the army; and
a shock of pain passed from soul to soul in that vast army, and
throughout all France, as if, among so many soldiers menaced with death,
this one alone should have been immortal.

History gives us examples of such universal grief, but only at the death
of great leaders whose authority and importance intensified the general
mourning for their loss. Thus, Troy without Hector was defenseless. When
Gaston de Foix, Duke de Nemours, surnamed the Thunderbolt of Italy, died
at the age of twenty-three after the victory of Ravenna, the French
transalpine conquests were endangered. The bullet which struck Turenne
at Saltzbach also menaced the work of Louis XIV. But Guynemer had
nothing but his airplane, a speck in the immense spaces filled by the
war. This young captain, though without an equal in the sky, conducted
no battle on land. Why, then, did he alone have the power, like a great
military chief, of leaving universal sadness behind him? A little child
of France has given us the reason.

Among the endless expressions of the nation's mourning, this letter was
written by the school-mistress of a village in Franche-Comte,
Mademoiselle S----, of Bouclans, to the mother of the aviator:

Madame, you have already received the sorrowful and grateful
sympathy of official France and of France as a nation; I am
venturing to send you the naive and sincere homage of young France
as represented by our school children at Bouclans. Before receiving
from our chiefs the suggestion, of which we learn to-day, we had
already, on the 22nd of October, consecrated a day to the memory of
our hero Guynemer, your glorious son.

I send you enclosed an exercise by one of my pupils chosen at
random, for all of them are animated by the same sentiments. You
will see how the immortal glory of your son shines even in humble
villages, and that the admiration and gratitude which the children,
so far away in the country, feel for our greatest aviator, will be
piously and faithfully preserved in his memory.

May this sincere testimony to the sentiments of childhood be of
some comfort in your grief, to which I offer my most profound
respect.

The School-mistress of Bouclans,
C.S.

And this is the exercise, written by Paul Bailly, aged eleven years and
ten months:

Guynemer is the Roland of our epoch: like Roland he was very brave,
and like R