 
 you'll be engulfed like the rest of us in the 
 realization of the necessity of the whole civilized 
 world arming itself against this intrusion of 
 utter brutality and militaristic arrogance. 
 Peace God forbid such happiness until the in- 
 vaders have been victoriously driven back be- 
 hind their own borders, knowing the lesson of 
 their folly in treading ruthlessly on unoffending 
 neutral territory and all the rest of their deeds 
 of piracy and the blood of France and Belgium 
 has dried up. 
 
 During his period of training Genet met with 
 the usual accidents to which students are sub-
 
 252 AMERICAN VOLUNTEER AIRMEN 
 
 ject. Once he fell fifty yards or so in a fifty- 
 horse-power Bleriot monoplane, smashing the 
 machine to "pieces no larger than matchsticks." 
 Being strapped in tightly, however, he escaped 
 with only a badly wrenched hip and back. On 
 another occasion he turned over completely in 
 a Nieuport plane, without the slightest injury 
 to himself. For diversion he was able, on one 
 of his trips to Paris, to enjoy a performance of 
 "Samson et Delila" at the opera. At last, on 
 January 20, 1917, he reached the front as a 
 member of the Lafayette Escadrille, finding 
 himself, oddly enough, in the same neighbor- 
 hood where, nearly two years earlier, he had 
 begun his service in the Foreign Legion. 
 
 In a letter to his brother Rivers, Genet gave 
 this description of his first flight over the lines 
 in his new 110 horse-power Nieuport: 
 
 The first morning I flew over the lines I 
 went 4,200 metres (about 12,600 ft.) which is 
 some altitude for a clear and very cold morning. 
 The view was wonderful and just about 500 
 metres below and to our right (I was out with 
 one of the other fellows) shells fired at us from 
 a German anti-aircraft battery were bursting. 
 A light covering of snow helped to accentuate
 
 GENET IN THE AMERICAN ESCADRILLE 253 
 
 the outlines of the ground, the railroad-lines, 
 roads, villages, etc. That was one of our ex- 
 ceptional clear days though. This is surely no 
 kid's game. It's mighty tiring and trying on 
 the nerves and one feels it lots at the end of 
 each day's flying. One has to keep constantly 
 on the alert and a mighty wide-awake alert 
 too. Manoeuvring the machine has practically 
 to be done involuntarily mechanically, I should 
 say, and keep all the senses absolutely on the 
 alert for the enemy and the course taken. The 
 enemy machines drop down behind one with 
 blamed suddenness and then there's the devil 
 to pay. It's some job ! There isn't a great 
 deal of danger of being brought down by shells 
 although there have been machines brought 
 down that way mostly with a lot of luck on 
 the part of the gunners. Both sides, though, 
 do possess some mighty good anti-aircraft bat- 
 teries. 
 
 Genet made many flights and had several 
 combats with German air-ships, on one occasion 
 coming very near getting lost in the enemy's 
 territory, owing to the thickness of the weather. 
 Finally came the expedition with McConnell, 
 Genet's description of which has already been 
 given. Genet himself was a fatalist and ex- 
 pected to meet the same end as that which had 
 overtaken Chapman, Rockwell, Prince, and
 
 254 AMERICAN VOLUNTEER AIRMEN 
 
 now McConnell. But he faced the probability 
 with high courage. "All we ask," he said, "is 
 to be able to bring down a few of the enemy 
 machines before our turn comes." Genet's last 
 letter to his "dear little Mother" was dated 
 April 15, a little more than a week after the 
 United States declared war against Germany. 
 He was killed on the following day while mak- 
 ing a sortie over the lines with Lufbery. 
 
 Lufbery's account of his companion's death 
 was as follows: 
 
 One afternoon, at half -past two, Genet and 
 I were ordered to make a patrol on the lines 
 between St. Quentin and La Fere. I was lead- 
 ing and everything seemed to be all right. At 
 about 3 o'clock somewhere around Moy the 
 German anti-aircrafts started to shell us. I 
 saw very plainly three shells bursting right 
 behind Genet's machine, about one hundred 
 yards from it. As we get that very often I did 
 not pay much attention to it. Many times I 
 myself had been shelled much closer than that 
 and nothing had happened. Anyway, I don't 
 know if he got hit or not, but he suddenly turned 
 around and went toward the French lines. I 
 followed him for about three or four minutes 
 to make sure that he was taking the right 
 direction, after that I went back to the lines 
 to finish my patrol duty. There is another
 
 GENET IN THE AMERICAN ESCADRILLE 255 
 
 thing: Genet that day was not feeling well. He 
 went out in the morning for a moment, and 
 when he landed he told us that there was some- 
 thing wrong with him and went to bed. We did 
 not want to let him go to the afternoon sortie, 
 but he insisted, saying he was now much better. 
 
 Soldiers who saw him fall say that the ma- 
 chine got in a corkscrew dive at about 1,400 
 yards high, finally a wing came off and the 
 whole thing crashed on the ground. 
 
 I do not know exactly what happened, but 
 might suppose that, being ill, he fainted. He 
 also might have got wounded by a piece of shell. 
 
 Genet was a nice little fellow and everybody 
 in the Escadrille was very fond of him. He 
 was very brave and I am sure he would have 
 become one of the best. 
 
