He had a sweetheart from the United States, whom he had convinced to come to France. She was impossible. On a particularly harsh leave during which he concluded he had nothing to live for, Ripley married her. This is why he had named his difficult and unreliable airplane, the DH 4 with machine guns tended to by Lee Duncan, Lenore.

The DH 4s used by the 135th were the first with entirely American parts in their engines, and were thus newsworthy. One morning in August, news-reel photographers showed up at dawn to record their launch. There was no real reason to fly that day—it was drizzling, and no offensives were planned—but headquarters at Toul wanted to indulge the Signal Corps, so all planes were ordered into the air.

The planes were carefully filmed coming out of the hangar, with the last few left in the shadows, as if there might be hundreds more in reserve. There was a great deal of commotion and drama as one, two, three, four— all fifteen aircraft lifted gracefully, one by one, and disappeared into the clouds, while the cranks turned and newspaper men wrote hymns to describe the first sight of American planes becoming one with the vault of the heavens, winding in ever-widening spirals into the ethereal blue to drive von Hindenburg from the skies forever.

Leland Duncan performed his duties with his head turned away from the lenses. The photographers asked if he wouldn’t mind showing how he maintained the guns. Lee saluted, and after the tripods were set up, he showed off the bullets, how they fit into clips, how the clips were loaded onto belts, which were fed into Marlins, which operated on a recoil principle.

He was asked to stand behind the guns as if firing them, which he did, and then he was asked if he might wink at the camera. Eventually, he said, “No, I don’t do that.”

There was a village near the aerodrome whose name was Fleurey, or Flirrey—the peasants there spelled it any number of ways. It consisted of a few communal farms, an estaminet that rarely had food except egg and chips, a brothel, and several shacks by the river that housed either one large family or several smaller ones who had banded together. An old woman washed uniforms, taking them to the creek and beating them with an oar, and hanging them on a wire strung across the single, large room, where there was a fireplace.

One morning, Lee stood in the old woman’s front yard while she found his uniform, and he looked two doors down, where the girls of the brothel stood barefoot in the dirt. They wore fading chiffon and satin. One lifted her skirt as if displaying the day’s catch. He looked toward a cornfield.