Georges Guynemer: Knight of the Air. Henry Bordeaux
is the Roland of our epoch: like Roland he was very brave, and like Roland he died for France. But his exploits are not a legend like those of Roland, and in telling them just as they happened we find them more beautiful than any we could imagine. To do honor to him they are going to write his name in the Panthéon among the other great names. His airplane has been placed in the Invalides. In our school we consecrated a day to him. This morning as soon as we reached the school we put his photograph up on the wall; for our moral lesson we learned by heart his last mention in the despatches; for our writing lesson we wrote his name, and he was the subject for our theme; and finally, we had to draw an airplane. We did not begin to think of him only after he was dead; before he died, in our school, every time he brought down an airplane we were proud and happy. But when we heard that he was dead, we were as sad as if one of our own family had died.
Roland was the example for all the knights in history. Guynemer should be the example for Frenchmen now, and each one will try to imitate him and will remember him as we have remembered Roland. I, especially, I shall never forget him, for I shall remember that he died for France, like my dear Papa.
This little French boy's description of Guynemer is true and, limited as it is, sufficient: Guynemer is the modern Roland, with the same redoubtable youth and fiery soul. He is the last of the knights-errant, the first of the new knights of the air. His short life needs only accurate telling to appear like a legend. The void he left is so great because every household had adopted him. Each one shared in his victories, and all have written his name among their own dead.
Guynemer's glory, to have so ravished the minds of children, must have been both simple and perfect, and as his biographer I cannot dream of equaling the young Paul Bailly. But I shall not take his hero from him. Guynemer's life falls naturally into the legendary rhythm, and the simple and exact truth resembles a fairy tale.
The writers of antiquity have mourned in touching accents the loss of young men cut down in the flower of their youth. "The city," sighs Pericles, "has lost its light, the year has lost its spring." Theocritus and Ovid in turn lament the short life of Adonis, whose blood was changed into flowers. And in Virgil the father of the gods, whom Pallas supplicates before facing Turnus, warns him not to confound the beauty of life with its length:
Stat sua cuique dies; breve et irreparabile tempus
Omnibus est vitae; sed famam extendere factis,
Hoc virtutis opus …
"The days of man are numbered, and his life-time short and irrecoverable; but to increase his renown by the quality of his acts, this is the work of virtue. … "[1]
[1] Æneid, Book 10, Garnier ed.
Famam extendere factis: no fabulous personage of antiquity made more haste than Guynemer to multiply the exploits that increased his glory. But the enumeration of these would not furnish a key to his life, nor explain either that secret power he possessed or the fascination he exerted. "It is not always the most brilliant actions which best expose the virtues or vices of men. Some trifle, some insignificant word or jest, often displays the character better than bloody combats, pitched battles, or the taking of cities. Also, as portrait painters try to reproduce the features and expression of their subjects, as the most obvious presentment of their characters, and without troubling about the other parts of the body, so we may be allowed to concentrate our study upon the distinctive signs of the soul. … "[2]
[2] Plutarch, Life of Alexander.
I, then, shall especially seek out these "distinctive signs of the soul."
Guynemer's family has confided to me his letters, his notebooks of flights, and many precious stories of his childhood, his youth, and his victories. I have seen him in camps, like the Cid Campeador, who made "the swarm of singing victories fly, with wings outspread, above his tents." I have had the good fortune to see him bring down an enemy airplane, which fell in flames on the bank of the river Vesle. I have met him in his father's house at Compiègne, which was his Bivar. Almost immediately after his disappearance I passed two night-watches—as if we sat beside his body—with his comrades, talking of nothing but him: troubled night-watches in which we had to change our shelter, for Dunkirk and the aviation field were bombarded by moonlight. In this way I was enabled to gather much scattered evidence, which will help, perhaps, to make clear his career. But I fear—and offer my excuses for this—to disappoint professional members of the aviation corps, who will find neither technical details nor the competence of the specialist. One of his comrades of the air—and I hope it may be one of his rivals in glory—should give us an account of Guynemer in action. The biography which I have attempted to write seeks the soul for its object rather than the motor: and the soul, too, has its wings.
France consented to love herself in Guynemer, something which she is not always willing to do. It happens sometimes that she turns away from her own efforts and sacrifices to admire and celebrate those of others, and that she displays her own defects and wounds in a way which exaggerates them. She sometimes appears to be divided against herself; but this man, young as he was, had reconciled her to herself. She 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]
[3] Henri Lavedan (L'Illustration of October 6, 1917).
[4] Pierre l'Ermite (La Croix of October 7, 1917).
The sky-juggler was working for his brother the infantryman. As the singing