IV The Vigil
Before Guynemer, other knights of the air, other aces, had been reported missing or had perished—some like Captain Le Cour Grandmaison or Captain Auger in our lines, others like Sergeant Sauvage and sous-lieutenant Dorme in the enemy’s. In fact, he would be the thirteenth on the list if the title of ace is reserved for aviators to whom the controlling board has given its visé for five undoubted victories. These were the names:
| Captain Le Cour Grandmaison | 5 | victories |
| Sergeant Hauss | 5 | ″ |
| sous-lieutenant Delorme | 5 | ″ |
| sous-lieutenant Pégoud | 6 | ″ |
| sous-lieutenant Languedoc | 7 | ″ |
| Captain Auger | 7 | ″ |
| Captain Doumer | 7 | ″ |
| sous-lieutenant Rochefort | 7 | ″ |
| Sergeant Sauvage | 8 | ″ |
| Captain Matton | 9 | ″ |
| Adjutant Lenoir | 11 | ″ |
| sous-lieutenant Dorme | 23 | ″ |
Would Guynemer’s friends now have to add: Captain Guynemer, 53? Nobody dared to do so, yet nobody now dared hope.
A poet of genius, who even before the war had been an aviator, Gabriele d’Annunzio, has described in his novel, Forse che si forse che no, the friendship of two young men, Paolo Tarsis and Giulio Cambasio, whose mutual affection, arising from a similar longing to conquer the sky, has grown in the perils they dare together. If this book had been written later, war would have intensified its meaning. Instead of dying in a fight, Cambasio is killed in a contest for altitude between Bergamo and the Lake of Garda. As Achilles watched beside the dead body of Patroclus, so Tarsis would not leave to another the guarding of his lost friend:
“In tearless grief Paolo Tarsis kept vigil through the short summer night. So it had broken asunder the richest bough on the tree of his life; the most generous part of himself ruined. For him the beauty of war had diminished, now that he was no longer to see, burning in those dead eyes, the fervor of effort, the security of confidence, the rapidity of resolution. He was no longer to taste the two purest joys of a manly heart: steadiness of eye in attack, and the pride of watching over a beloved peer.”
For him the beauty of war had diminished.... War already so long, so exhausting and cruel, and laden with sorrow! Will war appear in its horrid nakedness, now that those who invested it with glory disappear, now, above all, when the king of these heroes, the dazzling young man whose luminous task was known to the whole army, is no more? Is not his loss the loss of something akin to life? For a Guynemer is like the nation’s flag: if the soldiers’ eyes miss the waving colors, they may wander to the wretchedness of daily routine, and morbidly feed on blood and death. This is what the loss of a Guynemer might mean.
But can a Guynemer be quite lost?
Saint-Pol-sur-Mer, September, 1917
(From the author’s diary)
Visited the Storks Escadrille.
The flying field occupies a vast space, for it is common to the French and the British. A dam protecting the landing-ground screens it from the sea. But from the second floor of a little house which the bombs have left standing, you can see its moving expanse of a delicate, I might say timid blue, dotted with home-coming boats. The evening is placid and fine, with a reddish haze blurring the horizon.
Opposite the sheds, with their swelling canvas walls, a row of airplanes is standing before being rolled in for the night. The mechanicians feel them with careful hands, examining the engines, propellers, and wings. The pilots are standing around, still in their leather suits, their helmets in their hands. In brief sentences they sum up their day’s experiences.
Mechanically I look among them for the one whom the eye invariably sought first. I recalled his slight figure, his amber complexion, and dark, wonderful eyes, and his quick descriptive gestures. I remembered his ringing, boyish laugh, as he said:
“And then, ‘couic’....”
He was life itself. He got out of his seat panting but radiant, quivering, as it were, like the bow-string when it has sent its shaft, and full of the sacred drunkenness of a young god.
Ten days had passed since his disappearance. Nothing more was known than on that eleventh of September when Bozon-Verduraz came back alone. German prisoners belonging to aviation had not heard that he was reported missing. Yet it was inconceivable that such a piece of news should not have been circulated; and, in fact, yesterday a message dropped by a German airplane on the British lines, concerning several English aviators killed or in hospital, was completed by a note saying that Captain Guynemer had been brought down at Poelkapelle on September 10, at 8 a.m. But could this message be credited? Both the day and hour it stated were wrong. On September 10 at 8 a.m. Guynemer was alive, and even the next day he had not left the camp at the hour mentioned. An English newspaper had announced his disappearance, and perhaps the enemy was merely using the information. The mystery remained unsolved.
