and who from the age of fifteen had sailed the seven seas, managed to
slip out of the Foreign Legion into aviation and joined the other
Americans at Pau.

There seems to be a fascination to aviation, particularly when it is
coupled with fighting. Perhaps it's because the game is new, but more
probably because as a rule nobody knows anything about it. Whatever be
the reason, adventurous young Americans were attracted by it in
rapidly increasing numbers. Many of them, of course, never got
fascinated beyond the stage of talking about joining. Among the chaps
serving with the American ambulance field sections a good many
imaginations were stirred, and a few actually did enlist, when, toward
the end of the summer of 1915, the Ministry of War, finding that the
original American pilots had made good, grew more liberal in
considering applications.

Chouteau Johnson, of New York; Lawrence Rumsey, of Buffalo; Dudley
Hill, of Peekskill, N.Y.; and Clyde Balsley, of El Paso; one after
another doffed the ambulance driver's khaki for the horizon-blue of
the French flying corps. All of them had seen plenty of action,
collecting the wounded under fire, but they were all tired of being
non-combatant spectators. More or less the same feeling actuated me,
I suppose. I had come over from Carthage, N.C., in January, 1915, and
worked with an American ambulance section in the Bois-le-Pretre. All
along I had been convinced that the United States ought to aid in the
struggle against Germany. With that conviction, it was plainly up to
me to do more than drive an ambulance. The more I saw the splendour of
the fight the French were fighting, the more I felt like an
_embusque_--what the British call a "shirker." So I made up my mind to
go into aviation.