e of Guynemer had disappeared. On November
8, 1917, the German Foreign Office replied as follows to a question
asked by the Spanish Ambassador:

Captain Guynemer fell in the course of an air fight on September 11
at ten A.M. close to the honor graveyard No. 2 south of
Poelkapelle. A surgeon found that he had been shot through the
head, and that the forefinger of his left hand had been shot off by
a bullet. The body could neither be buried nor removed, as the
place had been since the previous day under constant and heavy
fire, and during the following days it was impossible to approach
it. The sector authorities communicate that the shelling had plowed
up the entire district, and that no trace could be found on
September 12 of either the body or the machine. Fresh inquiries,
which were made in order to answer the question of the Spanish
Embassy, were also fruitless, as the place where Captain Guynemer
fell is now in the possession of the British.

The German airmen express their regret at having been unable to
render the last honors to a valiant enemy.

It should be added that investigation in this case was only made
with the greatest difficulty, as the enemy was constantly
attacking, fresh troops were frequently brought in or relieved, and
eye witnesses had either been killed or wounded, or transferred.
Our troops being continually engaged have not been in a position to
give the aforesaid information sooner.

So there had been no military funeral, and Guynemer had accepted nothing
from his enemies, not even a wooden cross. The battle he had so often
fought in the air had continued around his body; the Allied guns had
kept the Germans away from it. So nobody can say where lies what was
left of Guynemer: and no hand had touched him. Dead though he was, he
escaped. He who was life and movement itself, could not accept the
immobility of the tomb.

German applause, like that with which the Greeks welcomed the dead body
of Hector, did not fail to welcome Guynemer's end. At the end of three
weeks a coarse and discourteous paean was sung in the _Woche_. In its
issue of October 6, this paper devoted to Guynemer, under the title
"Most Successful French Aviator Killed," an article whose lying
cowardice is enough to disgrace a newspaper, and which ought to be
preserved to shame it. A reproduction of Guynemer's diploma was g