rille expressed it. So in September, 1916,
he went out after a big German machine, he saw flying in French
territory. He had but little difficulty in climbing above it, and
then dashed down in his usual impetuous manner, his machine gun
blazing as he came on. But the German was of heavier metal mounting
two machine guns. Just as to onlookers it seemed that the two
machines would crash together, the wings of one side of Rockwell's
plane suddenly collapsed and he fell like a stone between the lines.
The Germans turned their guns on the pile of wreckage where he lay,
but French gunners ran out and brought his body in. His breast was
all blown to pieces with an explosive bullet--criminal, of course,
barbarous and uncivilized, but an everyday practice of the Germans.

Rockwell was given an impressive funeral. All the British pilots,
and five hundred of their men marched, and the bier was followed by
a battalion of French troops. Over and around the little French
graveyard aviators flew dropping flowers. In later days less
ceremony attended the last scene of an American aviator's career.

Another American aviator, also a Harvard man, who met death in the
air, was Victor Chapman of New York, a youth of unusual charm, high
ideals, and indomitable courage. At the very outbreak of the war he
enlisted in the French Foreign Legion--a rough entourage for a
college-bred man. Into the Foreign Legion drifted everything that
was doubtful, and many that were criminal. No questions were asked
of those who sought its hospitable ranks, and readers of Ouida's
novel _Under Two Flags_ will recall that it enveloped in its
convenient obscurity British lordlings and the lowest of Catalonian
thieves. But in time of actual war its personnel was less mixed, and
Chapman's letters showed him serving there contentedly as pointer of
a mitrailleuse. But not for long. Most of the spirited young
Americans who entered the French Army aspired to serve in the
aviation corps, and Chapman soon was transferred to that field.
There he developed into a most daring flyer. On one occasion, with a
bad scalp wound, after a brush with four German machines, he made
his landing with his machine so badly wrecked that he had to hold
together the broken ends of a severed control with one hand, while
he steered with the other. Instead of laying up for the day he had
his mechanician repair his machine while a surgeon repaired him,
then, patched up together, man and machine