ed to hear them speaking of their
absent companion without any depression, with hardly any sorrow. They
thought of him when they were successful, referred to him as a model,
found an incentive in his memory,--that was all. Their grief over his
loss was virile and invigorating.

* * * * *

After watching his friend's body through the night, the hero of
d'Annunzio goes to the aerodrome where the next trials for altitude are
to take place. He cannot think of robbing the dead man of his victory.
As he rises into the upper regions of the air he feels a soothing
influence and an increase of power: the dead man himself pilots his
machine, wields the controls, and helps him higher, ever higher up in
divine intoxication.

In the same way the warlike power of Guynemer's companions is not
diminished. Guynemer is still with them, accompanying each one, and
instilling into them the passionate longing to do more and more for
France.

V. THE LEGEND

In seaside graveyards, the stone crosses above the empty tombs say only,
after the name, "Lost at sea." I remember also seeing in the churchyards
of the Vale of Chamonix similar inscriptions: "Lost on Mont-Blanc." As
the mountains and the sea sometimes refuse to give up their victims, so
the air seems to have kept Guynemer.

"He was neither seen nor heard as he fell," M. Henri Lavedan wrote at
the beginning of October; his body and his machine were never found.
Where has he gone? By what wings did he manage thus to glide into
immortality? Nobody knows: nothing is known. He ascended and never came
back, that is all. Perhaps our descendants will say: "He flew so high
that he could not come down again."[29]

[Footnote 29: _L'Illustration_, October 6, 1917.]

I remember a strange line read in some Miscellany in my youth and never
forgotten, though the rest of the poem has vanished from memory:

Un jet d'eau qui montait n'est pas redescendu.

Does this not embody the upspringing force of Guynemer's brilliant
youth?

Throughout France some sort of miracle was expected: Guynemer must
reappear--if a prisoner he must escape, if dead he must come to life.
His father said he would go on believing even to the extreme limits of
improbability. The journalist who signs his letters from the front to
_Le Temps_ with the pseudonym d'Entraygues recalled a passage from
Balzac in which some peasants at work on a haystack call to the postman
on the road: "Wha