and gratitude which the children, so far away in the country, feel for our greatest aviator, will be piously and faithfully preserved in his memory.

     May this sincere testimony to the sentiments of childhood be of
     some comfort in your grief, to which I offer my most profound
     respect.

     The School-mistress of Bouclans,
     C.S.

And this is the exercise, written by Paul Bailly, aged eleven years and ten months: 

Guynemer is the Roland of our epoch:  like Roland he was very brave, and like Roland he died for France.  But his exploits are not a legend like those of Roland, and in telling them just as they happened we find them more beautiful than any we could imagine.  To do honor to him they are going to write his name in the Pantheon among the other great names.  His airplane has been placed in the Invalides.  In our school we consecrated a day to him.  This morning as soon as we reached the school we put his photograph up on the wall; for our moral lesson we learned by heart his last mention in the despatches; for our writing lesson we wrote his name, and he was the subject for our theme; and finally, we had to draw an airplane.  We did not begin to think of him only after he was dead; before he died, in our school, every time he brought down an airplane we were proud and happy.  But when we heard that he was dead, we were as sad as if one of our own family had died.

Roland was the example for all the knights in history.  Guynemer should be the example for Frenchmen now, and each one will try to imitate him and will remember him as we have remembered Roland.  I, especially, I shall never forget him, for I shall remember that he died for France, like my dear Papa.

This little French boy’s description of Guynemer is true and, limited as it is, sufficient:  Guynemer is the modern Roland, with the same redoubtable youth and fiery soul.  He is the last of the knights-errant, the first of the new knights of the air.  His short life needs only accurate telling to appear like a legend.  The void he left is so great because every household had adopted him.  Each one shared in his victories, and all have written his name among their own dead.

Guynemer’s glory, to have so ravished the minds of children, must have been both simple and perfect, and as his biographer I cannot dream of equaling the young Paul Bailly.  But I shall not take his hero from him.  Guynemer’s life falls naturally into the legendary rhythm, and the simple and exact truth resembles a fairy tale.

The writers of antiquity have mourned in touching accents the loss of young men cut down in the flower of their youth.  “The city,” sighs Pericles, “has lost its light, the year has lost its spring.”  Theocritus and Ovid in turn lament the short life of Adonis, whose blood was changed into flowers.  And in Virgil the father of the gods, whom Pallas supplicates before facing Turnus, warns him not to confound the beauty of life with its length: