land was marked by geometrical lines, showing man's labor and its
regularity, an immense parti-colored checker-board traversed by the
lines of highroads and rivers, and containing islands which were forests
and towns and cities. Was it the chain of the Pyrenees covered with snow
which, breaking this uniformity, wrested a cry of admiration from the
aviator? What shades of gold and purple were shed over the scene by the
setting sun? His half-sentence is like a confession of love for the joy
of living, violently torn from him, and the only avowal this blunt
Roland would allow himself.
For the nature of his correspondence is somewhat surprising. Read
superficially, it must seem extremely monotonous; but when better
understood, it indicates the writer's sense of oppression, of
hallucination, of being bewitched. From that moment Guynemer had only
one object, and from its pursuit he never once desisted. Or, if he did
desist for a brief interval, it was only to see his parents, who were
part of his life, and whom he associated with his work. His
correspondence with them is full of his airplanes, his flights, and then
his enemy-chasing. His letters have no beginning and no ending, but
plunge at once into action. He himself was nothing but action. Only
that? the reader will ask. Action was his reason for existing, his
heart, his soul--action in which his whole being fastened on his prey.
A long and minutiose training goes to the making of a good pilot. But
the impatient Guynemer had patience for everything, and the self-willed
Stanislas student became the hardest working of apprentices. His
scientific knowledge furnished him with a method, and after his first
long flights his progress was very rapid. But he wanted to master all
the principles of aviation. As student mechanician he had seen airplanes
built. He intended to make himself veritably part of the machine which
should be intrusted to him. Each of his senses was to receive the
education which, little by little, would make it an instrument capable
of registering facts and effecting security. His eyes--those piercing
eyes which were to excel in raking the heavens and perceiving the first
trace of an enemy at incalculable distances--though they could only
register his motion in relation to the earth and not the air, could, at
all events, inform him of the slightest deviations from the horizontal
in the three dimensions: namely, straightness of direction, lateral and
longit
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