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!"