Since the outbreak of war there are few homes in France which have not been in mourning. But these fathers and mothers, these wives and children, when they read this book, will not say: "What is Guynemer to us? Nobody speaks of _our_ dead." Their dead were, generally, infantry soldiers whom it was impossible for them to help, whose life they only knew by hearsay, and whose place of burial they sometimes do not know. So many obscure soldiers have never been commemorated, who gave, like Guynemer, their hearts and their lives, who lived through the worst days of misery, of mud and horror, and upon whom not the least ray of glory has ever descended! The infantry soldier is the pariah of the war, and has a right to be sensitive. The heaviest weight of suffering caused by war has fallen upon him. Nevertheless, he had adopted Guynemer, and this was not the least of the conqueror's conquests. The infantryman had not been jealous of Guynemer; he had felt his fascination, and instinctively he divined a fraternal Guynemer. When the French official dispatches reported the marvelous feats of the aviation corps, the infantry soldier smiled scornfully in his mole's-hole: "Them again! Everlastingly them! And what about US?" But when Guynemer added another exploit to his account, the trenches exulted, and counted over again all his feats. He himself, from his height, looked down in the most friendly way upon these troglodytes who followed him with their eyes. One day when somebody reproached him with running useless risks in aerial acrobatic turns, he replied simply: "After certain victories it is quite impossible not to pirouette a bit, one is so happy!" This is the spirit of youth. "They jest and play with death as they played in school only yesterday at recreation."[3] But Guynemer immediately added: "It gives so much pleasure to the poilus watching us down there."[4] [Footnote 3: Henri Lavedan (_L'Illustration_ of October 6, 1917).] [Footnote 4: Pierre l'Ermite (_La Croix_ of October 7, 1917).] The sky-juggler was working for his brother the infantryman. As the singing lark lifts the peasant's head, bent over his furrow, so the conquering airplane, with its overturnings, its "loopings," its close veerings, its spirals, its tail spins, its "zooms," its dives, all its tricks of flight, amuses for a while the sad laborers in the trenches. May my readers, when they have finished this little book, composed according to the rules of the boy, Paul Bailly, lift their heads and seek in the sky whither he carried, so often and so high, the tricolor of France, an invisible and immortal Guynemer! CANTO I CHILDHOOD I. THE GUYNEMERS