Airman's Odyssey Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Table of Contents

  The Trilogy

  Copyright

  Introduction

  Wind, Sand and Stars

  I. The Craft

  II. The Men

  III. The Tool

  IV. The Elements

  V. The Plane and the Planet

  VI. Oasis

  VII. Men of the Desert

  VIII. Prisoner of the Sand

  IX. Barcelona and Madrid (1936)

  X. Conclusion

  Night Flight

  Preface

  I

  II

  III

  IV

  V

  VI

  VII

  VIII

  IX

  X

  XI

  XII

  XIII

  XIV

  XV

  XVI

  XVII

  XVIII

  XIX

  XX

  XXI

  XXII

  XXIII

  Flight to Arras

  I

  II

  III

  IV

  V

  VI

  VII

  VIII

  IX

  X

  XI

  XII

  XIII

  XIV

  XV

  XVI

  XVII

  XVIII

  XIX

  XX

  XXI

  XXII

  XXIII

  XXIV

  About the Author

  Copyright 1939 by Antoine de Saint-Exupery

  Copyright renewed 1967 by Lewis Galantiere

  Copyright 1942, 1932 by Harcourt, Inc.

  Introduction copyright (c) 1984 by Harcourt, Inc.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003.

  www.hmhbooks.com

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:

  Saint-Exupery, Antoine de, 1900-1944.

  Airman's odyssey

  Translation of 3 stories from French.

  Reprint. Originally published: New York:

  Reynal & Hitchcock, [1943]

  Contents: Introduction--Wind, sand and stars--

  Night flight--Flight to Arras.

  1. Saint-Exupery, Antoine de, 1900-1944--Translations, English. 2. Saint-Exupery, Antoine de, 1900-1944--Biography. 3. Authors, French--20th century--Biography. 4. Air pilots--France--Biography. 5. World War, 1939-1945--Personal narratives, French. I. Title.

  PQ2637.A274A2 1984 848'.91209 84-10497

  ISBN 978-0-15-603733-4 (pbk.)

  eISBN 978-0-544-12808-8

  v2.0113

  He was expecting that his death would be the end of him. "The individual is a mere path," he had written in Flight to Arras. "What matters is Man, who takes that path." Had he stood clear and watched the Focke-Wulf fighter slide behind his unarmed reconnaissance plane that last day of July, had he seen the gunfire and the flames and his crash into the sea, he might have said, "Poor old Saint-Ex. Not a bad life, but now it's done."

  Given a chance, he might have told us what it felt like, those last moments; his words shaped and timed and brushed to match the colors of the sky and the sea and the fire rolling and pouring around him, his plane a comet trailing a scarf of night to meet a larger night, waiting. He didn't have the chance, though, and the words never made it to print. As far as he knew, he was dead.

  ***

  Buffing alone in the airport sun ten years later, coaxing a gray aluminum Luscombe 8E training plane into mirrors and flying lessons, I was swept in wonderment. This wing, this very metal under my cloth, it's been above the clouds! This whole entire airplane, it's flown so high it's been out of sight from earth ... a person could look straight up and never see it, it's been so high, so free, so unlocked from the world! Nobody else thought such things, I'd bet, except me and Antoine de Saint-Exupery.

  The stories you can tell, I whispered to the engine cowling, to the rudder. The far places, the storms and rains and winds, the world you've seen beyond the fence of my horizons! Tell me, airplane, will I one day learn to fly? Will my love of freedom and control conquer my fear of heights and spins?

  Those questions I could ask the Luscombe, but since it would be years before I'd know how to listen to her answers, I heard only silence, the muffled rasp of terry cloth on smoothing mirror.

  No one else could I ask. The few aviators I had met were as frosty and unspeaking as they had been in Saint-Exupery's day, wrapped in an intimidating cloak of knowledge and flight time. They spoke little, even to each other. Nobody said a word about above the clouds or unlocking from the world. A brief nod, perhaps, on the way to their aircraft, then they'd close themselves in a cockpit, an engine would start in a whirl of wind and fire, and moments later they'd be golden specks dwindling north, disappearing east, vanishing west in sunny haze.

