Yet Guynemer came near missing the fighting altogether. Guynemer was born on Christmas day, 1893, in the town of Compiègne. He grew up a tall, delicate boy, who, his friends predicted, would never live to reach maturity. Perhaps the fact that he was almost an invalid turned his attention away from the athletic sports of the other boys and gave him his intense interest in mechanics. He had one consuming ambition: to become a student in the École Polytechnique in Paris; but when by hard study he had finally prepared himself and came up for his entrance examination, the professors of the school rejected him on the ground that he might not live to finish the course. To help the lad forget his overwhelming disappointment, his parents hurried him away to a health resort at Biarritz. He had been there a year when in August, 1914, came the news that his country had been attacked. Burning with zeal to help defend his beloved France, Guynemer offered himself again and again for enlistment in the French army. Hard pressed as that army was, its officers did not feel that they needed the sacrifice of a frail youth with one foot in the grave. Gently but firmly, the young candidate was rejected. Bitterly humiliated he went back to his life of enforced inaction; and while he saw his comrades marching forth to war, he eagerly pondered in his mind what service he could perform in the war against the invader. At length he hit upon an idea. Since he could not become a soldier, why should he not turn his mechanical skill to some account in one of the great airplane factories where France was turning out her swift squadrons of the air. He volunteered and was accepted. In a short time he had made his presence felt, for he had received a thorough preparatory education in mechanics and was far the superior of the majority of his fellow workmen. Little by little he won the friendship and admiration of his superiors, who promoted him to the position of mechanician at one of the big military aviation fields. Now for the first time he was living among war scenes. While he performed his humble duties in the hangar he burned with ambition to pilot over the lines one of the swift French battle planes. But he hardly dared make the request that he be taught to fly, fearing the rebuff which he had received on every other occasion when he had sought to enlist. But the officers at the aviation camp had been watching young Guynemer, and their respect for his nobility of character and high intelligence finally outweighed their fears that he might prove too delicate for the service in the air. So the happy day finally arrived when he was permitted to enlist as a student airman. In January, 1916, having completed his course of training, he flew for the first time in a swift scout plane.