Flight to Arras Read online

  Not that oil the subject of war, of death, of sacrifice, of France I do not think quite other things than what I now say; but sitting in that office my thoughts were without a compass, my language was a blur. I sat thinking in contradictions. My concept of truth had been shattered, and the best I could do was to stare at one fragment after another. "If I am alive," I said to myself, "I shall do my thinking tonight." Night, the beloved. Night, when words fade and things come alive. When the destructive analysis of day is done, and all that is truly important becomes whole and sound again. When man reassembles his fragmentary self and grows with the calm of a tree.

  Day belongs to family quarrels, but with the night he who has quarrelled finds love again, For love is greater than any wind of words. And man, leaning at his window under the stars, is once again responsible for the bread of the day to come, for the slumber of the wife who lies by his side, all fragile and delicate and contingent. Love is not thinking, but being. As I sat facing Alias I longed for night and for the rebirth in me of the being that merits love. For night, when my thoughts would be of civilization, of the destiny of man, of the savor of friendship in my native land. For night, so that I might yearn to serve some overwhelming purpose which at this moment I cannot define. For night, so that I might perhaps advance a step towards fixing it in my unmanageable language. I longed for night as the poet might do, the true poet who feels himself inhabited by a thing obscure but powerful, and who strives to erect images like ramparts round that thing in order to capture it. To capture it in a snare of images.

  And as I sat there longing for night, I was for the moment like a Christian abandoned by grace. I was about to do my job with Dutertre honorably, that was certain. But to do it as one honors ancient rites when they have no longer any significance. When the god that lived in them has withdrawn from them. I should wait for night, I said to myself; and if I was still alive I would walk alone on the highway that runs through our village. Alone and safely isolated in my beloved solitude. So that I might discover why it is I ought to die.

  II

  I awoke out of my daydream--was startled out of it by an astonishing proposal.

  "If this sortie bothers you, Saint-Ex; if you don't feel up to it today, I can--"

  "Oh, come, Major!"

  He knew perfectly well that his proposal was idiotic. And I knew why he made it. If a pilot doesn't get back you begin to recall how solemn he was when he was ordered out. You say to yourself that he must have had a premonition of his end. And you accuse yourself of having wilfully brushed it aside. You take time out for an attack of conscience.

  The major's scruple reminded me of Israel. Two days before, I had been sitting smoking at the window of the Intelligence Room. Israel, when I caught sight of him through the window, was walking swiftly past. His nose was red. A big nose, very Jewish and very red. Suddenly there seemed to me something queer about that big red nose.

  This Israel, whose nose I was staring at, was a man I profoundly liked. He was one of the most courageous pilots of the Group. One of the most courageous and one of the most modest. He had heard so much talk of Jewish craftiness that he probably mistook his courage for a form of craftiness. To gain a victory is to act craftily.

  There I sat, watching that red nose that gleamed in my sight only for an instant, so swift were the steps that carried Israel and his nose out of view. I turned to Gavoille, and without meaning to make a joke of it, I said:

  "Why do you suppose his nose is like that?"

  Gavoille answered: "His mother made it like that." And then added quickly: "Low-altitude sortie. Can't blame the fellow."

  That night, when we had given up looking for Israel to get back, I thought again of that nose, planted in the middle of a totally expressionless face and yet revealing, with a sort of genius of its own, the burden of the thoughts revolving in the man's mind. If it had been my job to order Israel on that sortie, the memory of his nose would have haunted me like a reproach. Israel, surely, had responded to the order with no more than a "Yes, sir," a "Very good, sir." Israel, surely, had not allowed a single muscle of his face to quiver on hearing the order. But gently, insidiously, treacherously, his nose had reddened. Israel had been able to control the muscles of his face, but not the color of his nose. And in the silence in which he had received the order, his nose had taken advantage of him. Unknown to Israel, it had made clear to the major its emphatic disapproval of the sortie.

  This was the kind of thing that made Alias hesitate to send into action men he imagined might be subject to premonitions. Premonitions are more often false than true; but when you are seized by one, a military order will sound like a court sentence. And Alias was not a judge, after all, but a group commander.

  There was the case the other day of the gunner I shall call T. As Israel was all courage, so T. was all fear. He is the only man I have ever known who really felt fear. When, during the war, you gave T. an order you released in him at that moment a wave of dizziness. Something simple, relentless, and gradual. Rising slowly from his feet to his head, a stiffening would come over his whole body. Little by little his face would go totally blank. And his eyes would begin to shine.

