himself shifted from the Foreign Legion to aviation soon after Thaw,
was flying a Nieuport fighting machine, and, a little later,
instructing less-advanced students of the air in the Avord Training
School. His particular chum in the Foreign Legion, James Bach, who
also had become an aviator, had the distressing distinction soon after
he reached the front of becoming the first American to fall into the
hands of the enemy. Going to the assistance of a companion who had
broken down in landing a spy in the German lines, Bach smashed his
machine against a tree. Both he and his French comrade were captured,
and Bach was twice court-martialed by the Germans on suspicion of
being an American _franc-tireur_--the penalty for which is death! He
was acquitted but of course still languishes in a prison camp
"somewhere in Germany." The sixth of the original sextet was Adjutant
Didier Masson, who did exhibition flying in the States until--Carranza
having grown ambitious in Mexico--he turned his talents to spotting
_los Federales_ for General Obregon. When the real war broke out,
Masson answered the call of his French blood and was soon flying and
fighting for the land of his ancestors.

Of the other members of the escadrille Sergeant Givas Lufbery,
American citizen and soldier, but dweller in the world at large, was
among the earliest to wear the French airman's wings. Exhibition work
with a French pilot in the Far East prepared him efficiently for the
task of patiently unloading explosives on to German military centres
from a slow-moving Voisin which was his first mount. Upon the heels
of Lufbery came two more graduates of the Foreign Legion--Kiffin
Rockwell, of Asheville, N.C., who had been wounded at Carency; Victor
Chapman, of New York, who after recovering from his wounds became an
airplane bomb-dropper and so caught the craving to become a pilot. At
about this time one Paul Pavelka, whose birthplace was Madison, Conn.,