Bordeaux says here: “Il sera un homme, mais il restera longtemps un gamin aussi. Longtemps? Presque jusqu’à la fin—à ses heurs, jusqu’à la fin.” It was Georges Guynemer, who not so very long after flamed out a boy hero of France, doing deeds that struck the world with wonderment, and while the world marveled vanished mysteriously, leaving no trace behind. Small and feminine, educated chiefly by governesses and his sisters, later a day student at the Lyceum, afterwards for a time at Stanislas, he was not the stuff for a soldier, yet soldier he wished to be when France set out to repel the German horde. He was twenty years old then. He hastened to his father. “I’m going to enlist.” “You are in luck.” “Ah! you authorize me!” “I envy you.” “Then as an old soldier you can help me. You can speak for me.” “I will.” But it was to no avail. He was not able to carry the equipment and endure the fatigue of a private, and the effects of a childhood’s illness made it impossible for him to serve in the cavalry. He was rejected—laughed at by some, be it said. He made a second attempt to enlist with no better result. Says M. Bordeaux: “He returned with his father to Biaritz, pale, silent, mournful, in such a state of rage and bitterness that his face was distorted.” He wrote to his old preceptor at Stanislas: “If I have to lie at the bottom of an auto-camion I wish to go to the front; and I will go. I mean to serve, it doesn’t matter where nor how, it doesn’t matter in what branch, but go to the front, serve I will.” That sort of spirit is not to be denied. Fate and circumstances make way for it. He met the pilot of an airplane one day and in conversation with him asked: “How can one get into the air service?” “See the Captain; you’ll find him at Pau.” A SMALL BEGINNING His parents, or rather his father, consenting, he was on his way to Pau next morning. He rushed to Captain Bernard-Thierry with his plea. The Captain objected. Georges pleaded, passionately, tearfully, begging even as a child for a desired object. The troubled captain made the only practicable concession—he would receive the youth as a mechanician student. The heavens opened. “That’s the thing! That’s the thing! I know automobiles.” And so it began, with hard work to the like of which he had never been accustomed, his endurance of which was problematical. But January 26, 1915, he was named as pilot student; March 10, 1915, he made his veritable first flight. In a letter to his father about this time he said: “I believe I am not making a reputation for prudence, but I hope this will come. I shall know soon.”