A tribute to the hero Roland Garros

It was ten o'clock in the morning. For a few minutes, the curious had been stopping under the breeze to see young men with clear eyes and faces covered with scars approach each other on the platform of the Arc-de-Triomphe. We named a few of them:
René Fonck, the ace of aces!
Captain Pinsard, the ace of the Cigogenes!
Colonel de Groys!
The one whose face is burned is Emile Picard, Madon's camararade...
None displayed any decorations. But all of them, war aviators and "oldies", dressed in the warm woollens usual for airmen, wore the badge of their squadron on their ties, as a pin.
There was Kirch, Hoeglen, de Marmier, Rigaud, and others. There were veterans, Besançon, Blanchet, Renault, Sarda, Letorey, pilots of planes, airships, balloons, land and sea officers, fighters, bombers, machine gunners. .
In the middle of them, there was Mr. Georges Garros and the mother of Roland Garros. Everyone was there to pay tribute to the hero who fell on October 5, 1918, a month before the armistice, under the blows of five combined adversaries. They waited together for the remains of the struck plane, which Bathiat, Labric and Fronval, like them, had gone to find in Saint-Marcel and which they brought back at full speed by car, to save them from the looters of relics and take them to Chalais-Meudon.
Soon, three cars, marked with a stork, jumped onto the Champs-Elysées. One wore a large crown of gold foliage and chrysanthemums and, in two boxes adorned with tricolor stamen, the heroic remains, with this inscription:
ROLAND GARROS’ DEVICE
With a single gesture, the heads were uncovered. The car stopped against the tomb of the Unknown Soldier. The aces surrounded him. The father of the man who first crossed the Mediterranean, who invented the propeller shot, and who, as a prisoner, escaped, took, with Emile Picard, the tawny crown. And all the comrades, bareheaded, iramobile, watched as they placed these flowers on the slab.
That was all. It was moving and proud. Then, without a word, the big one broke up. silence, the car started, continued on its way and the audience dispersed.
At 11 a.m., at the Aeronautics Museum in Chalais-Meudon, Captain Hirschauer and Mr. Dollfus received the broken wings of the great historic bird, which will soon be remembered, at the place where it fell. , a monument erected by the hero's brothers in arms.