  Unlike Israel, whose nose, reddened with irritation, had seemed to me so dejected at the thought of the probable death of Israel, no psychic mutation took place in T. He did not react, he moulted. When you had finished giving T. an order you discovered that you had lit a flame of anguish in him, and that the anguish had begun to spread a sort of even glow through his being. Thereafter, nothing at all could reach him. You felt in the man the gradual spread of a desert of indifference that intervened between him and the universe. Never in any other man on earth have I perceived this form of ecstasy.

  "I shouldn't have let him fly that day," Alias said to me later. For that day, when the major had given T. his orders, T. had not merely turned white, he had begun to smile. Quite plainly to smile. Probably as tortured men smile when, really, the executioner has gone too far.

  "You're off your feed today, T. I'll get another gunner."

  "If you please, sir. It's my turn," T. had answered. He was standing respectfully at attention, eyes front and perfectly motionless.

  "Still, if you don't feel sure of yourself--."

  "It's my turn out, sir."

  "Come, T., look here--."

  "Sir!" T. had interrupted; and his whole body looked carved out of rock.

  "So," Alias concluded, "I let him have his way."

  Exactly what happened, we never knew. T., sitting aft as gunner of the crew, had seen a German fighter bear down on him. The German's guns had jammed, and he had turned tail and vanished. T. had exchanged remarks with his pilot through the speaking tube all the way back to the neighborhood of their base. The pilot had observed nothing abnormal in T.'s conversation. But about five minutes before landing T. had stopped talking, and the pilot had been unable to raise him.

  That same evening, T. was brought in, his skull split open by the tail-unit of his own plane. He had tried to bail out over home territory where he was completely out of danger. The plane had been flying at high speed, and he had done a bad job of parachuting. The passage of that German fighter had been irresistible, a siren call.

  "Better get along and dress, now," the major said. "I want you off the ground at five-thirty."

  We said, "See you this evening, sir," and the major responded by a vague wave of the hand. Was it superstition? I turned to leave, became aware that my cigarette was out, and was fumbling in vain through all my pockets when the major said testily:

  "Why is it you never carry any matches?"

  It was true; and with this substitute for "Good luck!" in my ears I shut the door saying to myself, "Why is it I never have a match on me?"

  Dutertre said, "This sortie has got on his nerves."

  He doesn't give a damn about it, I thought. But I didn't say so aloud, for I wasn't thinking of Alias. I was thinking of man in general. I had been brought up with a jerk by a very evi
dent fact which men do not trouble to see--that the life of the spirit, the veritable life, is intermittent, and only the life of the mind is constant. This instant and spontaneous reflection leads back to Alias in a roundabout way.

  Man's spirit is not concerned with objects; that is the business of our analytical faculties. Man's spirit is concerned with the significance that relates objects to one another. With their totality, which only the piercing eye of the spirit can perceive. The spirit, meanwhile, alternates between total vision and absolute blindness. Here is a man, for example, who loves his farm--but there are moments when he sees in it only a collection of unrelated objects. Here is a man who loves his wife--but there are moments when he sees in love nothing but burdens, hindrances, constraints. Here is a man who loves music--but there are moments when it cannot reach him. What we call a nation is certainly not the sum of the regions, customs, cities, farms, and the rest that man's intelligence is able at any moment to add up. It is a Being. But there are moments when I find myself blind to beings--even to the being called France.

  Major Alias had spent the previous night at Staff headquarters discussing what was in effect pure logic. Pure logic is the ruin of the spirit. Afterwards he had driven back, and driving back he had worn himself out getting through the tangled traffic. Having finally reached his billet he had found a hundred details to look after, those details that fray a man's nerves and set him on edge. And this afternoon he had sent for us and ordered us to embark upon an utterly impossible sortie. What were we to him? Particles in the universal chaos. We were not Saint-Exupery and Dutertre to him--each with our own way of seeing or not seeing things, of thinking, walking, smiling, drinking. We were mere details in a vast structure to see the whole of which demanded more time, more silence, more perspective than he could possibly obtain. Had my face been afflicted with a tic, he would have been able to see nothing but the tic. He would have sent out over Arras the memory of a tic. In this senseless hullabaloo, in this avalanche, we ourselves, each of us, saw nothing but particles. That voice. That nose. That tic. And particles are not the objects of anybody's emotion.

