"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.