In the last of the three letters, on June 18, she wrote Allen, “This is only a line to say I had a letter from Kenneth yesterday saying he was going to the trenches in the morning. . . . I have been keeping at him for two weeks to make out a demand for the airplane service. For some reason he has not sent it and says now that he will after this time at the front.
“I have a wonderful chance for him and heard directly from the Minister of War this morning, saying if Kenneth would send the demand it would be all right. You can imagine how I am feeling. I can only say I have done my best and pray he may come through.”
The day before Alice Weeks wrote that hopeful letter, Kenneth participated in an attack waged by the remnants of his regiment at Souchez, another small town near Arras. After his unit broke through the first and second German lines, his comrades last saw him on June 17, 1915, “running toward the third line of the German trenches, his right arm extended, and facing the enemy.” He had been trained to throw grenades, and running toward the enemy with “his right arm extended” was consistent with that.
An unimaginable time began for Alice. Despite her using every kind of connection and entering into a correspondence with his surviving Legion friends, no one had seen him since that bloody day, and she never received the usual Red Cross card sent to the families of those who arrived in prison camps on either side.
Partly to distract herself from her constant hope of news of Kenneth, she threw herself into her role as Maman Legionnaire. Her big apartment also became the wartime home of Paul Rockwell who had sent his brother Kiffin “The Bottle of Death.” When the Escadrille came into existence, its pilots named Paul as their official historian. In that capacity, he made frequent visits to them at the different bases to which the squadron moved. The Americans in the Foreign Legion who wanted to become fliers rightly discerned that Paul Rockwell had considerable influence to expedite their applications for French aviation. In his rooms in Alice Weeks’s apartment, he became a clearinghouse for everything from storing pilots’ civilian clothes to arranging to have their photos of one another and their planes and girlfriends developed and sent back to them.
As the war continued, Paul Rockwell married a young woman named Marie Francoise Jeanne Leygues. Her father, Georges Leygues, was a deputy in the French parliament and president of that body’s Foreign Affairs Committee, and he later became premier of France. She and Paul had a daughter. Thus the men who visited Mrs. Weeks had both the advantages of her friendly and comfortable surroundings and the opportunity to spend time with a combat veteran who was living a relatively normal family life.
Every young volunteer who came to Alice Weeks’s house was grateful for her hospitality, but in addition to that she acted in a special letter-writing capacity. The Germans did not allow prisoners they had taken to correspond with their former comrades, so Alice became an intermediary, passing letters addressed to her on to the men named in them. A few of the men who visited her regularly developed particularly warm friendships with her. Kiffin Rockwell, Paul’s brother, had been in Kenneth’s squad of foot soldiers and was wounded in the thigh on May 9, nine weeks before the attack after which Kenneth went missing. Kiffin spent six weeks in a military hospital, and then convalesced for another eight days at Alice Weeks’s apartment. She dressed his wounds and later wrote a friend, “He looks terribly with those dreadful eyes men always have after going through heavy firing. I can not describe them. They are sunken and yet have a sharp look.”
Kiffin Rockwell was as great an idealist as one could find, and a man susceptible to martial ardor. When he was transferred into the Foreign Legion’s First Marching Regiment, created specifically for men who enlisted in 1914, he said this of his new comrades, and of their behavior on the day of the attack in which he was wounded:
“They were more serious about the war, and the volunteers were men who engaged out of love and admiration for France, and because they knew they were right. They were men who had the courage of their convictions and were willing to die, if necessary, to prove it.
“So the day we were called upon to attack, every man went into it willingly with the determination to do his best, and humming the Marseillaise. As to the officers—no officers ever led their men better than ours led us. Practically every one of them fell, but they fell at the head of their men, urging them onward.” In a situation that most men would find ghastly, he said, “All I could think of was what a wonderful advance it was and how everyone was going against the stream of lead as if he loved it.”
Alice kept widening the circle of those she wrote in hopes of hearing about Kenneth. In a letter written September 3, a Legionnaire named Lawrence Scanlan, who was from Cedarhurst, Long Island, near New York City, told her this:
“Dear Mrs. Weeks,
“I received your letter yesterday and I am very sorry I cannot give you any information. The last I saw of Kenneth, he was running just behind Smith and Kelly, a little to one side. [John Smith’s real name was John Earl Fisk, but the Legion allowed a man to change his name when he enlisted.] They were not very far from me, but when I was hit I fell down in a trench and so didn’t see them anymore. That was at the third line of German trenches. That is what makes me certain that if Kelly was a prisoner, the others were also.
“I would have written long ago, but had lost the address Kenneth had given me. I understand how you feel and if I receive any news at all, I will write you. I thank you very much and will call on you if I need anything.
“Hoping I will soon have more news of Kenneth, I remain,
“Very sincerely,
“Lawrence Scanlan”
Near the end of August 1915, Alice wrote her son Allen a letter that conveyed the sensations of being in her apartment in Paris.
