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]
[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.
Does this not embody the upspringing force of Guynemer's brilliant youth?
Throughout France some sort of miracle was expected: Guynemer must reappear—if a prisoner he must escape, if dead he must come to life. His father said he would go on believing even to the extreme limits of improbability. The journalist who signs his letters from the front to Le Temps with the pseudonym d'Entraygues recalled a passage from Balzac in which some peasants at work on a haystack call to the postman on the road: "What's the news?" "Nothing, no news. Oh! I beg your pardon, people say that Napoleon has died at St. Helena." Work stops at once, and the peasants look at one another in silence. But one fellow standing on the rick says: "Napoleon dead! psha! it's plain those people don't know him!" The journalist added that he heard a speech of the same kind in the bush-region of Aveyron. A passenger on the motor-bus read in a newspaper the news of Guynemer's death; everybody seemed dismayed. The chauffeur alone smiled skeptically as he examined the spark plugs of his engine. When he had done, he pulled down the hood, put away his spectacles, carefully wiped his dirty hands on a cloth still dirtier, and planting himself in front of the passenger said: "Very well. I tell you that the man who is to down Guynemer is still an apprentice. Do you understand?..."
The credulity of the poor people of France with regard to their hero was most touching. When the death of Guynemer had to be admitted, there was deep mourning, from Paris to the remote villages where news travels slowly, but is long pondered upon. Guynemer had been brought down from a height of 700 meters, northeast of Poelkapelle cemetery, in the Ypres sector. A German noncommissioned officer and two soldiers had immediately gone to where the machine was lying. One of the wings of the machine was broken; the airman had been shot through the head, and his leg and shoulder had been broken in the fall; but his face was untouched, and he had been identified at once by the photograph on his pilot's diploma. A military funeral had been given to him.
Nevertheless, it seemed as if Guynemer's fate still remained somewhat obscure. The German War Office published a list of French machines fallen in the German lines, with the official indications by which they had been recognized. Now, the number of the Vieux-Charles did not appear on any of these lists, although having only one wing broken the number ought to have been plainly visible. Who were the noncommissioned officer and the two soldiers? Finally, on October 4, 1917, the British took Poelkapelle, but the enemy counter-attacked, and there was furious fighting. On the 9th the village was completely occupied by the British, and they searched for Guynemer's grave. No trace of it could be found in either the military or the village graveyard.
In fact, the Germans had to acknowledge in an official document that both the body and the airplane of Guynemer had disappeared. On November 8, 1917, the German Foreign Office replied as follows to a question asked by the Spanish Ambassador: