IV Guynemer in His Father’s House
To quote him once more, Sheik Jabias, after being dazzled by the Cid in his camp, is supposed to see him in his father’s castle at Bivar, doing more humble work.
...Que s’est-il donc passé? Quel est cet équipage?
J’arrive, et je vous trouve en veste, comme un page,
Dehors, bras nus, nu-tête, et si petit garçon
Que vous avez en main l’auge et le caveçon,
Et faisant ce qu’il sied aux écuyers de faire,
—Cheick, dit le Cid, je suis maintenant chez mon père.
Those who never saw Guynemer at his father’s at Compiègne cannot know him well. Of course, even in camp he was the best of comrades, full of his work, but always ready to enjoy somebody else’s success, and speaking about his own as if it were billiards or bridge. His renown had not intoxicated him, and he would have been quite unconscious of it had he not sometimes felt that unresponsiveness on the part of others which is the price of glory: anything like jealousy hurt him as if it had been his first discovery of evil. In Kipling’s Jungle Book, Mowgli, the man cub, noticing that the Jungle hates him, feels his eyes and is frightened at finding them wet. “What is this, Bagheera?” he asks of his friend the panther. “Oh, nothing; only tears,” answers Bagheera, who had lived among men.
One who, on occasion, told Guynemer not to mind knows how deep was his sensitiveness, not to the presence of real hostility, which he fortunately never encountered, but even to an obscure germ of jealousy. The moment he felt this he shrank into himself. His native exuberance only displayed itself under the influence of sympathy.
Friendship among airmen is manly and almost rough, not caring for formulas or appearances, but proving itself by deeds. To these men the games of war are astonishingly like school games, and are spoken of as if they were nothing else. When a comrade has not come back, and dinner has to begin without him, no show of sorrow is tolerated: only these young men’s hearts feel the absence of a friend, and the casual visitor, not knowing, might take them for sporting men, lively and jolly.
Guynemer was living his life in perfect confidence, feeling no personal ambition, not inclined to enjoy honors more than work, ignoring all affectation or attitudinizing, never politic, and naturally unconscious of his own simplicity. Yet he loved and adored what we call glory, and would tell anybody of his successes, even of his decorations, with a childlike certitude that these things must delight others as much as himself. His French honors were of course his great pride, but he highly appreciated those which he had received from allied governments, too: the Distinguished Service order, the Cross of St. George, the Cross of Leopold, the Belgian war medal, Serbian and Montenegrin orders, etc. All these ribbons made a bright show, and although he generally wore only the rosette of the Legion of Honor, he would sometimes deck himself out in them all, or carry them in his pocket and occasionally empty them out on a table, as at school he used to tumble out the untidy contents of his desk in search of his task.
When he went to Paris to see to his machines, he first secured a room at the Hôtel Edouard VII, and immediately posted to the Buc works. When he had time he would invite himself to dinner at the house of his schoolmate at the Collège Stanislas, Lieutenant Constantin. “Every time he came,” this officer writes, “some new exploit or a new decoration had been added to his list. He never wore all his medals, his ‘village-band banner,’ as he amusingly called them; but when people asked to see them, he immediately searched his pockets and produced the whole disorderly lot. When he became officer in the Legion, he appeared at my mother’s quite radiant, so that she asked him the reason of this unusual joy. ‘Regardez bien, madame, there is something new.’ The new thing which my mother discovered was a tiny rosette ornamenting his red ribbon.”
This rosette was so very small that nobody noticed it, and Guynemer felt that he must complain to the shopman at the Palais Royal who had sold it to him.
“Give me a larger one, a huge one,” he said; “nobody sees this.”
The tradesman spread a number of rosettes on his counter, but Guynemer only took back again the one of which he had complained, and went out laughing as if the whole thing had been a good joke.
His officer’s stripes gave him as much pleasure as his decorations. Every time he was promoted, he wanted his stripes sewn on, not in a day or an hour, or even five minutes, but immediately. He received his captain’s commission the same day he had been given the Distinguished Service order, and he promptly went to see his friend, Captain de la Tour, who was wounded in the hospital at Nancy. This officer had lost three brothers in action, and loved Guynemer as if he had been another younger brother. Indeed, Guynemer said later that La Tour loved him more than any other did.
“Don’t you see any change in me?” Guynemer asked.
“No, you’re just as usual.”
“No, there’s a change!”
“Oh, I see; you mean your English order; it does look well.”
“There’s something else. Look closer.”
La Tour at last discovered the three stripes on the cap and sleeves.
“What! Are you a captain?”
