its nose like a stone, at the foot of the tree which had stopped me.  I unfastened my belt which, luckily, had not broken, and let myself slip onto the ground, amazed not to be suffering intense agony.  The only bad effects were that my head was heavy, and blood was flowing through my mask.  I breathed, coughed, and shook my arms and legs, and was dumbfounded to find that all my faculties functioned normally....”  Guynemer did not tell us so much; but, as a mathematician, he calculated his chances.  He too had switched off, and with the greatest sang-froid superintended, so to speak, his fall.  Its result was no less magical.

The infantrymen had observed this rainfall of airplanes.  The French plane reached the earth just before its pilot’s last victim fell also, in flames.  The soldiers pitied the poor victor, who had not, as they thought, survived his conquest!  They rushed to his aid, expecting to pick him up crushed to atoms.  But Guynemer stood up without aid.  He seemed like a ghost; but he was standing, he was alive, and the excited soldiers took possession of him and carried him off in triumph.  A division general approached, and immediately commanded a military salute for the victor, saying to Guynemer: 

“You will review the troops with me.”

Guynemer did not know how to review troops, and would have liked to go.  He was suffering cruelly from his knee: 

“I happen to be wounded, General.”

“Wounded, you!  It’s impossible.  When a man falls from the sky without being broken, he is a magician, no doubt of that.  You cannot be wounded.  However, lean upon me.”

And holding him up, almost indeed carrying him, he walked with the young sous-lieutenant in front of the troops.  From the neighboring trenches rose the sound of singing, first half-suppressed, and then swelling into a formidable roar:  the Marseillaise.  The song had sprung spontaneously to the men’s lips.

* * * * *

Cerebral commotion required Guynemer to rest for a few days.  But on October 5 he started off again.  The month of October on the Somme was marked by an improvement in German aviation, their numbers being considerably reinforced and supplied with new tactics.  Guynemer defied the new tactics of numbers, and in one day, October 17, attacked a group of three one-seated planes, and another group of five.  A second time he made a sortie, and attacked a two-seated plane which was aided by five one-seated machines.  On another occasion, November 9, he waged six battles with one-seated and two-seated machines, all of which made their escape, one after another, by diving.  Still this was not enough, and he set forth again and attacked a group of one Albatros and four one-seated planes.  “Hard fight,” says the journal, “the enemy has the advantage.”  He broke off this combat, but only to engage in another with an Albatros which had surprised Lieutenant Deullin