First to Fly

by Charles Bracelen Flood

  One of these famous Americans was J. P. Morgan, Jr. The younger Morgan, then fifty-one, had ample reason to hope that the Allies would win the war. In 1915, when it had become clear that the war would be long and bloody, he’d loaned the French government fifty million dollars. The Morgan interests also became the official purchasing agency for the British government, buying massive amounts of steel, chemicals, and other commodities and charging a 1 percent commission on all transactions. This was to be followed by Morgan’s formation of a syndicate of more than two thousand banks that loaned the Allies five hundred million dollars.

  At the request of the resident New York newspaper correspondents, the American volunteers in the Foreign Legion and those assigned to the French 170th Infantry Regiment, which had a reputation for valor almost equal to that of the Legion, had received a forty-eight-hour leave to attend the day’s activities. This included a ceremony at Lafayette’s tomb in the Picpus Cemetery in Paris.

  Victor Chapman’s death unleashed a torrent of Franco-American feeling. During a banquet in Paris that evening of July 4, French prime minister Aristide Briand paid tribute to Chapman as “the living symbol of American idealism.” Equally important in terms of enlisting public support in the United States for the idea of entering the war, the New York Times, in its issue of July 5, 1916, covered all the day’s events. Two months later, on the occasion of the 159th anniversary of the birth of the Marquis de Lafayette, some eight hundred celebrities, including the Arctic explorer Admiral Robert E. Peary, gathered at New York’s Waldorf-Astoria Hotel to honor France, in the person of its ambassador, Jean Jules Jusserand, who had this to say:

  “Never in my country will the American volunteers of [this] great war be forgotten. Serving in the ambulances, serving in the Legion, serving in the air, serving liberty, observing the same impulses that brought Lafayette to these shores, many young Americans, leaving family and homes, have offered to France their lives. America has shown tonight that she does not forget; France will show that she remembers.”

  Critically wounded, Clyde Balsley had much more to endure. This was later described by his squadron mate Ned Parsons. When Parsons made his decision to cross the Atlantic to fight for France and asked his father for passage money, his father “flatly stated that it was not our war and he wanted no part of my wild scheme.” Parsons then wangled a voyage from New York to the French port of St.-Nazaire as an “assistant veterinarian” aboard the Carpathia, a ship carrying two thousand horses, and spent most of his time shoveling manure.

  Parsons went on to write two books. Their titles revealed his mixed feelings about his time with the Escadrille. The first was The Great Adventure. In his second, the sharp-edged Flight into Hell, he portrayed how Clyde Balsley’s “trip” to “see the war, and see it well” turned out. Referring to the terrible wounds that Clyde received when he was shot down, wounds that kept him in hospitals in France for nineteen months, Parsons said:

  “Although, after the removal of more than forty pieces of the [large explosive] bullet, plenty more still remain, and he is badly crippled for life, Clyde is a real hero and never utters a complaint. The glorious record of his great adventure is compensation enough for him, for he knows that, despite the pain and suffering as the first American aviator to be wounded, his services to France and the United States were incalculable. The sympathy that he created cemented a bond between the two countries that can never be measured.”

  The idea that the wounding of one man could accomplish so much might be questioned, but while the First World War had enormous battles that could be marked on maps, there were also battles for the allegiance of the mind. In this saga, the adventurous and colorful young American fighter pilots who fought for France before the United States entered the war seized the imagination of both nations. Those volunteers never saw themselves as propagandists, but made their powerful statement by sacrificing themselves in the silver skies of northern France.

  Eight

  Women at War: Alice Weeks

  As early as the first months of the war, a number of Americans started individual efforts to help the Americans fighting for France. An affluent, well-traveled, silver-haired lady named Alice Weeks was living in Boston when the war broke out. In early 1915, accompanied by her maid, Louise, she crossed the Atlantic to be closer to her twenty-four-year-old son Kenneth, who had been living in Paris in 1914 and was among the first Americans to join the Foreign Legion. The circumstances of her crossing and the people she met even before she reached Paris demonstrated that she was an extraordinary woman traveling in unusual circumstances.

