us. It is a religious war, greater far than any of the old Crusades in its principles—principles that are greater and larger than Christianity itself.'
This is not a speech from the sidelines but from the firing line, and it may be set against that of the realistic politician who insists that "we merely went in to strafe the Hun."
Some of these men went into battle in mortal fear. Of one it is said: "He had a horror of war and was always very nervous when he went to the front, and yet he always volunteered for any dangerous mission." Others developed the sang-froid of Mercutio, fighting and taking their own death with a jest on their lips. Happiest of the dead, probably, were the first thirty—sportsmen, many of them, football and polo players and big game hunters, eager for the thick of the scrimmage.
For Victor Chapman, entrance into American aviation, declares his father, was "like being made a knight. It transformed—one might almost say transfigured—him. That the universe should have supplied this spirit with the consummation which it had sought from infancy and should have given in a few weeks complete happiness and complete fulfillment—the crown of life to which one can imagine no other perfect ending—is one of the mysteries of this divine age."
Of the same Hotspur breed were Hamilton Coolidge, Quentin Roosevelt, Norman Prince and young David Endicott Putnam, a boy of twenty, who had had some difficulty entering aviation on account of his youth, yet brought down five German planes in a day and gayly wrote to his mother on the evening of June 30, 1918:
