Roland Garros

…a friend of the aviator Roland Garros and dedicated to him the early poems inspired by aviation, Le Cap de Bonne-Espérance (1919; The Cape of Good Hope). At intervals during the years 1916 and 1917, Cocteau entered the world of modern art, then being born in Paris; in the bohemian…

…real breakthrough was made by Roland Garros, a famous sporting pilot before the war and a friend of Saulnier, who perceived that a machine gun fitted with such a device and mounted rigidly atop the fuselage could be aimed accurately simply by pointing the airplane in the desired direction. Though…

On April 19 French pilot Roland Garros was forced to land behind the German lines east of Ypres; he and his plane were captured, and the Germans recovered Garros’s revolutionary machine-gun–synchronizing device. That same day, German heavy guns, including a 17-inch howitzer, began the preparatory bombardment of Ypres, and an…