  The only pilot who spoke much to me then was Antoine de Saint-Exupery, the one who would have sworn he was dead. Home at night, I turned the pages of Airman's Odyssey, savoring the acquaintance of this man turned intimate instead of intimidating by what he had learned. Better than standing beside him, I stood inside his mind while he watched the weather, studied the routes that he would fly. When this one pilot started his engine and flew over his horizons, he didn't disappear; he came closer to me.

  I was there, unsure and nervous before that first flight with the mails from Toulouse to Alicante, listening to our friend Guillamet: "Think of those who went through it before you, and say to yourself, 'What they could do, I can do.'" Of course, I nodded, looking up from the page. Of course I can do it! And with that I joined every other person who has become an airplane pilot: I put my fears aside and learned.

  I had Saint-Exupery's map to follow of what to expect flying might be ... a fairy-tale world of sunlight on an ocean of clouds; of sheep dashing down distant hillsides, attacking airplane wheels; instruments glowing in soft-night cockpits; stars like beacons set afire for pilots to steer by; gazelles unfolded from seaside deserts; monster winds gnashing airplanes like croissants for breakfast. He told me that I wasn't alone, that it was all right for me to be touched and changed by the glory of flight.

  In his day, aviation was a risky job for the none-too-well educated, work for the not-too-thoughtful who fancied early violent death at the controls of large crashable machines. People of reflective mind did not become heavy-equipment drivers in those times, even if the heavy equipment had wings and flew. His books were read with the same startled bafflement as we would have reading a tractor driver's books today ... what insight and humor and humanity, found on the blade of a bulldozer!

  In writing what he saw and learned from aviation, Saint-Exupery shattered a stereotype. Out of the pieces came a model for something new: the thoughtful airplane pilot, the articulate flyer. Living and writing as he does in these three books of Airman's Odyssey, he gave permission for others to become more than robots pushing the controls of a machine.

  When I was a pilot with an American air force fighter squadron in France, stationed two hundred miles north of Toulouse, 37 years north of 1926, I turned again to the ideas that I had read when I was the kid with airplane polish in his hands.

  Sleep blown away by the siren just outside our
window, bolted through the dark to airplanes fueled and loaded for war, scrambled into our machines and slammed high-speed through checklists, we were set to start engines and launch into the night. One coded word on the radio from the general and we'd be fired like missiles against our secret targets to the east. Without that word, it wasn't war, it was just another practice alert. We waited in our dim-glowing cockpits.

  France, I thought. I'm here tonight in the homeland of Antoine de Saint-Exupery! I remembered my old friend and teacher, thought about the way he had chosen to live and die. If I could squeeze his books until just two words remained, I asked myself, what two words would they be? There must be one idea that mattered more....

  Affirm Life. It mattered more to him than his own living.

  The bombs clung dark as the night to my wings, leeches anxious to suck the life from a city whose crime it was to have been built in the wrong half of Germany. I shook my head, ever so slightly, listened to empty static on the radio. No word yet to launch.

  Saint-Ex, I thought, if the code came in your earphones, would you fly to the target and turn midnight to noon, would you cremate living people because some general told you to?

  Dark. Moonless starless darkful night.

  I don't know jet planes or computers or nuclear weapons, he said. What I know is that long before you die, Richard, you'll begin answering to yourself for every life-denying choice you've made.

  Never once had the air force, for all its fixation on classrooms, taught pilots a course in Individual Responsibility for the Murder of Cities. I needed teaching, fast. In all my training, I had never thought, that's not the general's thumb on the bomb release, it's mine!

  Antoine, old friend, can a line pilot, can a first lieutenant waiting ready in the cockpit, can he decide by himself to follow other laws than military? Can I choose a different future than sudden noon for my city, can I choose not to arm the bombs, can I fly low and lay the things down cold in some pasture outside city limits?

