Georges Guynemer | Page 4

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 a?rial 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, it was he in reality who educated his son.
Guynemer is a very old French name. In the Chanson de Roland one Guinemer, uncle of Ganelon, helped Roland to mount at his departure. A Guinemer appears in Gaydon (the knight of the jay), which describes the sorrowful return of Charlemagne to Aix-la-Chapelle after the drama of Roncevaux; and a Guillemer figures in Fier-à-Bras, in which Charlemagne and the twelve peers conquer Spain. This Guillemer l'Escot is made prisoner along with Oliver, Bérart de Montdidier, Auberi de Bourgoyne, and Geoffroy l'Angevin.
In the eleventh century the family of Guynemer left Flanders for Brittany. When the French Revolution began, there were