Flying for France: With the American Escadrille at Verdun — Story, Setting & Ideas

Diction of the Cockpit

McConnell’s vocabulary is that of a pilot, not a poet. He writes of “sorties,” “elevating planes,” and “forced descents” with the precision of someone who has repaired or flown these machines. When describing Fontaine’s escape, he notes the gunner “fell forward on him, dead”—no euphemism, no pause for sentiment. The language is stripped of ornament, mirroring the stripped-down Nieuports and Farmans the men flew. Even the humor is dry: the British, McConnell reports, did not say “let’s call off the war and have tea” on the day of the Oberndorf bombardment. The joke works because it is grounded in a real contrast between national stereotypes and the grim business of dropping tons of explosives on Mauser works.

Voice of the Volunteer

The introduction, written by F. C. P., traces McConnell’s evolution from ambulance driver to combat pilot. McConnell’s own letters, excerpted in the text, show a shift from adventurous curiosity to a “profound conviction that France and the French people were fighting the fight of liberty.” But in the narrative proper, this conviction is expressed through action, not rhetoric. McConnell does not lecture; he shows men like Lufbery and Fontaine making split-second decisions—diving, turning, waving good-bye—that reveal their priorities. The voice is that of an American who has chosen to fight, but who remains an observer of his own transformation. He notes that Lufbery “had a fighting acquaintance” with a German pilot, a phrase that suggests a strange intimacy born of repeated attempts to kill each other.

Structure of the Air Battle

McConnell organizes his account around individual sorties and set-piece bombardments, but the structure is episodic rather than chronological. The Oberndorf raid, for instance, is described in a sequence of departures: British Sopwiths first, then French Brequets and Farmans, then the American escadrille. The reader sees the mission from the ground up, as if watching from the field. Within each episode, McConnell focuses on the mechanics of survival—how a pilot maneuvers for position, how a jammed gun turns a gunner into a dead weight. The narrative does not build to a climax; it accumulates details, each one a lesson in the physics and luck of aerial combat. The effect is that of a debriefing, not a story.

Recurring Details of Damage and Luck

McConnell repeatedly catalogs the damage inflicted on aircraft: “three bullets entered his motor, two passed through the fur-lined combination he wore, another ripped open one of his woolen flying boots.” He notes that Lufbery’s plane was “riddled from wing tip to wing tip” and “junked as being beyond repairs.” These inventories serve a dual purpose: they testify to the violence of the air war and to the sheer improbability of survival. McConnell also records near-misses and escapes—Fontaine crossing the lines at six hundred feet with a dead gunner and wings “so full of holes that they barely supported the machine.” The repetition of such details creates a baseline of risk against which every successful landing is a minor miracle.

McConnell’s account is best read as a pilot’s logbook, not a memoir. He does not reflect on the war’s meaning; he records what he saw and heard. Readers interested in the psychology of combat aviators will find his understated tone more revealing than any amount of introspection. Pay attention to what he leaves out—the silence between sorties, the mechanics rushing out to grasp a landing plane—as much as to what he describes.

Reading McConnell’s grim, smiling accounts from Verdun, I kept thinking about the quiet paperwork of survival—the endless letters home, the pay stubs that meant next week’s coffee. That’s why War-Time Financial Problems — Reading Companion felt like the other half of the story. The same urgency, just a slower engine. I remember those moments between flights, when money seemed so absurdly normal. Odd, the things that anchor us.