lodytes 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

In his book on Chivalry, the good Leon Gautier, beginning with the
knight in his cradle and wishing to surround him immediately with a
supernatural atmosphere, interprets in his own fashion the sleeping baby
smiling at the angels. "According to a curious legend, the origin of
which has not as yet been clearly discovered," he explains, "the child
during its slumber hears 'music,' the incomparable music made by the
movement of the stars in their spheres. Yes, that which the most
illustrious scholars have only been able to suspect the existence of is
distinctly heard by these ears scarcely opened as yet, and ravishes
them. A charming fable, giving to innocence more power than to proud
science."[5]

[Footnote 5: _La Chevalerie_, by Leon Gautier. A. Walter ed. 1895.]

The biographer of Guynemer would like to be able to say that our new
knight also heard in his cradle the music of the stars, since he was to
be summoned to approach them. But it can be said, at least, that during
his early years he saw the shadowy train of all the heroes of French
history, from Charlemagne to Napoleon.

Georges Marie Ludovic Jules Guynemer was born in Paris one Christmas
Eve, December 24, 1894. He saw t