 In a letter to Paul Rockwell, Sergeant Walter 
 Lovell, of Newtonville, Massachusetts, then in 
 the American Escadrille, after having been 
 graduated, as so many of his fellows were, from 
 the American Ambulance service told of the 
 finding of Genet's body at a spot a few miles 
 within the French lines and not far from where 
 McConnell fell a few weeks earlier. "He had 
 fallen with the motor in full speed in the middle 
 of the road, which proves that the German shell 
 had killed him or rendered him unconscious."
 
 256 AMERICAN VOLUNTEER AIRMEN 
 
 He was buried with full military honors at 
 Ham. 
 
 Genet is thought to have been the first 
 American to be killed after the United States 
 entered the war. In accordance with his re- 
 quest, his body was wrapped in the French flag, 
 and both the French and the American flags 
 were placed upon his grave. Finally, it is diffi- 
 cult to read dry-eyed these paragraphs from 
 Paul Rockwell's letter to the boy's mother: 
 
 I feel a sympathy with you that I cannot 
 find words to express, I would have written 
 you ere now, but the loss of dear little Edmond 
 coming right after that of Jim gave me such a 
 feeling of the "blues" that I could not write. 
 
 Anyway we know that Edmond fell for some- 
 thing worth while, and that he was so fine an 
 idealist he didn't mind dying for the cause. He 
 is over there with Kiffin and Jim and the other 
 boys and it will not be long until we will be 
 with them too. 
 
 I think that one enters eternity with the 
 same force and strength that one quits this 
 world with, and that one falling in battle in the 
 full bloom of youth and energy has a better 
 place in the next world than those who linger 
 here and die of illness or age. Anyhow I would 
 change places with any one of the boys who 
 have died so gallantly.
 
 XXXIII 
 MAJOR LUFBERY, ACE OF AMERICAN ACES 
 
 NO more romantic career than that of 
 Raoul Lufbery, of Wallingford, Connecti- 
 cut, world-rover and soldier of fortune, has thus 
 far emerged from the turmoil and smoke of the 
 great war. That a wanderer for years over the 
 face of the earth, born of an American father 
 and a French mother, should have finally found 
 himself on the bloody fields of France and 
 should have won, by his brilliant conquests of 
 the Boches in the air, the three highest honors 
 the French could bestow upon him, together 
 with the British Military Cross for distinguished 
 service, must seem indeed like a fairy-tale. 
 
 Lufbery was born thirty-four years ago in 
 Clermont, France, and was brought up after 
 he was six, when his mother died, by his mater- 
 nal grandmother. Unlike most French boys, 
 and owing possibly to his American blood, he 
 developed a roving disposition wanted to see 
 the world. So when he was fifteen he ran away 
 
 257
 
 258 AMERICAN VOLUNTEER AIRMEN 
 
 and went to Paris. But Paris disappointed 
 him there were too many people and there 
 were too few opportunities for quiet meditation, 
 of which he was increasingly fond, even at that 
 early age. The conventional life did not ap- 
 peal to him. 
 
 Then began the wanderings of this Franco- 
 American Ulysses. First he sailed to Algiers, 
 where, being ill, he went to the hospital. Being 
 a likable sort of a fellow, sympathetic by nature 
 and deft with his hands, he became, on his re- 
 covery, an orderly in the hospital and stayed 
 there two years. Speaking of his adaptability 
 for army service, his brother Charles said to a 
 writer for the New York Sun : 
 
 He was always ready to risk everything, 
 and the moment's joy was all he wanted from 
 it. Ah, he is splendid for an army ! He could 
 dress wounds, or cook or comfort the wounded, 
 and do all those simple things which so few 
 know how to do at all. He ought to know 
 them. He has made his living since he was 
 fifteen. 
 
 From Algiers Lufbery wandered to Egypt 
 and thence, after many adventures, to Constan- 
 tinople, through Roumania and finally to Ger-
 
 LUFBERY, ACE OF AMERICAN ACES 259 
 
 many, learning, while working in a brewery at 
 Fulda, to speak and read German. But he 
 wanted to see the rest of the world and to visit 
 his own people, his father, his brothers, and his 
 half-sisters in New England. So he made his 
 way to Hamburg and worked until he had 
 money enough to take him to New York. He 
 reached Wallingford in 1906, but family ties 
 were not strong enough to keep him there per- 
 manently. Regular work in a silver factory 
 was not to his taste. So, after a year and a 
 half, he set forth again, making brief stays in 
 New Orleans, where he worked in a bakery, and 
 in San Francisco, where he was a waiter in a 
 hotel. In 1908 he was in Honolulu and from 
 there he went to the Philippines, where he 
 served in the United States Army for more than 
 a year. In 1911 his people in Wallingford re- 
 ceived word from him that he was in Canton, 
 China, and had a place in the Imperial Chinese 
 customs service. 
 
 While he was in the Far East Lufbery got 
 his first taste of aviation and through this ex- 
 perience was led to offer his services to the 
 French in the war. The circumstances were
 
 260 AMERICAN VOLUNTEER AIRMEN 
 
 thus stated by the New York Evening Post in a 
 sketch of Lufbery: 
 
 Several years ago he met the aviator, Marc 
 Pourpe, in Asia, who trained him as his assis- 
 tant. Lufbery discovered for the first time 
 that he was an American when he attempted 
 to enlist with Pourpe at the outbreak of the 
 war, and was rejected on account of his nation- 
 ality. He was finally permitted to go to the 
 front as Pourpe's mechanic. Pourpe was killed 
 soon afterward, and Lufbery importuned the 
 French authorities for permission to be trained 
 as a pilot, and his request was finally granted. 
 He joined the Lafayette Escadrille when it was 
 sent to the Verdun sector in May, 1916. 
 
