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

Abstract

A prominent banner atop the June 26th, 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