Second Lieutenant Bozon Verduraz had gone towards other fights with the conviction that his comrade would, without a doubt, come out of the duel victorious; but he found nothing there when he returned. Guynemer, the hero of dreams, had vanished in mystery.
And here above Poelcapelle the career of this most brilliant pilot of the air was terminated, after he had added up 755 hours of airplane flight!
The censor forbade the announcement of Guynemer’s disappearance, but the news was passed from mouth to mouth. Guynemer? Every one deemed him invulnerable—no one believed that he could be killed.
But many days afterward came the news from a German source. The Ace of Aces had been beaten down near the cemetery of Flemish Poelcapelle. Two soldiers had been present at the place of the catastrophe. One wing of the Spad had been broken. The pilot lay there, killed, with a bullet in his head, and one leg broken. On him was found his commission, which made it possible to identify the body.
The district in which Guynemer had ended his career in a burst of glory was being hammered by the English artillery. Attacks followed. The Allies looked for his grave in the cemetery of Poelcapelle when they took it. But they never succeeded in finding it. It was learned later that, on account of the incessant danger, the Germans had not been able to remove the remains to inter them. The soul of Guynemer in the Great Beyond had the supreme satisfaction of knowing that the body was not defiled by his enemy.
Lieutenant Weisemann, the German airman who had brought Guynemer’s career to a close, survived his success but a few days.
GUYNEMER’S PILOT CARD, REPRODUCED IN “DIE WOCHE” (THE WEEK) OF BERLIN, AFTER HIS DEATH