 Before becoming a member of the Lafayette 
 Escadrille Lufbery had gone through the usual 
 experience of beginners in bombing machines. 
 He contributed to Everybody's Magazine for 
 February, 1918, a description of one such expe- 
 dition in which he took part in January, 1916, 
 as the pilot of a 140 horse-power Voisin airplane. 
 The fleet consisted of no fewer than forty ships 
 and the objective was the Metz-Sablons rail- 
 way-station. Lufbery pictured the approach to 
 this objective through shrapnel fire, and con- 
 tinued as follows:
 
 LUFBERY, ACE OF AMERICAN ACES 261 
 
 A few minutes later I found myself over the 
 spacious station of Metz. This was our objec- 
 tive. The machine in front of me executed a 
 semi-circle in order to give the slower aeroplanes 
 time to come up. Handicapped by my 140 
 h. p. I took no part in this manoeuvre, but flew 
 straight to the point, where I was the first to 
 arrive. 
 
 Our coming must have been announced, as 
 several enemy machines came from every direc- 
 tion to meet us. One of them advanced toward 
 me. Quickly I turned my head to see if my 
 observer was on his guard. His machine gun 
 was pointed at the enemy, his finger on the 
 trigger. At a distance of one hundred and 
 fifty metres, the enemy machine made a brisk 
 movement to get beyond our range, turning to 
 enable its gunner to fire at us. But this ma- 
 nreuvre was useless, for the greater number of 
 the biplane machines have two guns, one sta- 
 tionary, which fires from the front, the other 
 mounted on a turret in the rear. 
 
 I kept my eye on my adversary. I could 
 clearly see the black painted cross on his fusi- 
 lage and helm. The fight began. We ex- 
 changed a shower of bullets. The Boche piqued, 
 apparently having had enough. I did not think 
 it worth my while to follow him, as there was 
 nothing now to obstruct our way, and I had 
 an important mission to fulfil. 
 
 Through the wind shield I could distinguish 
 railroad tracks, trains, stationary and on the 
 move, stores of goods, hangars, etc.
 
 262 AMERICAN VOLUNTEER AIRMEN 
 
 My observer tapped me on the shoulder and 
 signed for me to go ahead. Another tap in- 
 formed me that the bombs had been dropped. 
 Our mission was accomplished. All that re- 
 mained for us to do now was to get back to 
 camp as soon as possible. The Boches were 
 hurrying up in numbers. We had to keep a 
 watch on all sides. We were surprised by a 
 monoplane Fokker, which hurled at us a shower 
 of bullets and departed before we had time to 
 respond. Two or three short, sharp, familiar 
 sounds told me that my machine was hit. But 
 my motor continued its regular throb, and my 
 observer reported that the gasoline tank was 
 untouched. 
 
 The wind blowing from the north facilitated 
 our return. In a short time we were over our 
 lines. Then I laughed, without knowing why. 
 I looked at my observer, and he too laughed. 
 We were both feeling good. 
 
 Lufbery's skill as a fighting pilot developed 
 rapidly after he joined the American Escadrille. 
 From that admirable record of the achievements 
 of the members of this corps, McConnelPs 
 "Flying for France," two instances may be 
 cited. This relates to a combat over the Ver- 
 dun battlefield: 
 
 A pilot seldom has the satisfaction of be- 
 holding the result of his bull's-eye bullet.
 
 LUFBERY, ACE OF AMERICAN ACES 263 
 
 Rarely, so difficult is it to follow the turnings 
 and twistings of the dropping 'plane, does he 
 see his fallen foe strike the ground. Lufbery's 
 last direct hit was an exception, for he followed 
 all that took place from a balcony seat. I 
 myself was in the "nigger-heaven," so I know. 
 We had set out on a sortie together just before 
 noon one August day, and for the first time on 
 such an occasion had lost each other over the 
 lines. Seeing no Germans, I passed my time 
 hovering over the French observation machines. 
 Lufbery found one, however, and promptly 
 brought it down. Just then I chanced to make 
 a southward turn, and caught sight of an air- 
 plane falling out of the sky into the German 
 lines. 
 
 As it turned over, it showed its white belly 
 for an instant, then seemed to straighten out, 
 and planed downward in big zigzags. The 
 pilot must have gripped his controls even in 
 death, for his craft did not tumble as most do. 
 It passed between my line of vision and a wood, 
 into which it disappeared. Just as I was going 
 down to find out where it landed, I saw it again 
 skimming across a field, and heading straight 
 for the brown band beneath me. It was out- 
 lined against the shell-racked earth like a tiny 
 insect, until just northwest of Fort Douaumont 
 it crashed down upon the battlefield. A sheet 
 of flame and smoke shot up from the tangled 
 wreckage. I watched it burn a moment or two, 
 then went back to the observation machines. 
 
