"A Death Like the Rebel Angels": Cather and Faulkner Expose the Myth of Aerial Chivalry in One of Ours and Soldiers' Pay

Aprominent banner atop the June 26^th, 1916 edition of the New York Evening World read "N.Y. Flier Meets Heroic Death in Air Battle." The article's subheading proclaimed that the flier in question, Corporal Victor Chapman, "Dashed Fearlessly to Aid of Fellow Aviators Confronted by Superior Force" (Victor). The death of Victor Chapman in the skies over France a few days earlier was notable not only because he was the first American aviator to die in World War I, but because of the persistent myth created around it. An American pilot flying with the French in the newly created Escadrille Americaine, Chapman died when he attacked a superior flight of German aircraft to defend his comrades. Contemporary accounts of his death emphasize his heroism and idealism, reflecting the trend of American newspapers, in the spring and summer of 1916, to report on the exploits of America's new "air heroes." In the reports of Chapman's death, as Samuel Hynes notes, "a myth is in the making" (23). Arising a mere five years after the first use of aircraft in combat in 1911, the myth of the aviator hero was new and exciting, conflating an icon of modernity with the ancient elements of chivalry.

The myth of aerial chivalry begs interrogation because it represented the air war as a clean war by masking the death and injuring of the aviator. This romantic myth cloaked the aviator in idealism and hid the damaged body of the flyer in rhetoric. In this war of increasing mechanization, the air war was lauded as the last bastion of individual, man-to-man combat; as such, the chivalric myth captured the hearts of the public, painting the aviators as knights of the air and romanticizing both their kills and their deaths in legends of glory.¹

The creation of this myth was public and deliberate. Early reports in American papers described how Chapman "darted to the rescue" to "save" three other flyers (Victor), while Benjamin Gould's poem "Victor Chap-man" lauded the pilot as "the spirit of our age/ triumphant over time and space" (lines 22–23). French papers, too, contributed to this effort, as Ross F. Collins argues, converting Chapman's demise from "just another death among hundreds of thousands into a knight of heroic myth" (650). Even Theodore Roosevelt praised Chapman's "dauntless courage" and "devotion to great ideals" in a Colliers article published a month after the flier's death.

While these sources disseminated and sustained the myth, probably the most influential contribution to its development was the 1917 publication of Victor Chapman's Letters from France, containing the pilot's letters, mostly mundane, and a significant opening "Memoir," in which John Chapman curates a collection of increasingly heroic testimonials to his son, explaining "Victor's entry into the American Aviation was, to him, like being made a Knight" (25). Harvard classmate John Temple Jeffries lauds Chapman's "noble and chivalrous instincts" (17), while the French prime minister calls Chapman "the living symbol of American idealism" (28), and fellow pilot Kiffin Rockwell highlights Chapman's "glorious death" and "his ideals" (42). The mythical construction of the air war is perhaps best illustrated by French author and family friend Andre Chevrillon, who explains: "no Soldiers' death in our modern battle has so much of the truly epic.... They carry us back to the legendary times in which everything was pure and beautiful—to the time of the Medieval Knight who ran, single-handed [to help besieged brethren]" (36). This over-the-top discourse is significant because, along with many other stories of World War I aviators' exploits, it created a chivalric myth of aerial warfare that soon became, as Hynes puts it, "a part of our collective memory" (5). Although the notion of aerial chivalry declined later in the century, its prominence during the Great War created a discourse of honor and fairness in combat that informs all later images of the air war, and the aviator. The myth's immense...