Page:Fred Arthur McKenzie - Americans at the Front (1917).djvu/18

 the more I began to feel like an embusqué—what the British call a 'skirker.' So I made up my mind to go into aviation."

The original six had grown by the middle of 1916, to about fifty pilots and men in training. One of the first group, Bach, was captured by the Germans when going to the rescue of a comrade, and was for a time in danger of death by court-martial as a franc-tireur. The Germans did the American aviators the honour of ranking them with the English soldiers, as objects for their special hatred. Elliot Cowdin won the Medaille Militaire before the American squadron was formed, by bringing down a German machine on the Verdun front.

The first member of the squadron to lose his life was Victor Chapman. He was a student in the Latin Quarter when the war broke out, and at once joined the Foreign Legion. Soon wounded in action, he was on recovery transferred to the air service as an aerial bomb dropper, and later qualified as pilot. Chapman was a super-man. He took every opportunity to fly straight for the enemy's country and to attack any enemy craft within reach. If there were several enemy planes together, so much the better. "He flew more than any of us," wrote one of his comrades. "Never missing an opportunity to go up, and never coming down