"That is why I enter the aviation service of France. Because I still hope to meet him and make him repay his debt of honor to me."
Dorcieres went to the front to seek in the air the only man who had ever insulted him and failed to pay the price. His pilot, the aviator who operated the aeroplane in which he fought his last duel, told the rest of the story to Dorcieres's friends long after the official bulletins had announced his death:
"He told me to find you, messieurs, and to tell you just what he told me as he lay dying—dying from eleven machine-gun bullets which riddled his torso in that last combat which nearly cost me, also, my life.
"Rouzier Dorcieres was the strangest machine-gunner I ever had with me. Unlike other gunners, he always carried binoculars, and when we sighted and approached a Boche aeroplane he spent his preliminary time in peering intently at the occupants of the enemy machine instead of preparing and testing his mitrailleuse anxiously as most gunners do.
"As we circled near the German machine in his last flight Dorcieres passed me a scrap of paper. On it he had scrawled a request that I swoop past the German as near as I could. Instantly I divined his reason—and his reason for always carrying and using his high-power glasses. He thought he recognized one of the occupants of the other aeroplane.
"I swerved and doubled and shot past the Fokker's tail. Dorcieres's eyes had been riveted to the glasses, but he dropped them now, heedlessly, and they smashed in the bottom of the fuselage.
"Dorcieres's right hand was on the mitrailleuse-trigger and his left was feeding the cartridge-belt cleanly into the loading-chamber as we rounded and flashed by, abreast, but a little higher, than the enemy.
"Taca-tac-pouf-pouf-taca-tac-pouf-pouf—and he drove thirty rounds at the Fokker. And then as I swerved the Boche turned upward and let fly at us. He had been traveling faster than I thought, because my mind had been distracted by approaching too near him at Dorcieres's request, and he reached us with every shot from his machine gun. Our fuselage cracked and splintered as the leaden hail perforated the car and the choking gasps that I heard behind me were the positive indications that my gunner had been hit. I, too, turned upward, as my motor was undamaged and climbed with the German. Then we both planed and approached each other. I heard my mitrailleuse begin to spit at the exact fraction of a second that we came within range, and the enemy gun never once barked a reply. Dorcieres's first shot must have killed the enemy gunner. And his torrent of bullets ripped off the tail of the Fokker and it dived into our lines like a stone, nose down.
"I landed within fifty yards of the broken Boche car and its occupants. Two stretchers were waiting there for us, but I was unhurt, miraculously. We put Dorcieres in one, tenderly as a baby, and then started off. But he had seen the wreck of the Fokker there and he begged that we stop beside it.
"Beside the German machine were the pilot and the gunner, both dead. By a superhuman effort my dying gunner raised himself on his elbow. He gazed at the face of the enemy machine-gunner.