  A lightning answer. Before you turned fighter pilot, he said, you turned human being. Before you gave allegiance to the military you gave allegiance to life.

  The other pilots out past my wings in the dark, I thought, Jim Roudabush and Pat Flanagan and Ed Carpinello, are they thinking too? We never talked about it, not once a word about what our life might be like after we had murdered a city. Roudy and Pat, Carp and I, were here not because we wanted to kill people but because every one of us loved to fly airplanes, and the highest-performance airplanes happen to be owned by the military forces of every country in the world. Air forces seduce pilots by shouting, Fly! If instead they shouted Kill! would there be young men and women in military cockpits today?

  "If you are to be," his words echoed that night, "you must begin by assuming responsibility." And you alone are responsible for every moment of your life, for every one of your acts. Not the general. You.

  What would be the penalty, I thought suddenly, if one of us, or three or twelve ... what sentence if every pilot of every nation just happened to drop bombs that didn't detonate? Could it be worse than the penalty we'd pay if we dropped bombs that did?

  I listened, waiting in my airplane for the war to start. I'll never know what I would have done had the order come to incinerate that city. But I was hearing his words, I was watching myself, and I was thinking about it.

  In Wind, Sand and Stars, in Flight to Arras, how carefully he watched, with such calm judgment Saint-Exupery measured his own choices, his own humanity. Whether he lived or died didn't seem to make much difference to him--time and again he set off on adventures that placed human values over personal survival. His books are plays of light around a person who cared most of all for the community of humankind, who loved most of all to be part of that community, fashioning its destiny on our little planet.

  I don't agree with everything he says, this old friend I've never met, and some of his views still sound to me clipped and stiffened by his time. Yet the power of an idea is not measured by its eagerness to please or the date of its words; it is measured by the change that it brings in the lives of its readers.

  "If what I wish is to preserve on earth a given type of man and the particular energy that radiates from him," says Saint-Exupery, "I must begin by salvaging the principles that animate that kind of man."

  Change man to person and we have the core of the latest force for change in the whole of world society. The principle is Affirm Life, and at this writing it looks as if barely, one by one by ten by a hundred, just barely enough of us have begun a change that might yet steer the planet this side of destruction.

  Saint-Exupery writes with grace and beauty, surely; he blends adventure with reflection in a way few writers have. Along the way, he writes with a whimsical sense of life, writes with the kindness and courtesy to catch sparkling detail that he knows we'll enjoy.

  Adventure and reflection--that's how he makes lifelong friends of kids with polishing rags. He invites communication, and he stays around to talk in spite of what happened that last day of July, 1944.

  The world, he said, it isn't Us and Them, it's only Us!

  Once set afire, ideas burn till they're quenched in action. Twenty years from now, in the night cockpits and passenger cabins of our hypersonic transports, on the soft-lit decks of our space colonies, will a lot of kids turned friends of his ideas be seeing them for truth, watching the planet turn safely beneath their wings?

  What would he say if they told him that he hadn't died in the war?

  RICHARD BACH

  Wind, Sand and Stars

  Translated from the French by Lewis Galantiere

  I. The Craft

  In 1926 I was enrolled as student airline pilot by the Latecoere Company, the predecessors of Aeropostale (now Air France) in the operation of the line between Toulouse, in southwestern France, and Dakar, in French West Africa. I was learning the craft, undergoing an apprenticeship served by all young pilots before they were allowed to carry the mails. We took ships up on trial spins, made meek little hops between Toulouse and Perpignan, and had dreary lessons in meteorology in a freezing hangar. We lived in fear of the mountains of Spain, over which we had yet to fly, and in awe of our elders.

