DENNIS DOWD was probably the first American who went to France from the United States for the purpose of enlisting in the French Foreign Legion. Several of his fellow country men preceded him by several days in offering their services, but they were either permanently resident in the country or there on business or pleasure at the time war was declared. Dowd, whose love for France came second only to his love for America, sailed immediately after the beginning of hostilities, and enlisted on August 26, 1914. He was not a lover of war and had no illusions as to what the nature of his service was to be. But his former comrades in the Legion and in the 170th Infantry Regiment, to which he afterward transferred, say that he never once complained of hardship or failed in the accomplishment of a duty. He was a keen observer, and wrote of war with a kind of Barbussian touch which made his letters interesting and worth while. "I have never seen the kind of bayonet charge I read about. It is usually the slow amble of a lot of brutally tired men, over ground that has been torn to pieces by big guns, so that when the enemy is reached, there is none of the fancy play with the bayonet as taught at school. Men of both sides have a real distaste for that yard of cold steel, and they just poke dully and rather carefully at one another, until one side or the other runs." Dowd was wounded in the Champagne offensive of September and October, 1915, and spent the autumn and winter in hospital. When again ready for duty he transferred to the French Air Service, where he made an unusually brilliant record while in training. He had almost completed his brevet tests when he was killed by accident while making his altitude flight. He was the second American airman to be killed in France and the first one to meet his death at an aviation school. His loss was an irreparable one to the Franco-American Corps, as it was then called, but coming as it did, at a time when the American attitude toward the Allied cause was still undefined, the news went abroad and did much to enlist American sympathy on the side of liberty-loving nations. And so Dowd served his country in his death as he had served it in life, to splendid purpose. Source - Google books "The Lafayette Flying Corps, Volume 1" by James Norman Hall, Charles Nordhoff, Edgar G. Hamilton, Houghton Mifflin publisher, 1920.Born 22 April 1887 in Manhattan, New York. Graduate of Columbia University, and of Georgetown, District of Columbia, a lawyer by profession.