villages, and that the admiration and gratitude which the children,
so far away in the country, feel for our greatest aviator, will be
piously and faithfully preserved in his memory.

May this sincere testimony to the sentiments of childhood be of
some comfort in your grief, to which I offer my most profound
respect.

The School-mistress of Bouclans,
C.S.

And this is the exercise, written by Paul Bailly, aged eleven years and
ten months:

Guynemer 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.