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Decorated at the age of twenty-one, the enlisted mechanician of Pau continued to progress at breakneck speed. The red ribbon, the yellow ribbon and green War Medal with four palms, are very becoming to a young man's black coat. Georges Guynemer never despised these baubles, nor in any way concealed the pleasure they afforded him. He knew how high one has to climb to pick them.
Immediately he dragged me into a shop, bought a croix de guerre, pinned it on my vareuse, and hugged me before everybody." Guynemer had a genius for graciousness, and his imagination was inexhaustible when he wished to please, but his temper was hot and quick. His complete freedom from conceit has often been remarked.
"I can take you as student mechanician." "That's it, that's it; I understand automobiles." Guynemer exulted, as Jean Krebs' technical lessons flashed already into his mind; they would be of great help in his work. The officer gave him a letter to the recruiting officer at Bayonne, and he went back there for the third time.
To discuss all who even as early as 1917 had made their names memorable would require a volume in itself. A few may well be mentioned below. There, for example, was Captain Georges Guynemer, "King of the French Aces." An "ace" is an aviator who has brought down five enemy aircraft. Guynemer had fifty-three to his credit.
Orpheus, it is true, charmed the rivers, trees and rocks away from their places with his lyre, but the Maenades tore him to pieces in his turn." We cannot say that the Guynemer who flew in Flanders was not the same Guynemer who had flown over the Somme, Lorraine or Aisne battle-fields.
A visionary, Viscomte Melchior de Vogué, had already foreseen the prodigious development of air-travel. All the young people of the time longed to fly. Guynemer, studying the new invention with his customary energy, could hardly do otherwise than share the general infatuation. His comrades, like himself, dreamed of parts of airplanes and their construction.
On his first flight, on his two-gun machine, he found that the water-pump control did not work, and had to land on a Belgian aërodrome, where he was welcomed and asked to sit for his photograph. The picture shows a worried, tense, disquieting countenance under the mask ready to be pulled down. After frightening the enemy so long, Guynemer was now frightening his friends.
His old friend, Captain Heurtaux, so long Commander of the Storks, was not there; he had been wounded the day before by an explosive bullet, and the English had picked up and evacuated him. Heurtaux possessed infinite tact, and had not infrequently succeeded in influencing the rebellious Guynemer; but nobody was there to replace him. September 5 was a day of extraordinary activity for Guynemer.
What sort of story had the German who brought him down told? Was it not obvious that if Guynemer had engaged him at 4000 meters, and had been killed at 700, that he must have prolonged the struggle, and prolonged it above the enemy's lines?
At a luncheon given in his honor by the well-known deputy, Captain Lasies, he would not say a word about himself, but extolled his comrades until somebody said: "You are really modesty itself." Whereupon another guest asked: "Could you imagine him bragging?" Guynemer was delighted, and when the party broke up he went out with the gentleman who had said this and thanked him warmly.
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