 I thought Lufbery would show up and point
 
 264 AMERICAN VOLUNTEER AIRMEN 
 
 to where the German had fallen. He failed to 
 appear, and I began to be afraid it was he 
 whom I had seen come down, instead of an 
 enemy. I spent a worried hour before my re- 
 turn homeward. After getting back I learned 
 that Lufbery was quite safe, having hurried in 
 after the fight to report the destruction of his 
 adversary before somebody else claimed him, 
 which is only too frequently the case. Obser- 
 vation posts, however, confirmed Lufbery's 
 story, and he was of course very much de- 
 lighted. Nevertheless, at luncheon I heard him 
 murmuring, half to himself, "Those poor fel- 
 lows!" 
 
 Noticing on another occasion during a fight 
 with a Boche that a German plane was over 
 French territory, Lufbery swooped down near 
 his adversary, waved a good-by, which was 
 returned, and "whirred off to chase the other 
 representative of Kultur." McConnell con- 
 tinued: 
 
 He caught up with him and dove to the 
 attack, but he was surprised by a German he 
 had not seen. Before he could escape three 
 bullets entered his motor, two passed through 
 the fur-lined combination he wore, another 
 ripped open one of his woolen flying boots, his 
 airplane was riddled from wing-tip to wing-tip, 
 and other bullets cut the elevating plane. Had
 
 LUFBERY, ACE OF AMERICAN ACES 265 
 
 he not been an exceptional aviator he never 
 would have brought safely to earth so badly 
 damaged a machine. It was so thoroughly 
 shot up that it was junked as being beyond 
 repairs. 
 
 Lufbery's conquests in his combats with the 
 Germans won for him in quick succession the 
 Croix de Guerre, the Medaille Militaire and 
 the Croix de la Legion d'Honneur from the 
 French, and the Military Cross for Distinguished 
 Service from his British associates. On De- 
 cember 27, 1917, he wrote in quaint phraseology 
 to his brother Charles in Wallingford, as quoted 
 in the sketch in the New York Sun already re- 
 ferred to, as follows: 
 
 Now, I am looking like a Christmas tree, 
 medals all over my chest. The last one I was 
 decorated with is a Montenegrin order, with a 
 ribbon red, blue and white. Though it has 
 not the value of the French Legion of Honor or 
 the Military Medal, I am awfully proud to 
 wear it. 
 
 You certainly have heard through the 
 newspapers about my commission in the Ameri- 
 can aviation, but the truth is I have been ap- 
 pointed to that rank (Major) a month ago, but 
 I cannot wear the uniform yet, as the French 
 are still holding my discharge.
 
 266 AMERICAN VOLUNTEER AIRMEN 
 
 I now have sixteen official German machines 
 to my credit, and many others unofficial. On 
 December 2 I brought two of them down. 
 
 Well, how is everything up at the old Wal- 
 lingford? I would like very much to see it 
 back again. Unfortunately, I must to give it 
 up for the present. For I should like to organ- 
 ize some sort of a little flying circus for the 
 Germans before I leave here. 
 
 Major Lufbery, however, was destined never 
 to see "the old Wallingford" "back again." 
 For a few months later, on Sunday, May 19, 
 1918, he was killed by a fall from his machine, 
 which had apparently been set on fire by incen- 
 diary bullets from a huge German air-ship, with 
 two guns, in a desperate combat over the city 
 of Toul. At the time of his death he was offi- 
 cially credited with having shot down eighteen 
 enemy planes, far and away the most note- 
 worthy achievement of any American in the 
 aviation service. 
 
 One of those who took part in the military 
 funeral of Major Lufbery the next day was a 
 fellow aviator, Lieutenant Kenneth P. Culbert, 
 who had been graduated at Harvard in the pre- 
 vious year. In the middle of a long letter dated
 
 Copyright by the Committee on Public Information. 
 
 Major Raoul Lufbery.
 
 LUFBERY, ACE OF AMERICAN ACES 267 
 
 May 21 from Lieutenant Culbert to Professor 
 C. T. Copeland, of Cambridge, which was 
 printed in the Harvard Alumni Bulletin, ap- 
 peared this description of the funeral of Major 
 Lufbery : 
 
 Perhaps you'd like to hear of Major Luf- 
 bery 's funeral you doubtless know that he was 
 shot down, and fell from his burning plane into 
 a courtyard. He had done a great deal in 
 uniting the French and Americans, he was the 
 greatest of our airmen and seventh on the list 
 of French aces, he had all the qualities of a 
 soldier, audacity, utter fearlessness, persistency, 
 and tremendous skill, in every way, sir, he was 
 a valuable man. 
 
 As we marched to his interment the sun 
 was just sinking behind the mountain that 
 
 rises so abruptly in front of T ; the sky was 
 
 a faultless blue, and the air was heavy with the 
 scent of the blossoms on the trees in the sur- 
 rounding fields. An American and French 
 general led the procession, following close on 
 to a band which played the funeral march and 
 "Nearer My God to Thee" in so beautiful a 
 way that I for one could hardly keep my eyes 
 dry. Then followed the officers of his squadron 
 and of my own and after us an assorted group 
 of Frenchmen famous in the stories of this war, 
 American officers of high rank, and two Ameri- 
 can companies of infantry, separated by a 
 French one.
 
