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.
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