As we were discussing these particulars, the last airplanes were landing, one after another, and Guynemer’s companions offered their reasons for hoping, or rather believing; but none seemed convinced by his own arguments. Their inner conviction must be that their young chief is dead; and besides, what is death, what is life, to devoting one’s all to France?
Captain d’Harcourt had succeeded Major Brocard pro tem as commandant of the unit. He was a very slim, very elegant young man, with the grace and courtesy of the ancien régime which his name evoked, and the perfection of his manners and gentleness seemed to lend convincing power to all he said. Guynemer being missing and Heurtaux wounded, the Storks were now commanded by Lieutenant Raymond. He belonged to the cavalry, a tall, thin man, with the sharp face and heroic bearing of Don Quixote, a kindly man with a roughness of manner and a quick, picturesque way of expressing himself. Deullin was there, too, one of Guynemer’s oldest and most devoted friends. Last of all descended from the high regions sous-lieutenant Bozon-Verduraz, a rather heavy man with a serious face, and more maturity than belonged to his years, an unassuming young man with a hatred for exaggeration and a deep respect for the truth.
Once more he went through every detail of the fatal day for me, each particular anticipating the dread issue. But in spite of this narrative, full of the idea of death, I could not think of Guynemer as dead and lying somewhere under the ground held by the enemy. It was impossible for me not to conjure up Guynemer alive and even full of life, Guynemer chasing the enemy with strained terrible eyes, Guynemer of the superhuman will, the Guynemer who never gave up,—in short, a Guynemer whom death could not vanquish.
A wonderful atmosphere men breathe here, for it relieves death of its horror. One officer, Raymond, I think, said in a careless manner:
“Guynemer’s fate will be ours, of course.”
Somebody protested: “The country needs men like you.”
To which Deullin answered: “Why does it? There will be others after us, and the life we lead....”
But Captain d’Harcourt broke in gaily: “Come on; dinner’s ready—and with this bright moon and clear sky we are sure to get bombed.”
Bombed, indeed, we were, and pretty severely, but in convenient time, for we had just drunk our coffee. A few minutes before, the practiced ear of one of us had caught the sound of the bimoulins, the bi-motor German airplanes, and soon they were near. We gained the sheltering trench. But the night was so entrancingly pure, with the moon riding like an airship in the deep space, that it seemed to promise peace and invited us to enjoy the spectacle. We climbed upon the parapet and listened to the breathing of the sea, accompanying with its bass the music of the motors. There were still a few straggling reddish vapors over the luminous landscape, and the stars seemed dim. But other stars took their place, those of the French Voisins returning from some bombing expedition, their lights dotting the sky like a moving constellation, while at intervals a rocket shot from one or the other who was anxious not to miss the landing-ground. Over Dunkirk, eight or ten searchlights stretched out their long white arms, thrusting and raking to and fro after the enemy machines. Suddenly one of these appeared, dazzled by the revealing light, as a moth in the circle of a lamp; our batteries began firing, and we could see the quick sparks of their shells all around it. Flashing bullets, too, drew zebra-like stripes across the sky, and with the cannonade and the rumbling of the airplanes we heard the lament of the Dunkirk sirens announcing the dreaded arrival of the huge 380 shells upon the town, where here and there fires broke out. Meanwhile the German airplanes got rid of their bombs all around us, and we could feel the ground tremble.
The Storks looked on with the indifference of habit, thinking of their beds and awaiting the end. One of them, a weather prophet, said:
“It will be a good day to-morrow; we can start early.”
As I spun towards Dunkirk in the motor, these young men and their speeches were in my mind, and I seemed to hear them speaking of their absent companion without any depression, with hardly any sorrow. They thought of him when they were successful, referred to him as a model, found an incentive in his memory,—that was all. Their grief over his loss was virile and invigorating.
After watching his friend’s body through the night, the hero of d’Annunzio goes to the aërodrome where the next trials for altitude are to take place. He cannot think of robbing the dead man of his victory. As he rises into the upper regions of the air he feels a soothing influence and an increase of power: the dead man himself pilots his machine, wields the controls, and helps him higher, ever higher up in divine intoxication.
In the same way the warlike power of Guynemer’s companions is not diminished. Guynemer is still with them, accompanying each one, and instilling into them the passionate longing to do more and more for France.