  In a letter she started writing at sea and finished when she arrived in Paris, she said this:

  “We are somewhere on the ocean, but the map which is always on steamers in normal times showing the progress, is not given as there may be spies on board . . . I have been watching them put fresh water and biscuit in the lifeboats, so we are getting ready for submarines.” In the first letter she wrote from Paris, she finished her description of the trip. “When we landed [at Liverpool] there was a big Red Cross ship beside us that had just come in with the wounded [from France] and everywhere in the station they lay on stretchers waiting to be put on the hospital train which was beside ours. It was my first sight of war.”

  After a rough Channel crossing from England to the French port where the passengers were to take the train for Paris, Alice had a lengthy wait before she went through customs and an inspection of her passport and other documents.

  “By the time I reached the train there wasn’t a seat anywhere but at last a gentleman opened his compartment, invited me in and likewise a Frenchman and his wife. The train ran very slowly as we traveled through the war-scarred country. At times we were able to get out and walk about while the train stood for some unknown reason.

  “Louise came to me during one of these intermissions and finding me alone, asked me if I knew who these new found friends were. I said no, and she informed me they were the Duke and Duchess of Teck, the [British] Queen’s brother and his wife. I enjoyed my day with them for we were all day getting down to Paris. When we arrived in Paris they said to me, ‘How lucky you are that you can go to a hotel,’ for there at the station was a platform decorated with flags and people waiting to receive the Duke and Duchess . . . The last I saw of the Tecks was when I turned on leaving the station and they waved their hands at me.”

  Beginning her life in Paris, where for a time she could not see Kenneth because he was fighting at the front, Alice first did work among refugees of all nationalities. She described her dismay at what she experienced:

  “. . . the stories I hear are so pathetic, mothers who have lost children, and wives who are hunting for husbands, and wounded sons who do not know where their families are. It doesn’t seem possible that this is possible in this day. I have known women to walk through the country a hundred miles to hunt for their families. I saw a soldier saved by his dog who took him out of his shell hole after being buried and many men with arms and legs missing. I wonder if this is not hell after all. Surely the people who inhabit the earth have only so far succeeded in veneering themselves. Underneath they are still the same old savages.”

  Alice and her son Kenneth had an affectionate bond. Along with a number of this first wave of American volunteers, he was a precocious intellectual. The London publishers Allen and Unwin had recently brought out his 190-page book of philosophy, “Science, Sentiments and Senses,” all of which, except for the nine-page prologue, he had written by the time he was twenty-one. In it he foresaw this, at a time when concern for the environment was in its infancy:

  “We know that water will finally disappear from the [Earth’s] surface . . . the seas will dry . . . After this, our planet will go to join the ranks of Moon, Mars, and Mercury, cold and dead.”

  Kenneth also remained fully involved in the issues of his day. In a letter that he sent to his mother five weeks after he joined
the Foreign Legion and was still in training, Kenneth eloquently expressed the idealism motivating many men like him.

  “It is commencing to grow cold, and no doubt this winter we will suffer, but through it all I will be satisfied if the victory is ours, and I would be glad to die in perhaps the most crucial test that civilization has ever experienced.” As for how Kenneth saw the Germans, he wrote, “They have destroyed the Cathedral of Rheims—a pretty feat. Their ancestors destroyed Greece and Rome.” At the same time he expressed a grudging admiration for German courage and discipline: “Big attack here three days ago; the Germans come on in columns of eight, and are mowed down in spite of it.” Back in his idealistic vein, he closed another letter to his mother with this: “My dear, I embrace you with all my love, for in defending France I hope to defend you.” Replying to one from her just before Christmas of 1914 in which she expressed fears for his safety, he said, “Much love, dear. I think always of you and the happy days that are to come. Be patient, and do not doubt of my happy return.”