“Yes, a captain,” and Guynemer laughed his boyish laugh.—This kid a captain! So I am not an impressive captain, then? I haven’t run risks enough to be a captain, probably!—His laugh said all this.
Lieutenant Constantin also says in his notes: “Guynemer disliked walking about Paris, because people recognized him. When he saw them turn to look at him, he would grumble at the curse of having a face that was public property. So he preferred waiting for evening, and then drove his little white car up the Champs Elysées to the Bois. He enjoyed this peaceful recreation thoroughly, and forgot the excitement of his life at the front. Memories of our boyhood days came back to him, and he dwelt on them with delight: ‘Do you remember one day in seconde when we quarreled and fought like madmen? You made such a mark on my arm that it is there yet.’ He did not mind, but I was ashamed of having been such a young brute. Another day, in May, 1917, coming home on leave I met Georges just as he stepped out of his hotel, and as I had just been mentioned in dispatches I told him about it. Immediately he dragged me into a shop, bought a croix de guerre, pinned it on my vareuse, and hugged me before everybody.”
Guynemer had a genius for graciousness, and his imagination was inexhaustible when he wished to please, but his temper was hot and quick. One day he had left his motor at the door of the hotel, and some practical joker thought it clever to leave a note in the car with this inscription in large letters: AVIATORS TO THE FRONT! Guynemer did not take the joke at all, and was boiling with rage.
His complete freedom from conceit has often been remarked. At a luncheon given in his honor by the well-known deputy, Captain Lasies, he would not say a word about himself, but extolled his comrades until somebody said: “You are really modesty itself.”
Whereupon another guest asked: “Could you imagine him bragging?”
Guynemer was delighted, and when the party broke up he went out with the gentleman who had said this and thanked him warmly. “Don’t you see how little they understand? I don’t say I am modest, but if I weren’t I would be a fool, and I should not like to be that. I know quite well that just now some of us are getting so much admiration and so many honors that one may get more than one’s share. Whereas the men in the trenches—how different it is with them!”24
But it was inevitable that he should be lionized. People came to him with albums and pictures. He wrote to his father that a Madame de B. wanted something, just one sentence, in an album which was to be sold in America. “I am to be alongside the Generalissimo. What on earth can I write?”
An American lady who was also a guest at the Hôtel Edouard VII wanted to have at any price some souvenir of the young hero. She ordered her maid to bring away an old glove of Guynemer’s which was lying on a chest of drawers, and replace it by a magnificent bouquet. “This lady put me in a nice dilemma,” Guynemer explained, “as it was Sunday and there was no way of getting any more gloves.”25
He had no affectation, least of all the kind that pretends to be ignorant of one’s own popularity; but surely he cared little for popularity. Here again he puts us in mind of a medieval poem. In Gilbert de Metz, one of our oldest epics, the daughter of Anséis is described seated at the window, “fresh, slim, and white as a lily” when two knights, Garin and his cousin Gilbert, happen to ride near. “Look up, cousin Gilbert,” says Garin, “look. By our lady, what a handsome dame!” “Oh,” answers Gilbert, “what a handsome creature my steed is! I never saw anything so lovely as this maiden with her fair skin and dark eyes. I never knew any steed that could compare with mine.” And so on, while Gilbert still refuses to look up at the beautiful daughter of Anséis. Also in Girard de Viane, Charlemagne, holding his court at the palace of Vienne, has just placed the hand of the lovely Aude in that of his nephew Roland. Both the girl and the great soldier are silent and blushing while the date of the wedding is being discussed, when a messenger suddenly rushes in: “The Saracens are in France! War! war!” shout the bystanders. Then without a word Roland drops the white hand of the girl, springs to arms, and is gone. So Guynemer would have praised his Nieuport or his Spad as Gilbert praised his steed, and belle Aude herself could not have kept him away from the fight.
One day his father felt doubts about the capacity of such a young man to resist the intoxication of so much flattery from men and women.
“Don’t worry,” Guynemer answered, “I am watching my nerves as an acrobat watches his muscles. I have chosen my own mission, and I must fulfil it.”
After his death, one of his friends, the one who spoke to him last, told me: “He used to put aside heaps of flattering letters which he did not even read. ‘Read them if you like,’ he said to me, and I destroyed them. He only read letters from children, schoolboys and soldiers.”
In L’Aiglon Prokesch brings the mail to the Prince Imperial, and handing him letters from women, he says:
Voilà
Ce que c’est d’avoir l’auréole fatale.
As soon as Prokesch begins to read them, the Prince stops him with the words: “Je déchire.” Even when a woman whom he has nicknamed “Little Spring”—“because the water sleeping in her eyes or purling in her voice has often cooled his fever”—announces her departure, hoping he may detain her, he lets her go, whispering again like a refrain, “Je déchire.”
