And to keep him at home until he should be cured, more or less, the young girl opened her window every morning and inspected the sky, secretly hoping to find it thickly covered with clouds.
"Clouds, waiting over there, motionless, on the edge of the horizon, what are you waiting for? Will you stand idle and let me awaken my brother, who is resting?"
The clouds being indifferent, the sleeper had to be awakened. He dressed hastily, with a smile at the transparent sky, and soon reached Vauciennes by automobile, where he called for his machine, mounted, ascended, flew, hunted the enemy, and returned to Compiègne for luncheon.
"And you can leave us like that?" remonstrated his mother. "Why, this is your holiday."
"Yes, the effort to leave is all the greater."
"Well?—"
"I like the effort, Maman."
His Antigone forced herself to keep her bargain with him. The sun never shone above the forest in vain, but nevertheless she detested the sun. What a strange Romeo this boy would have made! Without the least doubt he would have charged Juliet to wake him to go to battle, and would never have forgiven her for confounding the lark and the nightingale.
On his return to the aviation camp, in the absence of his own longed-for victories, he took pleasure in describing those of others. He knew nothing of rivalry or envy. He wrote his sister Odette the following description of a combat waged by Captain Brocard, who surprised a Boche from the rear, approached him to within fifteen meters without being seen, and, just at the moment when the enemy pilot turned round his head, sent him seven cartridges from his machine-gun: "Result: one ball in the ear, and another through the middle of his chest. You can imagine whether the fall of the machine was instantaneous or not. There was nothing left of the pilot but one chin, one ear, one mouth, a torso and material enough to reconstitute two arms. As to the "coucou" (burned), nothing was left but the motor and a few bits of iron. The passenger was emptied out during the fall...." It cannot be said that he had much consideration for the nerves of young girls. He treated them as if they were warriors who could understand everything relating to battles. He wrote with the same freedom that Shakespeare's characters use in speech.
Until the middle of September he piloted two-seated airplanes, carrying one passenger, either as observer or combatant. At last he went up in his one-seated Nieuport, reveling in the intoxication of being alone, that intoxication well known to lovers of the mountains and the air. Is it the sensation of liberty, the freedom from all the usual material bonds, the feeling of coming into possession of these deserts of space or ice where the traveler covers leagues without meeting anybody, the forgetfulness of all that interferes with one's own personal object? Such solitaries do not easily accommodate themselves to company which seems to them to encroach upon their domain, and steal a part of their enjoyment. Guynemer never enjoyed anything so much as these lonely rounds in which he took possession of the whole sky, and woe to the enemy who ventured into this immensity, which was now his park.