took the air again in
search for the Boches.

In June, 1916, though still suffering from a wound in the head, he
started in his machine to carry some oranges to a comrade lying
desperately wounded in a hospital some miles away. On the way he saw
in the distance behind the German lines two French airmen set upon
by an overwhelming force of Germans. Instantly he was off to the
assistance of his friends, plunging into so unequal a fight that
even his coming left the other Americans outnumbered. But he had
scarce a chance to strike a blow. Some chance shot from a German gun
put him out of action. All that the other two Americans, Lufbery and
Prince, knew was that they saw a French machine come flying to their
aid, and suddenly tip and fall away to earth. Until nightfall came
and Chapman failed to return none was sure that he was the victim.

The part played by young Americans as volunteers for France before
the United States entered upon the war was gallant and stimulating
to national pride. It showed to the world--and to our own countrymen
who needed the lesson as much as any--that we had among our youth
scores who, moved by high ideals, stood ready to risk their lives
for a sentiment--stood ready to brave the myriad discomforts of the
trenches, the bursting shrapnel, the mutilating liquid fire, the
torturing gas that German autocracy should be balked of its purpose
of dominating the world.

And the service of these boys aided far more than they knew. The
fact that our countrymen in numbers were flying for France kept ever
before the American people the vision of that war in the air of
which poets and philosophers had dreamed for ages. It brought home
to our people the importance of aviation before our statesmen could
begin to see it. It set our boys to reading of aircraft, building
model planes, haunting the few aviation fields which at the time our
country possessed. And it finally so filled the consciousness of our
people with conviction of the supreme importance of aviation as an
arm of the national armed service that long before the declaration
of war the government was embarrassed by the flood of volunteers
seeking to be enrolled in the flying forces of the nation.

CHAPTER IX

THE UNITED STATES AT WAR

The entrance of the United States upon the war was the signal for a
most active agitation of the question of overwhelming the enemy with
illimitable fleets of aircraft. Though the agitation was most
v