Did Guynemer deal with hearts as he dealt with the besieging letters, or as the falcon of St. Jean l’Hospitalier dealt with birds?—No “Little Spring,” had her voice been ever so rill-like, could have detained him when a sunny morning invited him skywards.
Safe from the admiring public, Guynemer would relax and breathe freely with his people at Compiègne, where he became once more a lively, noisy, indulged, but coaxing and charming boy, except when absorbed in work, from which nothing could distract him. He spent hours in pasting and classifying the snapshots he took of his enemies just before pulling the trigger of his machine-gun and bringing them down. One of his greatest pleasures when on leave was to arrange and show these photographs.
His eyes, which saw everything, were keen to detect the least changes in the arrangement of his home, even when mere knickknacks had been moved about. At each visit he found the house ornamented with some new trophy of his exploits. He was delighted to find that a miniature barkentine, which he had built with corks, paper, and thread when he was seven years old, still stood on his mother’s mantelpiece. Even at that age his powers of observation had been evident, and he had forgotten no detail of sails or rigging.
He had taken again so naturally his old place in the family circle that his mother forgot once and called the tall, famous young man by his old familiar name, “Bébé.” She quickly corrected herself, but he said:
“I am always that to you, Mother.”
“I was happier when you were little,” she observed.
“I hope you are not vexed with me, Mother.”
“Vexed for what?”
“For having grown up.”
He was naturally full of the one subject that interested him, airplanes and chasing, and he would go round the house collecting audiences. Strange bits of narration could be overheard from different rooms as he held forth:
“Then I embusqued myself became a slacker....”
“What!”
“Oh! I embusqued myself behind a cloud.”
Or, “The light dazzled me, so I hid the sun with my wing.”
He never forgot his sisters’ birthdays, but he could not always give them the present he preferred. “Sorry I could not present you with a Boche.”
He was hardly different when his mother received company: he was never seen to play the great man. Only on one subject he always and instantly became serious, namely, when the future was mentioned. “Do not let us make any plans,” he would say.
A page from one of my own notebooks will help to show Guynemer as I used to see him in his home.
Wednesday, June 27, 1917.—Compiègne. Called on the Guynemers. He is fascination itself with his “goddess on the clouds” gait—as if he remembered when walking that he could also fly—with his incomparable eyes, his perpetual movement, his interior electricity, his admixture of elegance and ardor, and with that impulse of his whole being towards one object which suggests the antique runner, even when he is for an instant in repose. His parents and sisters do not miss a single gesture, a single motion he makes. They drink in his every word, and his life seems to absorb them. His laugh echoes in their souls. They believe in him, are sure of him, sure of his future, and that all will be well. Noticing this certitude, whether real or assumed, I could not help stealing a glance at the frail god of aviation, made like the delicate statuettes that we dread breaking. He talks passionately, as usual, of his aërial fights. But just now one thought seems to supersede every other. He is expecting a new machine, a magic machine which he planned long ago, found difficult to get built, and with which he must do more damage than ever.
Then he showed us his photographs with the white blotches of bursting shells, or the gray wings of German airplanes. One of these is seen as it falls in flames, the pilot falling, too, some distance away from it. Thus the victim was registered, and the memory of it made him happy.
I swallowed a question I was going to ask: What about yourself—some day? because he looked so full of life that the notion of death could never present itself to him. But he seemed to have read my thoughts, for he said:
“You have plenty of time in the air, except when you fight, and then you have no time at all. I’ve been brought down six times, and I always had plenty of time to realize what was happening.” And he laughed his clear, boyish laugh.
As a matter of fact, he has been incredibly lucky. In one fight he was hit three times, and each time the bullet was deadened by some unexpected obstacle.
Finally I was shown photographs of himself, chronologically arranged. Needless to say, it was not he who showed them. There was the half-nude baby, with eyes already sparkling and eager, then the schoolboy with the fine carriage of the head, then the lad fresh from school with a singularly calm expression, and well filled-out cheeks. A little later the expression appeared more mature and tense, though still ingenuous. Later again there was a decidedly stern look, with the face less oval and thinner. The rough fingers of war had chiseled this face, and sharpened and strengthened it. I looked from the picture to him, and I realized that, compared to his former pictures, his expression had now indeed acquired something terrible. But just then he laughed, and the laughter conjured away all phantasies.
Notes
24 Journal des Débats for September 26, 1917.
25 Anecdote related in the Figaro for September 29, 1917.