 268 AMERICAN VOLUNTEER AIRMEN 
 
 How slowly we seemed to march as we 
 went to his grave, passing before crowds of 
 American nurses in their clean white uniforms, 
 and a throng of patients and French civilians ! 
 He was given a full military burial; with the 
 salutes of the firing squad, and the two repeti- 
 tions of taps, one answering the other from the 
 
 west. General E made a brief address, one 
 
 of the finest talks I have ever heard any man 
 give while throughout all the ceremony French 
 and American planes circled the field. In all 
 my life I have never heard taps blown so beau- 
 tifully as on that afternoon even some of the 
 officers joined the women there in quietly dab- 
 bing at their eyes with white handkerchiefs. 
 France and United States had truly assembled 
 to pay a last tribute to one of their soldiers. 
 My only prayer is that somehow through some 
 means I can do as much as he for my country 
 before I too wander west if in that direction 
 I am to travel. 
 
 On the very next day, as Fate willed it, May 
 22, the writer of these words was killed in 
 combat, his spirit, one may believe, joining that 
 of his comrade Lufbery in the journey "west- 
 ward."
 
 XXXIV 
 
 MAJOR THAW, PIONEER AMERICAN AVIATOR 
 
 THE opening chapter of this book was de- 
 voted to some of the experiences of young 
 William Thaw, of Yale, in the Foreign Legion. 
 Its final chapter shall treat of the exploits in 
 the aviation service of France and of the United 
 States, of Major William Thaw, of Pittsburgh, 
 now four years older than he was when he de- 
 cided that this was to be a conflict between 
 civilization and barbarism, and that it was up 
 to him as a good American to take active part 
 in it. At last accounts he was still fighting the 
 Boches, the only survivor over the firing-lines 
 of that gallant little band of American volun- 
 teers who formed the original Lafayette Esca- 
 drille, and the pioneer as well, in the French 
 air service, of them all. 
 
 Thaw joined the Legion as the quickest and 
 easiest way of getting into the firing-lines. 
 But, as we have seen, his experience with this 
 branch of the French service was disappointing, 
 
 269
 
 270 AMERICAN VOLUNTEER AIRMEN 
 
 and as soon as he was able to pull enough official 
 wires he got himself transferred, in December, 
 1914, into the French flying service. He was 
 not altogether a novice in an air machine, for, 
 like Norman Prince, he had done some flying in 
 the United States before the war, though not, 
 as he admits in one of his letters, over land. 
 He returned to the United States on a brief 
 furlough in the autumn of 1916; and this visit 
 recalled to a writer in the Yale Alumni Weekly 
 that at the beginning of his sophomore year 
 Thaw had arrived at New Haven in a hydro- 
 aeroplane. 
 
 At the end of December, 1914, Thaw was 
 at Mervel, attached to Escadrille D 6 of the 
 French Aviation Corps as an observer. His 
 capacity for this work and his personality evi- 
 dently impressed the French officers, and they 
 made his pathway easy. The contrast, more- 
 over, between his present mode of life and that 
 of the trenches made him very contented. 
 
 From the same group of Thaw's letters to his 
 family from which quotations have already 
 been made originally published in the Yale 
 Alumni Weekly a few more selections relating
 
 THAW, PIONEER AMERICAN AVIATOR 271 
 
 to this period may be taken. Thus, under date 
 of December 28, 1915, he wrote: 
 
 About three or four times a week I have to 
 go on little joy-rides in a good machine (we 
 have six 80-gnome Deperdussins) with a good 
 pilot (two of the six here have won the Legion 
 of Honor and two the Military Medal), mark 
 the position of German batteries, and regulate 
 by means of smoke signals the firing of our 
 guns. 
 
 A career as an observer and as a regulator of 
 artillery-fire did not, however, satisfy Thaw's 
 ambition; he wanted to fly his own battle-plane ! 
 So he schemed and manoeuvred to secure ad- 
 mittance to a military training-camp, where he 
 could obtain in time a license to fly. Finally, 
 in February, 1915, he carried his point and was 
 sent to the Reserve of Pilots, as it was called, 
 Caudron Division, at Buc. His letter of Feb- 
 ruary 14 tells how he evaded being sent to 
 school at Pau: 
 
 They wanted to send me to the school at 
 Pau, but I know what schools are, so I told 
 them that my name was W. Caudron Thaw, 
 and finally persuaded them to give me a try. 
 I was rather up against it though, as I'd never
 
 272 AMERICAN VOLUNTEER AIRMEN 
 
 flown on land, never with a rotary motor, never 
 with the propeller in front, and never with that 
 control, and at Buc they have nothing but the 
 big regulation 80 H. P. machines. But one of 
 my favorite mottoes is, "try anything once," 
 so the second day I got a ten-minute ride as a 
 passenger to get the feel of the machine, and 
 since then, in the occasional streaks of fairly 
 good weather, I have flown alone twice, and 
 the Captain says that I can take the brevet 
 militaire the first good day. But that is very 
 simple, as they have eliminated the cross- 
 country tests, and all you have to do is to stay 
 up for one hour at two thousand metres. 
 
 So I hope to be back at the front in two or 
 three weeks (and this time with a good job 
 instead of being a ditch-digger), probably with 
 my old escadrille, which, I believe, is going to 
 change to Caudrons. Anyway, the Captain (of 
 D. 6) who is now at Buc practising, having 
 changed from Dep. to Caudron, has asked to 
 have me with him, whether he takes the same 
 escadrille or not, so I should worry ! 
 
