His
powerful frame seemed to suggest the cuirass of the knights of old, as,
silhouetted against the cloudy sky, he towered above the two diminutive
aviators near whom he was standing. The band stopped playing, and the
general spoke, his voice rising and falling in the wind, and swelling to
a higher pitch when the elements were too rebellious. He was speaking
almost on the spot where Guynemer had departed from the soil of his own
country on his final flight.
"I have not summoned you," he said, "to pay Guynemer the last homage he
has a right to from the First Army, over a coffin or a grave. No trace
could be found in Poelcapelle of his mortal remains, as if the heavens,
jealous of their hero, had not consented to return to earth what seems
to belong to it by right, and as if Guynemer had disappeared in empyrean
glory through a miraculous assumption. Therefore we shall omit, on this
spot from which he soared into Infinity, the sorrowful rites generally
concluding the lives of mortals, and shall merely proclaim the
immortality of the Knight of the Air, without fear or reproach.
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