“It is becoming a meeting place and I get no chance for loneliness . . . My apartment is high and almost every day I can hear the boom of the cannons at the front. It is more feeling the vibration than hearing. They tell me it is the big cannon bombarding Compiègne [forty miles away]. I thought the other night that some heavy trucks were having difficulty in coming up the incline on the hill, but they turned out to be machine guns at the front. In the quiet these sounds go far:
“How much there will be to tell you when I see you again! Too much to write about. I would never get through. As the men come in from different lines at the front, I begin to feel I know every division in the army.
“Mother”
Alice may not have known “every division in the army,” but she heard some remarkable stories, one of them told to her by a man named Andrew Walbron who was serving in a French infantry regiment.
“He was wounded last Fall and was for some time in the hospital convalescing. At last he went back and found his regiment north of Arras. The men said, ‘Well this is a good place, and there is nothing doing, and the Germans come over and give us cigarettes for bread.’ . . . A few days later the front line trench was blown up by five German [land] mines, and all in the trenches killed . . . those Germans had come over and been friendly, all the time pacing off the distance between the lines to blow up the men they were friendly with.”
On one rare evening when there was not a man in the house, Alice had this to say about her one pet:
“My kitten Coco is so lonely without the boys to-night she will not leave me and cries in a pathetic way. They are so rough with her I should think she would be glad they are not here.”
On November 25, 1915, twenty-one weeks after Kenneth was last seen running forward in the attack at Souchez, his decomposed body was found there between the French and German lines. Alice did not receive the news for another five weeks. On January 2, 1916, she wrote this to her brother Fred in the United States:
“I have been notified this morning that Kenneth fell on the Field of Honor June 17th . . . Don’t worry about me. I am surrounded by friends who try and smooth the rough places for me. I shall, I think, ha
ve services here, and Paul will write something for the Paris papers.
“I do not know what the future has in store, but the boys cling to me and I could not leave them just now.
“Lovingly,
“Alice”
To compound the tragedy, Alice continued to receive letters from her “boys,” who for a time had no idea that her son had been killed. One from a friend who did learn of Kenneth’s death came from Jim McConnell, who had been a brilliant and popular student at the University of Virginia, from which he’d been nearly expelled when he placed a chamber pot on the head of a statue of Thomas Jefferson just before it was unveiled in front of President William Howard Taft and other prominent figures. He was in pilot training, and the letter of condolence he wrote to Alice demonstrated the eloquence that readers would see in a book he subsequently published, Flying for France. McConnell told Alice, “After all these months of waiting that you have so bravely endured, such news seems too cruel to be possible . . . Taking everything into consideration, he made the greatest sacrifice that has been known in this sublime struggle that our France is going through. He was the best, his motives were the finest of any that volunteered for this fight for civilization and his martyrdom adds a greater content to the war.”
Twelve days after receiving the news that Kenneth had been killed, Alice wrote her brother Fred about his memorial service.
“Friday I had a beautiful service here in St. George’s Church (English). They offered it to me and were very kind. A friend of mine played the organ and the music was very uplifting. I said I would have nothing doleful and all the hymns were the kind that give you strength. I selected the lesson in St. Paul’s Epistle, ‘Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels and have not charity—,’ and the choir sang the anthem ‘I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills.’ And at the end the Hallelujah Chorus of Handel. . . .
“The French papers had a beautiful article about the service, saying I had given it for Kenneth and his comrades who fell with him, and ending with, ‘To those young men who so nobly fell, the sympathy of all the mothers of France will be given.’ Do you see why France makes us willing to give our lives for her?”
Great as Alice Weeks’s ordeal was, a more concentrated form of agony awaited the mother of Lafayette Escadrille member Douglas MacMonagle, a high-living pilot from San Francisco. She was a resident of Paris who had thrown herself into war work as a volunteer nurse in one of the city’s Red Cross hospitals. On a September day she was looking forward to having a brief visit with her only son at his air base at Senard, just to the east of Verdun. When she arrived at the nearby train station at Ravenel, one of his friends had to greet her with the news that he had been shot down and killed a few hours before. His plane had come down just inside the French lines. Several of Douglas’s comrades had driven to the scene and pulled his body from inside the plane, finding him unmarked except for a small hole on either side of his head where a bullet had passed through just behind his eyes. They had brought his body back to the airfield and laid him out in an empty shed.
In a magnificent display of composure and courage, Mrs. MacMonagle entered the shed alone for a last visit with her son. The next day she stood bravely by his grave as trumpets played a final salute and a squad of riflemen fired three volleys as he was lowered into the earth.
An unfortunate situation occurred as she was about to board the train back to Paris. A man appeared, explained that he owned a local establishment frequented by the pilots—it was in fact a combination of bar and bordello—and presented her with her son’s tab of ten thousand francs, or twenty-five hundred dollars. Mrs. MacMonagle arranged for payment, and went on her way.
Nine
More American Eagles
Take to the Sky
By the end of 1915, France had been at war for seventeen months, and American volunteers had been fighting at the front in the Foreign Legion for nearly as long. Nonetheless, with the doors of French aviation beginning to open before them, these veterans of brutal route marches and vicious trench warfare now had to take physical examinations for that branch of the service, as if French military officials had never seen them before.