 Under date of April 7 Thaw wrote that the 
 French aviation centre had been moved from 
 Buc to Bourget, only a few miles from Paris, 
 which was easily reached by tram-car. Evi- 
 dently he had made good progress, for he said 
 that he had been acting as a sort of instructor, 
 "teaching green observateurs how to observe."
 
 THAW, PIONEER AMERICAN AVIATOR 273 
 
 At the time of writing Thaw had just reached 
 the front again and was glad to be there: 
 
 The Caudron, though very slow (113 kils.* 
 p. h.), is really a remarkable little machine. 
 Day before yesterday four of us came over here 
 to Luneville, where we are located indefinitely 
 on the champ des man&uvres, about 8 kils. be- 
 hind the lines; the other two are coming over 
 later. ... It is interesting to note that al- 
 though I am supposed here to be a pretty good 
 pilote, it was my first cross-country flight. And 
 it certainly is sport sailing along through the 
 clouds, steering by map and compass. 
 
 Under date of April 18 Thaw wrote of his 
 first meeting with a German "Taube": 
 
 Another short letter, just to say "Hello" 
 and "tout va bien."- -The past few days since I 
 wrote you have passed very quickly just 
 enough work to seem to be busy, and very, 
 very interesting work at that. Have made six 
 reconnaissances to date, and to-morrow morning 
 I do my first regulating of artillery fire, having 
 tried out my wireless to-day. Have so far 
 flown about 1200 kils.j over German territory, 
 and have more than once brought back fairly 
 important information. So, as I said before, 
 it certainly feels great to be really doing soine- 
 
 * About 70 miles per hour. 
 I Approximately 750 miles.
 
 274 AMERICAN VOLUNTEER AIRMEN 
 
 thing. Met my first and only "Taube" last 
 Thursday morning, and, believe me, I was 
 scared. But so was he and beat it straight 
 down, much to my relief, as we were 40 kils. 
 from our lines. Every day something new, 
 something exciting. It's a great life. . . . 
 
 McConnell notes that during the autumn of 
 1915 Thaw was doing excellent work at the 
 front as the pilot of a Caudron biplane carrying 
 an observer. During the autumn and winter, 
 however, he was co-operating heartily with Nor- 
 man Prince and Elliott Cowdin in their efforts 
 to persuade the French authorities to allow them 
 to form a purely American flying squadron. 
 
 When, late in the winter, the project seemed 
 likely to succeed, Thaw is found elaborately 
 planning to have Captain Thenault appointed 
 to the command of the new squadron. Thus in 
 a letter dated February 21, 1916, Victor Chap- 
 man wrote: 
 
 Now we must have a French Captain. But 
 first, as to the people who are running this. 
 They are, of course, the three you know Thaw, 
 Cowdin and Prince. Thaw, though the young- 
 est, has perhaps more weight, being a sows- 
 Lieutenant. Thaw wants his old chief at 
 his Caudron Escadrille, Capitaine Thenault,
 
 THAW, PIONEER AMERICAN AVIATOR 275 
 
 a charming fellow, but young. Balsan, after 
 being asked to look into the matter, gave some 
 uncertain answer. Thaw wants him if it's 
 physically possible. Meanwhile we wait, and if 
 nothing is done, we greatly fear that Thenault 
 may be definitely refused us and some "ser- 
 vice" Capitaine be dumped upon us to make 
 our life unpleasant. 
 
 Thaw as usual carried his point: Captain 
 Thenault was put in command of the Lafayette 
 Escadrille, with Lieutenant de Laage de Mieux 
 second in command. A year later Edmond 
 Genet, in one of his letters describing the Amer- 
 ican Escadrille as it then was, wrote of The- 
 nault: 
 
 We have a very pleasant captain of the esca- 
 drille, and the lieutenant (de Laage) is a dandy 
 fellow. Of course, Thaw, who is a lieutenant, 
 looks out for us a good deal, but de Laage is 
 our regular lieutenant. Both he and the cap- 
 tain speak English particularly de Laage. We 
 all eat together in one mess, and our cook is an 
 Al man. 
 
 Thaw and Cowdin had become expert fight- 
 ing pilots before the Lafayette Escadrille was 
 finally assembled on the Alsatian front in May,
 
 276 AMERICAN VOLUNTEER AIRMEN 
 
 1916, and had seen service at Verdun, where 
 Cowdin had brought down a German machine, 
 and by so doing had become the first American 
 to win the Medaille Militaire "the highest 
 decoration," McConnell calls it, "that can be 
 awarded a non-commissioned officer or private." 
 Almost before the members of the squadron had 
 got settled at Bar-le-Duc, after the transfer 
 from the Alsatian front, Thaw brought down a 
 Fokker one morning. In the afternoon of the 
 same day, however, in a big combat far behind 
 the German lines, he was wounded in the arm. 
 His wound bled profusely, but he succeeded in 
 landing just within the French lines, although 
 in a dazed condition. French soldiers carried 
 him, too weak to walk, to a field dressing- 
 station, and from there he was sent to a Paris 
 hospital. On his recovery he rejoined the 
 American Escadrille. 
 
