the wind, of controlling his machine, of seeing, breathing, thinking differently from the way he saw and thought and breathed on the land, of being born, in fact, into a new and solitary life in an enlarged world.  As he ascended, men suddenly diminished in size.  The earth looked as if some giant hand had smoothed its surface, diversified only by moving shadows, while the outlines of objects became stronger, so that they seemed to be cut in relief.

The 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 longitudinal horizontality, and accurately appreciate angular variations.