  Despite his preponderant idealism, Kenneth shared some of his mother’s skepticism about military ardor. In a letter to her written in May, he said, “Yesterday we had a review of the Division, and decorated several men. Parades of that sort seem abominably silly in hearing distance of the cannon; and what children we are to be pleased with medals and stripes!”

  In a letter to her younger son, Allen, who was back in the United States, Alice described her refugee work in Paris.

  “I am working at St. Sulpice, the old monastery which has not been used for ten years . . . It is a huge building with a courtyard and a tower with a clock which I think has stopped in astonishment to see so many women and children. Every [monk’s] cell has a family in it . . . It is very sad to see so many lost children, and nothing can be done, for all letters are returned from [German-occupied] Belgium. My woman [a refugee she helped to support] saw her home burned and one child with it. Her husband is at the front and she is expecting a baby next month.

  “I found among some soldiers there was one American boy who had been wounded and had no place to go. He was not well enough to go back to the army, or sick enough for the hospital. He spoke little French and when I found him I said, ‘Well, my boy, what is the matter,’ and patted his back . . . he began to cry. He is a splendid athletic-looking fellow, but his nerves are pretty high-strung and a little kindness was too much for him.

  “As I was going out to dinner tonight, he came to see me. The British Charitable Society are sending him to England where he can find work. It is hard here as he speaks so little French. He had to go at once, and spent his last franc to take the taxi and see me before he left. I told him to write me, gave him some money, and felt sorry to see him go.”

  Alice had the satisfaction of a mother sending her son things to eat. In a note to an American woman friend, also living in Paris, she said, “Today I sent Kenneth sausages, figs, peanuts, jelly, crackers, prepared coffee and oranges and every week I send him chocolate.”

  As Alice’s life in Paris unfolded, she became an adoptive mother to the group of American volunteers in the Foreign Legion, some of whom knew Kenneth. When they had short leaves they headed for her spacious apartment. She called them “my boys,” and entertained them with good food and gave them the opportunity to take hot baths and have their mud-crusted uniforms laundered. Once her “boys” went back to the trenches, Alice sent them packages of food and such things as gloves, long underwear, and blankets.

  Six of these men would become pilots in the Escadrille, and all of them regarded her as their Maman Legionnaire—Legionnaire Mother. At one point she wrote to her son Allen, “I have thirty men at the front now to look after, six prisoners [held in German prison camps] and six aviators.” Her “boys” wrote her warm and appreciative letters, to which she unfailingly responded.

  Some of these letters were of a kind that a Bostonian lady seldom received. One man who began writing her was Bill Thorin, a self-described “roughneck” from Canton, South Dakota, who before the war “had adventures as a marine on a Chinese gunboat and as a United States soldier on the Mexican border.” In a thank-you note he told Alice that he and three of his comrades were in a military jail at the La Valbonne training camp because they had been in a brawl in a café. Far from asking her help, he seemed proud of the affair. “Some guys called us Americans a lot of fools and we smashed them up and then a gendarme on top of them. From what I hear from others, they have changed their opinion about us here in La Valbonne, anyway. It was a good go. Would not have missed it for anything. It is bad, though, we smashed up a lot of things in the café as well, so we have to pay twenty francs in damages, but it is four of us, so I guess we will get the money somehow.” In a later letter he told her that the jailers were selling them an alcoholic concoction he and his friends called “Kill Me Quick,” which he described as being “strong enough to start a motor car.”

  Alice’s willingness to help those in need also brought to her those who were not Americans. To one of her woman friends in Paris she wrote, “This morning a [French] soldier came to see me. He had been eighteen months at the front, twice wounded, had never had a vacation except four days’ convalescence. His family are in the invaded district and he has never heard from them. My letters and groceries were the first thing he had. He kept saying over and over, ‘My, but it was good to get that letter.’ He now is stationed in Paris making motors for aeroplanes. I gave him some socks and cigarettes and a little money and he went away happy, saying he had friends now in Paris.”

