Georges Guynemer | Page 4

smiled at his youth and his prodigious deeds of valor. He made
peace within her; and she knew this, when she had lost him, by the
outbreak of her grief. As on the first day of the war, France found
herself once more united; and this love sprang from her recognition in
Guynemer of her own impulses, her own generous ardor, her own
blood whose course has not been retarded by many long centuries.
Since the outbreak of war there are few homes in France which have
not been in mourning. But these fathers and mothers, these wives and
children, when they read this book, will not say: "What is Guynemer to
us? Nobody speaks of our dead." Their dead were, generally, infantry
soldiers whom it was impossible for them to help, whose life they only
knew by hearsay, and whose place of burial they sometimes do not
know. So many obscure soldiers have never been commemorated, who
gave, like Guynemer, their hearts and their lives, who lived through the
worst days of misery, of mud and horror, and upon whom not the least
ray of glory has ever descended! The infantry soldier is the pariah of
the war, and has a right to be sensitive. The heaviest weight of suffering
caused by war has fallen upon him. Nevertheless, he had adopted
Guynemer, and this was not the least of the conqueror's conquests. The
infantryman had not been jealous of Guynemer; he had felt his
fascination, and instinctively he divined a fraternal Guynemer. When
the French official dispatches reported the marvelous feats of the
aviation corps, the infantry soldier smiled scornfully in his mole's-hole:
"Them again! Everlastingly them! And what about US?"
But when Guynemer added another exploit to his account, the trenches
exulted, and counted over again all his feats.
He himself, from his height, looked down in the most friendly way
upon these troglodytes who followed him with their eyes. One day

when somebody reproached him with running useless risks in aërial
acrobatic turns, he replied simply:
"After certain victories it is quite impossible not to pirouette a bit, one
is so happy!"
This is the spirit of youth. "They jest and play with death as they played
in school only yesterday at recreation."[3] But Guynemer immediately
added:
"It gives so much pleasure to the poilus watching us down there."[4]
[Footnote 3: Henri Lavedan (L'Illustration of October 6, 1917).]
[Footnote 4: Pierre l'Ermite (La Croix of October 7, 1917).]
The sky-juggler was working for his brother the infantryman. As the
singing lark lifts the peasant's head, bent over his furrow, so the
conquering airplane, with its overturnings, its "loopings," its close
veerings, its spirals, its tail spins, its "zooms," its dives, all its tricks of
flight, amuses for a while the sad laborers in the trenches.
May my readers, when they have finished this little book, composed
according to the rules of the boy, Paul Bailly, lift their heads and seek
in the sky whither he carried, so often and so high, the tricolor of
France, an invisible and immortal Guynemer!

CANTO I
CHILDHOOD
I. THE GUYNEMERS
In his book on Chivalry, the good Léon Gautier, beginning with the
knight in his cradle and wishing to surround him immediately with a
supernatural atmosphere, interprets in his own fashion the sleeping
baby smiling at the angels. "According to a curious legend, the origin

of which has not as yet been clearly discovered," he explains, "the child
during its slumber hears 'music,' the incomparable music made by the
movement of the stars in their spheres. Yes, that which the most
illustrious scholars have only been able to suspect the existence of is
distinctly heard by these ears scarcely opened as yet, and ravishes them.
A charming fable, giving to innocence more power than to proud
science."[5]
[Footnote 5: La Chevalerie, by Léon Gautier. A. Walter ed. 1895.]
The biographer of Guynemer would like to be able to say that our new
knight also heard in his cradle the music of the stars, since he was to be
summoned to approach them. But it can be said, at least, that during his
early years he saw the shadowy train of all the heroes of French history,
from Charlemagne to Napoleon.
Georges Marie Ludovic Jules Guynemer was born in Paris one
Christmas Eve, December 24, 1894. He saw then, and always, the faces
of three women, his mother and his two elder sisters, standing guard
over his happiness. His father, an officer (Junior Class '80, Saint-Cyr),
had resigned in 1890. An ardent scholar, he became a member of the
Historical Society of Compiègne, and while examining the charters of
the Cartulaire de royallieu, or writing a monograph on the _Seigneurie
d'Offémont_, he verified family documents of the genealogy of his
family. Above all,