Major Brocard.
These letters roused the enthusiasm of the Chamber, and the following resolution was passed by acclamation:
The government shall have an inscription placed in the Panthéon to perpetuate the memory of Captain Guynemer, the symbol of France's highest aspirations.
On November 5 the foregoing letters were solemnly read aloud in every school, and Guynemer was presented as an example to all French schoolboys.
The army then prepared to celebrate Guynemer as a leader, and in default of any place suitable for such a ceremony they selected the camp of Saint-Pol-sur-Mer, whence Guynemer had started on his last flight. On November 30 General Anthoine, commanding the First Army, before leaving the Flemish British sector where he had so brilliantly assisted in the success, decided to associate his men with the glorification of Guynemer.
The ceremony took place at ten in the morning. A raw breeze was blowing off the sea, whose violence the dam, raised to protect the landing-ground, was not sufficient to break. In front of the battalion which had been sent to render the military honors, waved the colors of the twenty regiments that had fought in the Flemish battles, glorious flags bearing the marks of war, some of them almost in rags. To the left, in front of the airmen, two slight figures were visible, one in black, one in horizon blue: Captain Heurtaux still on his crutches, the other sous-lieutenant Fonck. The former was to be made an officer, the latter a chevalier in the Legion of Honor. Heurtaux, a fair-haired, delicate, almost girlish young man, but so phenomenally self-possessed in danger, had been, as we have said, our Roland's Oliver, his companion of old days, his rival and his confidant. Fonck, whom I called Aymerillot because of his smallness, his boyish simplicity and his daring, the hope of the morrow and already a glorious soldier, had perhaps avenged Guynemer's death already. For Lieutenant Weissman, according to the Kölnische Zeitung, had boasted in a letter to his people of having brought down the most famous French aviator. "Don't be afraid on my account," he added, "I shall never meet such a dangerous enemy again." Now, on September 30 Fonck had shot this Lieutenant Weissman through the head as the latter was piloting a Rumpler machine above the French lines.
While the band was playing the Marseillaise, accompanied by the roaring of the gale and of the sea, as well as of the airplanes circling above, General Anthoine stepped out in front of the row of flags. 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.
"Men come and go, but France remains. All who fall for her bequeath to her their own glory, and her splendor is made up of their worth. Happy is he who enriches the commonwealth by the complete gift of himself. Happy then the child of France whose superhuman destiny we are celebrating! Glory be to him in the heavens where he reigned supreme, and glory be to him on the earth, in our soldiers' hearts and in these flags, sacred emblems of honor and of the worship of France!