[Footnote 17:  See Les Captifs delivres.]

Almost exactly one year later, on October 23, 1917, I saw the airplane of the same division hovering over the Fort of the Malmaison just as the Giraud battalion of the 4th Zouaves Regiment took possession of it.  At dawn it came to observe and note the site of the commanding officer’s post, and to read the optical signals announcing our success.  At each visit it seemed like the moving star of old, now guiding the new shepherds, the guardians of our dear human flocks—­not over the stable where a God was born, but over the ruins where victory was born.

* * * * *

[Illustration:  THE FIRST FLIGHT IN A BLERIOT]

Later on Captain Colcomb spoke of Guynemer as “the most sublime military figure I have ever been permitted to behold, one of the finest and most generous souls I have ever known.”  Guynemer was not satisfied to be merely calm and systematically immovable, and to display sang-froid, though to an extraordinary degree.  He amused himself by counting the holes in his wings, and pointing them out to the observer.  He was furious when the explosions occurred outside his range of vision, because he was not resigned to missing anything.  He seemed to juggle with the shrapnel.  And after landing, he rushed off to his escadrille chief, Captain Brocard, took him by the arm, and never left him until he had drawn him almost by force to his machine, compelling him to put his fingers into the wounds, exulting meanwhile and fairly bounding with joy.  Captain, now Major Brocard, felt quite sure of him from that time, and referred to him later in these words:  “Very young:  his extraordinary self-confidence and natural qualities will very soon make him an excellent pilot....”

His curiosity, indeed, was satisfied; and to whom would he confide all the risks that he ran?  His mother and his sisters, the hearts which were the most troubled about him, and whose peace and happiness he had carried off into the air.  He never dreamed of the torment he caused them, and which they knew how to conceal from him.  Even the idea of such a thing never occurred to him.  As they loved him, they loved him just as he was, in the raw.  He was too young to dissimulate, too young to spare them.  He knew nothing either of lies or of pity.  He never thought that any one could suffer anguish about a son or a brother when this son and brother was himself supremely happy in his vocation.  He was naively cruel.

But the rounds and reconnaissances were not to hold him long; and he already scented other adventures.  He had scented the odor of the beast, and he had his airplane furnished with a support for a machine-gun.  That particular airplane, it is true, came to an untimely end in a ditch, but was already condemned by its body-frame, which was rotten with bullet holes.  That was the only “wood” Guynemer “broke” during his early flights.