  These veterans were to be seen in the field restaurant--gruff, not particularly approachable, and inclined somewhat to condescension when giving us the benefit of their experience. When one of them landed, rain-soaked and behind schedule, from Alicante or Casablanca, and one of us asked humble questions about his flight, the very curtness of his replies on these tempestuous days was matter enough out of which to build a fabulous world filled with snares and pitfalls, with cliffs suddenly looming out of fog and whirling air-currents of a strength to uproot cedars. Black dragons guarded the mouths of the valleys and clusters of lightning crowned the crests--for our elders were always at some pains to feed our reverence. But from time to time one or another of them, eternally to be revered, would fail to come back.

  I remember, once, a homecoming of Bury, he who was later to die in a spur of the Pyrenees. He came into the restaurant, sat down at the common table, and went stolidly at his food, shoulders still bowed by the fatigue of his recent trial. It was at the end of one of those foul days when from end to end of the line the skies are filled with dirty weather, when the mountains seem to a pilot to be wallowing in slime like exploded cannon on the decks of an antique man-o'-war.

  I stared at Bury, swallowed my saliva, and ventured after a bit to ask if he had had a hard flight. Bury, bent over his plate in frowning absorption, could not hear me. In those days we flew open ships and thrust our heads out round the windshield, in bad weather, to take our bearings: the wind that whistled in our ears was a long time clearing out of our heads. Finally Bury looked up, seemed to understand me, to think back to what I was referring to, and suddenly he gave a bright laugh. This brief burst of laughter, from a man who laughed little, startled me. For a moment his weary being was bright with it. But he spoke no word, lowered his hea
d, and went on chewing in silence. And in that dismal restaurant, surrounded by the simple government clerks who sat there repairing the wear and tear of their humble daily tasks, my broad-shouldered messmate seemed to me strangely noble; beneath his rough hide I could discern the angel who had vanquished the dragon.

  The night came when it was my turn to be called to the field manager's room.

  He said: "You leave tomorrow."

  I stood motionless, waiting for him to dismiss me. After a moment of silence he added:

  "I take it you know the regulations?"

  In those days the motor was not what it is today. It would drop out, for example, without warning and with a great rattle like the crash of crockery. And one would simply throw in one's hand: there was no hope of refuge on the rocky crust of Spain. "Here," we used to say, "when your motor goes, your ship goes, too."

  An airplane, of course, can be replaced. Still, the important thing was to avoid a collision with the range; and blind flying through a sea of clouds in the mountain zones was subject to the severest penalties. A pilot in trouble who buried himself in the white cotton-wool of the clouds might all unseeing run straight into a peak. This was why, that night, the deliberate voice repeated insistently its warning:

  "Navigating by the compass in a sea of clouds over Spain is all very well, it is very dashing, but--"

  And I was struck by the graphic image:

  "But you want to remember that below the sea of clouds lies eternity."

  And suddenly that tranquil cloud-world, that world so harmless and simple that one sees below on rising out of the clouds, took on in my eyes a new quality. That peaceful world became a pitfall. I imagined the immense white pitfall spread beneath me. Below it reigned not what one might think--not the agitation of men, not the living tumult and bustle of cities, but a silence even more absolute than in the clouds, a peace even more final. This viscous whiteness became in my mind the frontier between the real and the unreal, between the known and the unknowable. Already I was beginning to realize that a spectacle has no meaning except it be seen through the glass of a culture, a civilization, a craft. Mountaineers too know the sea of clouds, yet it does not seem to them the fabulous curtain it is to me.

  When I left that room I was filled with a childish pride. Now it was my turn to take on at dawn the responsibility of a cargo of passengers and the African mails. But at the same time I felt very meek. I felt myself ill-prepared for this responsibility. Spain was poor in emergency fields; we had no radio; and I was troubled lest when I got into difficulty I should not know where to hunt a landing-place. Staring at the aridity of my maps, I could see no help in them; and so, with a heart full of shyness and pride, I fled to spend this night of vigil with my friend Guillaumet. Guillaumet had been over the route before me. He knew all the dodges by which one got hold of the keys to Spain. I should have to be initiated by Guillaumet.