 The latest information concerning him was 
 in a news despatch dated April 24, 1918, which 
 stated that Major Thaw like Lufbery, he had 
 been taken into the aviation service of the 
 United States Army with the rank of major 
 commanding the Lafayette Escadrille, had just
 
 THAW, PIONEER AMERICAN AVIATOR 277 
 
 brought down his fifth enemy plane and a cap- 
 tive balloon on the same day, and that he was 
 thenceforth to be classed among the "aces" in 
 aviation in France. Long may he live to fly !
 
 INDEX 
 
 Ahern, Dr. William P., with Red 
 Cross, 95. 
 
 Andrew, A. Piatt, in ambulance 
 service, 129-133. 
 
 Andrews, Philip, in Coldstream 
 Guards, 90. 
 
 Archer, William, 65. 
 
 Arrowsmith, Robert, with Com- 
 mittee for Relief in Belgium, 
 196. 
 
 Bach, James, in Foreign Legion, 
 
 24. 
 Balsley, Clyde, in aviation, 214, 
 
 222. 
 Barber, William M., in ambulance 
 
 service, 133, 154-156. 
 Bastados, in Foreign Legion, 30. 
 Boligny, Edwin, in Foreign Legion, 
 
 24. 
 Bostwick, Elmore McNeill, in 
 
 ambulance service, 157. 
 Bnswell, Leslie, in ambulance 
 
 service, 140, 143-147. 
 Butler, Ethan Flagg, with Red 
 
 Cross, 99-101, 103-104. 
 
 Campbell, Donald, in Foreign 
 Legion, 29. 
 
 Capdevielle, in Foreign Legion, 
 24. 
 
 Carey, J. J., in Foreign Legion, 
 24. 
 
 Chapman, Victor, 14, 57; in For- 
 eign Legion, 66-71 ; in aviation, 
 209, 213, 214, 217-224, 236, 245, 
 253. 
 
 Clyde, W. P., in ambulance ser- 
 vice, 159-160. 
 
 Covalieros, in Foreign Legion, 33. 
 
 Cowdin, Elliot C., in aviation, 207- 
 209, 213, 218, 274, 275. 
 
 Culbert, Kenneth P., in aviation, 
 266-268. 
 
 Curtis, Edward D., with Com- 
 mittee for Relief in Belgium, 
 186, 187, 190-191, 192, 196. 
 
 Delpenche, in Foreign Legion, 24. 
 
 Donovan, Dr. James C., with Red 
 Cross, 95. 
 
 Dowd, Dennis, in Foreign Legion, 
 24. 
 
 Downer, Dr. Earl B., with Red 
 Cross, 103, 104. 
 
 Drummond-Hay, Colonel, in Cold- 
 stream Guards, 91. 
 
 Elliott, General George P., 77. 
 Engler, in Foreign Legion, 29. 
 Evans, Frank E., 78. 
 
 Farnsworth, Henry, 13, in Foreign 
 
 Legion, 27, 36, 57, 71, 119. 
 Fletcher, Horace, in Belgium, 188. 
 
 Gailor, Frank Hoyt, in ambulance 
 
 service, 148-151. 
 Genet, Edmond, 14, in Foreign 
 
 Legion, 37-49; in aviation, 245, 
 
 249-256, 275. 
 Gibson, Hugh. 190. 
 Gray, Prentiss, with Committee 
 
 for Relief in Belgium, 197. 
 
 279
 
 280 
 
 INDEX 
 
 Gregory, Warren, with Committee 
 for Relief in Belgium, 197. 
 
 Hall, B. S., in Foreign Legion, 24. 
 Hall, Bert, in aviation, 209, 213. 
 HaH, Louis, 137. 
 Hall, Richard, in Ambulance 
 
 Corps, 133. 135-138. 
 Harjes, H. Herman, 158. 
 Hath, in Foreign Legion, 29. 
 Haupt, George H., in ambulance 
 
 service, 157. 
 
 Hill, Dudley, in aviation, 214, 244. 
 Hill, Lovering, in ambulance ser- 
 vice, 161-162. 
 Hollinshed, in ambulance service, 
 
 125. 
 Hoover, Herbert, with Committee 
 
 for Relief in Belgium, 175-180, 
 
 189. 
 Hoskier, in Foreign Legion 12; in 
 
 ambulance service, 125. 
 
 Imbrie, Andrew C., 79. 
 
 Jennings, in ambulance service, 
 
 137. 
 Johnson, Ghonteau, in aviation, 
 
 214. 
 
 Kelley, Edward J., in Ambulance 
 Corps, 133. 
 
 Kellogg, Prof. Vernon, in Belgium, 
 176, 181-182. 200-202. 
 
 King, Clapham P., with Red 
 Cross, 99. 
 
 King, David W., in Foreign 
 Legion, 24, 25, 71. 
 
 Kirbv-Smith, Dr. Raymond M., 
 with Red Cross, 103, 104. 
 
 Kittredge, Tracy P., with Com- 
 mittee for Relief in Belgium, 196. 
 
 Kohn, in Foreign Legion, 70. 
 
 Lane, Morton P., with Red Cross, 
 99. 
 
 Lawrence, Richard, in ambulance 
 service, 161. 
 
 Leach, Dr. Charles N., with Com- 
 mittee for Relief in Belgium, 
 196. 
 
