Georges Guynemer: Knight of the Air

but from the road you can see the machines start or land. The day was glorious, and the broad sun transfiguring these French landscapes, with their

cliffs, where the fighting was incessant

r camp? Because they knew that here, in default of Gree

rom farm to farm, of what had happened on the 25th, and on

cannot be expected to remember them all. Finally an airplane descended in

yne

old who, by grinding their colors themselves, insured the duration of their works. He resented not being able to make all his weapons himself, his engine, his Vickers, and his bullets. At length he seemed willing to leave his m

mit me, mon

but

the women watching him ecstatically. He made a despairing gesture. His fr

dark with golden reflections, could have been painted, they might no doubt have given a more accurate notion of him: his capacity for surveying all space, and his prompt decision, were visible in them, as well as his carefulness and his courage. T

o declare him unfit, a decision which he heroically resisted, adding to his thirty victories another triumph over physical disability. Guynemer differed from them mentally, too, possessing neither their instinct nor their intui

in recklessness without having pondered and calculated. His action was so swift that it

e knowing ways. There was not the least shade of affectation or of posing in his narrative, but he talked with the simplicity of a child. He told us that his third encounter had been the most enjoyable. He was coming back to lunch, had seen the impudent German soar

e could not be called clouds. But these white flakes began to multiply; they were, in fact, an enemy patrol, which had succeeded in crossing the lines and was now a

put into his leather suit. His whole soul was in his eyes, which glared at one moving point in space as if they themselves could shoot. Three of the German machines had already turned back, but the remaining one went on, insolently counting on his own po

ght at

seen climbing almost vertically. Up above the fight was beginning, and it seemed as if the three starting a

in the direction of the Aisne cliffs. But the Spad partly caught up with him and the a?rial circling began anew, while two other Spads appeared-a pack after a deer. The German cleverly took advantage now of the sun, now of the evening vapors, but he was within range, and the tack-tack of a machine-gun was heard. Guynemer and the other two w

unt, because another airman had shot first-which give

d in all the fanciful caprioles of acrobatic aviation, spinning down in quick spirals, turning somersaults, looping or plunging in a glorious sky-dance. Last of the