  She wrote to her son Allen of a similar experience. “A French soldier came to me the other day, and asked me to care for his two children who were with their grandmother . . . their mother was dead. He didn’t need anything he said, but I found out he did and fitted him out. His daughter he knows nothing about. She was lost in the beginning of the war.”

  In yet another friend-of-a-friend situation, Alice opened her door one morning to find a French soldier from Australia who had been given her name and address by one of her “boys.” “He said that five of his brothers were at the front and that his mother had come on from Australia to be near them. He said, ‘My, but it is nice having your mother back here when you are at the front.’ I don’t know the part that mothers played in other wars, but they play a big part in this.”

  Whenever Kenneth was sent from a rest area to the front, his letters became less frequent. In one he wrote at Easter of 1915, he referred to the lice and other vermin that infested the dugouts and trenches: “Also please send me a cake of camphor and a bottle of camphorated oil. I am going to try that for lice; did you ever have them?” After his mother sent him what he asked for, he told her, “Your bug water is no good; send the camphorated oil, not to kill, but to chase them.” He declined her offer to send him a heavy sweater, saying “the less to carry the better. Do you realize that the sack [full field pack] alone weighs fifty or sixty pounds?”

  Letters to and from the front moved slowly, amid reports of increasingly furious battles. On May 11, 1915, Kenneth wrote his mother a brief postcard:

  “Dear Mother,

  “Have been fighting hard for several days, and it’s going on. Don’t worry about me. We have taken enemy’s trenches, but it’s not over yet. Will send you a line as soon as possible.

  “I think of you in the thick of it.

  “Love, dear, and courage.

  “KENNETH”

  Alice later learned that Kenneth wrote that card on the battlefield during the taking of Neuville-St.-Vaast, a village near Arras in the northwestern corner of France. He handed it to a wounded soldier he saw crawling to the rear, and somehow it reached her in Paris. Increasingly worried about him, on May 18 she went to see “Monsieur Grandidier, private secretary to General Gallieni, who is Governor General of Paris.” In the back-and-forth of letters between the front and Paris, a letter that Kenneth had written four days earlier gave
her more recent and accurate information than she received through her connections at French Army Headquarters. Writing to Allen, she said of Kenneth’s recent battle experience, “Only 1,800 out of 4,000 of his regiment came through.” Also, with the thought that Kenneth’s chances of survival might be greater in the air than in the trenches, she had been investigating the possibility of his being one of the first Americans to be accepted for pilot training. When she broached the subject, he reacted to it in a letter in which he first told her about the battle from which he had just emerged.

  “. . . we have been fighting hard, and fighting victoriously . . . We fought forty-eight hours and were then replaced, going to the rear as reserve—that is, what were left of us . . .”

  Of himself, Kenneth said, “Not a scratch—that seems miraculous to me in such a hell of fire and shells . . . We fought well, and I am happy.”

  As for his mother’s idea, “I don’t think I care about the aeroplane service, dear. I will stay with my regiment.” Two weeks later, he apparently changed his mind; in a postscript to a letter, he asked his mother, “Will you find out whether I can get into the Aviation Corps or not? Of course, I know nothing of aeroplanes, but I did once of motors, and I could study.”

  During this period, in addition to seeing if she could get Kenneth transferred to pilot training, Alice wrote her son Allen three letters. In the first she spoke of her continuing work with refugees. “The woman I am supporting with her family, the refugee, has a new baby, a boy, and he is to be named for the President of France and I am the Godmother.”

  In a letter dated June 6, she commented on the bravery of French women.

  “I have never seen a tear in the street. Sometimes at a shop some girl has just received bad news and the girls pat her on the back and she proudly straightens and asks, ‘What will Madame have?’ This happened to me the other day. The soldiers are not all at the front.”