Adventure, August 1917 — page 180: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

178 Legion, had known his desire for transfer to the Flying Corps and, on the consumma- tion of his wish, had heard from him the interesting details of his training as an aviator and shared in his splendid enthu- siasm for the daring work that lay before him. Though I have never seen him he had somehow come to seem a personal friend and I think many of you fet as I did and were equally saddened by the news of his death. : A descendant of Governor Clinton of New York and of Citizen Genet, French Ambassador in 1793, he was all American and, as you know, his great desire was to gain practical experience in modern war- fare so that he might put this experience at the disposal of his own country. HE WAS only twenty-one when he died. Yet, besides the Foreign Legion and the Flying Corps, he had, on failing exami- nation for Annapolis, served as ordinary seaman in our Navy—was on the Texas at’ Vera Cruz. On his honorable discharge he went at once to France. It was in January of this year that he began active service with the Lafayette Escadrille of American Aviators against the Germans. March seventeenth he was tem- porarily blinded from a scalp-wound in bat- tle with two German aviators, but managed to reach the French lines. For his con- duct on that occasion he was recommended for a citation in orders. Only a few weeks later he met his own fate. BY CHANCE, a correspondent of the New York Globe saw a group of men in French uniform about a former German cemetery near the destroyed village of Golancourt and noticed the flutter of an American flag over the freshly-made grave they surrounded. From a poilu it was learned that here, among the enemy dead, young Edmond Genet had just been laid to rest. The poilu himself had come a long way in honor of the American boy who had died for France: “They placed the croix de guerre (war cross) there on his coffin,” was the first thing he said, this little poilu standing on the mud-guard of our car. ‘He was a fine soldier. Yes, he was a fine soldier, the youngest of them all—of these Americans who came here to fight for France. Yes, I knew him—a quiet boy. He didn’t say much of what he had seen; he didn’t talk much. Yes, it is but a few Adventure days ago that his friend McConnell was shot down. Genet was flying with him, and he didn’t even know what had become of him then. He was mak- | ing his own fight, you know, and he didn’t know what had happened. But it was for that fight that he earned his croix de guerre; only he didn’t live for them to give it to him, and they have buried it there with him. “YES; he was a brave soldier. They say he was shot down by a shell which blew his machine to pieces. That is what they say; that it wasn’t in a fight with a German plane, but that they shelled him. It may have been that he was coming back to make kis landing. He was too brave, you know. He always wanted to be flying. It was the same way with him the year he was fighting in the trenches, before he became an aviator. He was too brave to stop. On the very day he was shot he did not have to go up. “Those soldiers at the grave? That is the com- mandant of the group to which the American squad- ron belongs, and officers from division headquar- ters. Those others are French aviators and there is one from an English squadron. Oh, some of these men have made great fights, and all the American aviators are there, wearing French uniforms and looking down on the coffin there with the croix de guerre shining on it.” LTHOUGH this is not the first time Frederick Simpich has given us a story it’s my own fault that it is only now he introduces himself according to our Camp-Fire custom. To many of you, es- pecially those of you who have foregathered in the general neighborhood of the Mexican border in recent years, he needs no intro- duction. It came first out of the fog—early, when I was twelve, the call to far places. The call of a bell ringing in the fog, the bell of a distant river boat gliding ghostlike down-stream through the thick chill haze of November dawn. I dropped the mink I was skinning, to sit hours on the high bluff above the Big Muddy, dreaming of far places the luring bell hinted at. ALWAYS the old men from log houses among the bluffs talked of Boone, of Crockett, Quantrel and the James boys (not William and Henry but Frank and Jesse)—when I would have heard tales of Genghis Khan, of Chinese Gordon and Warren Hastings. Passed thus years of youth, the incom- parable adventures of gun and boat; three years of law. Then freedom. Hawaii, Japan, Manchuria, Pekin and the Great Wall, the Ming Tombs—all far places of dreams. Cruising on the Yangtze in a creaky junk,—through fog—a river steamer slid past, obscure, shadowy in the wet, gray dawn. Chains rattled, voices called, a bell rang—the echo of that bell ringing in the fog when I was twelve, calling still to farther places. Walled, moated Manila; Macao with its air of Monte Carlo; reeking, mildewed Singapore; the de- lectable isle of Guam. Up and down the world, around it. Dream places became real, happily, CoOMmiclsoo 5}