FRANCE MOURNS THE DEATH OF AIR HERO
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JEAN NAVARRE DEAD AFTER MAD SERIES OF ESCAPADES.
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Flyer Brought Down Nineteen Enemy Planes at Front—Engaged in More Than Seventy-five Air Battles.
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PARIS, July 16.—All France has been mourning the death of the "mad airman" who was recently killed in an airplane accident.
Sub-Lieut.
Jean Navarre, the mad flier of France, is dead at twenty-four. Navarre, who morosely brooded in his barracks over his clashes with the odious discipline of the army. Navarre, who attacked the enemies of his country in the air with the sulky petulance of a child—and the mad recklessness of a hero.
For there was much of the child as well as the hero in this courageous youth who ranks next to Captain Guynemer in the air annals of France. He was at continuous outs with his superior officers. He was one of the most frequently reprimanded, and at the same time one of the most lavishly decorated members of the French air service. He was retired from the army for his repeated acts of insubordination, and at the time he received his release he had acquired every known decoration of his government for bravery, and new ones had been devised to do him honor.
Flying over a squadron of Hun planes, he had thrown his machine into [a] series of hair-raising acrobatic positions in mute and petulant protest to his leader's command to return home. Tho he offered a fair target to the machine guns of the German planes beneath him, not a shot was fired, so great was the astonishment of those who watched him.
And, as he chafed under military authority, he resented even more the attempts of civil officers to curb his actions. Following an altercation with police in Paris, in which he had come out second, he jumped in a racing car and sped madly thru the streets of the capital city, aiming his machine at every policeman he saw. Following the mad ride, five patrolmen were carried to hospitals, and Jean Navarre was placed in prison.
But France, for the most part, was willing to ignore the escapades of its mad hero. His feats at the front were recounted in every cafe. His officers praised him even as they reprimanded him, and unless his insubordination passed all bounds, tales of his misconduct brought merely shrugs. His was the romantic, yet tragic, character of the scores of his fellow air fighters who were relegated to the "Cohort of the Damned," that famed squadron of free lance fliers, who, not amenable to discipline, were given planes and allotted a sector of the front where they might fight to the death, unmolested by army discipline.
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