Ned Parsons, who had been serving at the front in the American Ambulance Service before enlisting in the Foreign Legion, had to face these examinations. He had some defects, such as “being addicted to swollen tonsils, [and] the lid of my left eye drooped,” as well as this: “Due to an unfortunate accident with a ring, I had lost the first two joints of the little finger of my right hand. That in itself, I gathered, would have been enough to bar me from American [military] aviation.” He soon realized that the French military surgeons were carrying out a new policy: If these Americans want to fly, voila, let them fly.
Fig 10. American pilot Edwin Parsons. One of the Escadrille pilots who survived the war, this picture shows him with a training plane at the Pau airfield. He is holding a hard leather crash helmet and flew combat missions wearing this mackinaw jacket, which was the type then popular on many American college campuses. Parsons also took to the air wearing sabots, the wooden shoes then used by European peasants.
A husky French military doctor, a major, told Parsons to strip down. Parsons quickly passed through a cursory examination of his heart and lungs, but feared the eyesight test. The major placed him ten feet from an eye chart that Parsons said had letters as large as a sign in Times Square.
“He commanded me to read. ‘The second line,’ he’d say, ‘the third letter. I see there a B. What do you see?’
“Sure enough, it was a B, and I’d say so.
“‘Bon,’ he’d explode enthusiastically.
“Then we’d do some more of these silly exercises, he calling the letters as I checked up on him. He was right every time. He never tried to cross me by calling the wrong letter. He wasn’t taking any chances I’d be wrong, and his ‘Bons’ grew bigger and better with every answer.
“Then we passed to the color charts, where we repeated the same delightful process.
“‘I see red. What do you see?’
“‘Red, Major.’
“‘Bon. I see green. What—’”
“But why go on? In two shakes of a lamb’s tail it was all over. He gave me a friendly pat on the bare back that sent me staggering across the room and, signing his name to my papers with an official flourish, he congratulated me for being a perfect physical specimen and told me that as far as he was concerned I could go out and get myself killed at any time ‘pour la France.’”
At varying times, different Americans who had been serving as foot soldiers or driving ambulances were French military aviation, sent to one of four pilot training schools. Unlike what happened in the training programs of other nations, they often spent time alone in their planes right from the beginning of the three-month course, with instructors called moniteurs telling them how to taxi their “Penguins,” the nickname for the planes that had their wings clipped so that they could not fly. Many flights in the air were solos, most in a Blériot, a plane designed by the young French inventor Louis Blériot, who made the world’s first over-ocean flight when he flew from Calais to Dover in 1909.
The final exam in the first part of this pilot training consisted of two three-legged flights of 150 miles each. They had to be flown at a minimum altitude of three thousand feet, and completed within forty-eight hours. After that, the pilot had to pass his altitude test by maintaining flight for an hour at six thousand feet. (In flights of that height and higher, the pilots wore what some called a “teddy-bear suit.” These were sometimes simply heavy fur coats, or leather fur-lined one-piece flight suits. The high-altitude outfit included fur boots, a heavy wool sweater, gloves, and what one pilot described as “a huge cork safety helmet which Wisdom tells him to wear and Common Sense pronounces impossible. Common Sense wins.”)
Having passed all these tests, the pilot qualified for his brevet militaire, whi
ch involved a promotion to corporal and the doubling of his meager private’s pay. Other courses such as navigation and aerial gunning lay ahead for him, but he received a four-day permission to go to Paris. There, many tailors were ready to help the new flier choose a uniform from among a variety of styles, any one of which cost the equivalent of fifty dollars. Once a tailor made it, a seamstress would sew onto the sides of the high collar of his tunic a pair of red tabs with a flier’s embroidered insignia of a gold wing and a star, and stitch his corporal’s chevrons on the sleeve. To distinguish him from men serving on the ground, a horizontal winged propeller emblem also adorned his sleeve.
Of all the Escadrille pilots, only Bill Thaw chose a true regulation uniform. “The rest of us,” a pilot said, “went in for musical-comedy-style aviation uniforms, fearful to behold, and guaranteed to knock the not-too-difficult little mademoiselles right square on their backs. While the uniforms were entirely successful in their chosen purpose, they were hardly the thing for official inspections and always a bone of contention.”
A number of students failed during this difficult training to become fighter pilots. Records of the Lafayette Flying Corps indicate that several were “radiated” out of that program “due to ineptitude,” and reassigned to courses that resulted in their becoming pilots of bombers or observation planes.
In one case, an eager young American who had been fighting in the trenches and was accepted for pilot training ended his first solo flight by crashing into the top of a towering tree. For four hours he remained wedged inside the cockpit, physically unharmed but terrified that at any moment the branches precariously holding the plane might give way and drop him and his fragile aircraft to the ground. When he was finally rescued by municipal firemen from several miles away who brought long ladders and climbed up and got him down, “he asked for a transfer back to his original infantry regiment, where he could be safe.”
First to Fly Page 7