 Lebrun, Corporal, in Foreign Le- 
 gion, 29. 
 
 Lipton, Sir Thomas, with Red 
 Cross, 102. 
 
 Long, John D., 77. 
 
 Lovell, Walter, in aviation, 255. 
 
 Lufbery, Raoul, in aviation, 213, 
 222,254. 
 
 Lumsden, D., in Black Watch, 80. 
 
 Lytie, Richard R., with Committee 
 for Relief in Belgium, 192, 194. 
 
 MacCreery, Lawrence, in ambu- 
 lance service, 125. 
 
 McConnell, James P., in Amer- 
 ican field ambulance service, 
 140-143; in aviation, 209, 210- 
 216, 239-248, 262, 264. 
 
 McCord, in aviation, 244. 
 
 Magruder, Dr. Ernest P., with Red 
 Cross, 99, 102. 
 
 Masson, Didier, in aviation, 214. 
 
 Matter, in ambulance service, 137. 
 
 Maurice, Arthur Bartlett, with 
 Committee for Relief in Bel- 
 gium, 195-199. 
 
 Maverick, Robert V., with Com- 
 mittee for Relief in Belgium, 
 196. 
 
 Mignot, 144-147. 
 
 Mitchell, Clarence V. S., in ambu- 
 lance service, 165-171. 
 
 Morlae, E., 13, 19; in Foreign 
 Legion, 37-49. 
 
 Morrison, H. D., Secretary, Amer- 
 ican Ambulance Corps, 132. 
 
 Mortens, in Foreign Legion, 33. 
 
 Mussorgsky, in Foreign Legion,
 
 INDEX 
 
 281 
 
 Nicolet, in Foreign Legion, 33. 
 
 Norton, Richard, head of Ambu- 
 lance Corps, 115-1528, 130, 181, 
 159. 
 
 Oakman, Walter G., in Coldstream 
 
 Guards, 88. 
 
 Ogilvie, Francis D., 146. 
 Ohlinger, in Foreign Legion, 24. 
 
 Paradise, Scott Hurtt, with Com- 
 mittee for Relief in Belgium, 187. 
 
 Phelizot, in Foreign Legion, 24. 
 
 Pierce, Waldo, 135. 
 
 Poe, John Prentiss, in First Black 
 Watch, 75-82, 85. 
 
 Prince, Norman, in aviation, 207- 
 208, 209, 222, 231-238, 243, 245, 
 253, 274. 
 
 Rainey, Paul, in ambulance ser- 
 vice, 167. 
 
 Rockwell, Kiffin, in aviation, 209, 
 213, 214, 215-216, 222, 225-230, 
 245, 253. 
 
 Rumsey, Lawrence, in aviation, 
 214. 
 
 Ryan, Dr. Edward W., with Red 
 Cross, 95-98, 102, 104. 
 
 Salisbury, Edward Van D., in am- 
 bulance service, 139. 
 
 Sanders, Roswell S., in ambulance 
 service, 133, 156. 
 
 Scanlon, Bob, in Foreign Legion, 
 24. 
 
 Schroder, Bernard N. P., in am- 
 bulance service, 144, 145. 
 
 Seeger, Alan, 9, in Foreign Legion, 
 24, 50-65, 71. 
 
 Sperry, William H., with Com- 
 mittee for Relief in Belgium, 
 196, 198. 
 
 Starr, Dillwyn P., in Coldstream 
 Guards, 83-91. 
 
 Stockton, Gilchrist, with Commit- 
 tee for Relief hi Belgium, 192, 
 193. 
 
 Strong, Dr. Richard P., with Red 
 Cross, 106-112. 
 
 Stuart, Dr. Edward, with Red 
 Cross, 107. 
 
 Subiron, Bob, in Foreign Legion, 
 24. 
 
 Suckley, Henry M., in ambulance 
 service, 133, 161-164. 
 
 Sudic, in Foreign Legion, 33. 
 
 Sukuna, in Foreign Legion, 29, 33. 
 
 Thaw, William, in Foreign Legion, 
 14-20, 24; in aviation, 209, 213, 
 214, 269-277. 
 
 Trinkard, in Foreign Legion, 24. 
 
 Tuck, William H., with Committee 
 for Relief in Belgium, 192, 194. 
 
 Uhlin, hi Foreign Legion, 29, 30. 
 
 Ware, Gordon, in ambulance ser- 
 vice, 163, 164. 
 
 Warren, Robert H., with Commit- 
 tee for Relief in Belgium, 187. 
 
 Wendell, in ambulance service, 
 125. 
 
 Wheeler, David E., hi Foreign 
 Legion, 42, 47, 48, 49. 
 
 Wheeler, Walter H., hi ambulance 
 service, 154-156. 
 
 Wickes, Francis C., with Com- 
 mittee for Relief in Belgium, 196. 
 
 Winslow, Carroll D., in aviation, 
 220. 
 
 Zampanedes, in Foreign Legion, 
 
 32. 
 Zinn, F. W., in Foreign Legion. 
 
 25. 
 Zinn, Wilhelm, in Foreign Legion, 
 
 25.
 
 University of 
 
 ' Los Angeles, CA 90024-1388 
 this material to the library 
 from which it was borrowed. 
 
 OCT1719 
 2 9 1994
 
 E. 
 
 P 
 
 A 001 176386 9