  Thus I was not thinking about Alias specifically, but about man in general. A friend you love has died, and it is you who must see that he is decently buried. At that moment you have no contact with your dead friend. How can you have? Death is a thing of grandeur. It brings instantly into being a whole new network of relations between you and the ideas, the desires, the habits of the man now dead. It is a rearrangement of the world. Nothing has changed visibly, yet everything has changed. The pages of the book are the same, but the meaning of the book is different. And how can you, who are busy with funeral details, know any of this? Do you wish to bring the dead friend to mind? You must be able to imagine yourself needing him. At that moment you will miss him. Imagine him needing you. Ah, but he no longer needs you! Imagine those Wednesdays when, invariably, you lunched together. Wednesday is now a vacuum. Life, we know, has to be seen in perspective. But on a day of burial there is no perspective--for space itself is annihilated. Your dead friend is still a fragmentary being. The day you bury him is a day of chores and crowds, of hands false or true to be shaken, of the immediate cares of mourning. The dead friend will not really die until tomorrow, when silence is round you again. Then he will show himself complete, as he was--to tear himself away, as he was, from the substantial you. Only then will you cry out because of him who is leaving and whom you cannot detain.

  I am still on the track of my thought when I say that I do not like the pretty picture-book of war. The gruff warrior squeezing back a tear and hiding his honest emotion under a grumpy exterior. What nonsense! The gruff warrior is not hiding anything at all. If he lets fly a gruff remark it is because a gruff remark has come into his mind.

  Nor does it matter for my purpose whether a man be decent or a brute. Major Alias is a sensitive person. If Dutertre and I fail to get back it will probably affect him more than anyone else in the Group. Provided, however, that he think of Saint-Exupery and Dutertre, and not of a sum of unrelated particles. Provided that he be allowed the silence in which to effect this reconstruction of ourselves. For if, tonight, the baliff at our heels once more constrains the Group to move, a single broken-down lorry will suffice to put off our death until another time. Alias will forget to be affected by our death.

  The life of the spirit, I say, is intermittent. My own spirit as much as Alias'. I am off on an "awkward" sortie. Is my mind filled with the thought of the war of the Nazi against the Occident? Not at all. I think in terms of immediate details. I think of possible wounds. I think of the absurdity of flying over German-held Arras at two thousand feet. Of the futility of the intelligence we are asked to bring back. Of the interminable time it takes to dress in these clothes that remind me of men made ready for the executioner. And I think of my gloves. Where the devil are my gloves? I have lost my gloves.

  I can no longer see the cathedral in which I live. I am dressing for the service of a dead god.

  III

  "Get going! Where are my gloves?... No, not those. Have a look in my bag."

  "Sorry, sir. Can't find them."

  "God, you're a fool!"

  Everybody is a fool. My orderly, who doesn't know where my gloves are. Hitler, who unloosed this mad war. And that fellow on the General Staff, obsessed by low-altitude sorties.

  "I asked you to get me a pencil. I have been asking you for ten minutes to find me a pencil. Haven't you got a pencil?"

  "Here it is, sir."

  One man, at least, who is not a fool.

  "Tie a string round it. Now knot the string through this buttonhole.... I say, gunner, you seem to be taking things very easily."

  "I'm all ready, sir."

  "Oh!"

  And my observer. I swung round to him.

  "Everything shipshape, Dutertre? Nothing missing? Worked out your course?"

  He has worked out his course. "Awkward" sortie indeed! Where is the sense, I ask you, in sending a crew out to be murdered for the sake of intelligence that is sure to be useless and will never reach the Staff anyway, even if one of us lives to report it?

  "Mediums," I said aloud. "They must have a crew of mediums on the General Staff."

  "What do you mean, Captain?"

  "How do you think we'll report to them? They are going to communicate with us. Table tipping. Automatic writing."

  Not very funny; but I went on grousing.

  "General Staffs! Let them fly their own damned sorties!"

  It takes a long time to dress for a sortie that you know is a hopeless one. A long time to harness yourself only for the fun of being blasted to bits. There are three thicknesses of clothing to be put on, one over the other: that takes time. And this clutter of accessories that you carry about like an itinerant pedlar! All this complication of oxygen tubes, heating equipment; these speaking tubes that form the "inter-com" running between the members of the crew. This mask through which I breathe. I am attached to the plane by a rubber tube as indispensable as an umbilical cord. The plane is plugged in to the circulation of my blood. Organs have been added to my being, and they seem to intervene between me and my heart. From one minute to the next I grow heavier, more cumbrous, harder to handle. I turn round all of a piece, and when I bend down to tighten my straps or pull at buckles that resist, all my joints creak aloud. My old fractures begin to hurt again.

  "Hand me another helmet. I've told you twenty times that my own won't do. It's too tight."

  God knows why, but a man's skull swells at high altitude. A helmet that fits perfectly on the ground becomes a vise pressing on the skull at thirty thousand feet.

  "But this is another helmet, sir. I sent back your old one."

  "Huh!"

  I cannot stop grousing, and I grouse without remorse. A lot of good it does! Not that it is important. This is the moment of timelessness. This is the crossing of the inner desert of anguish. There is no god here. There is no face to love. There is no France, no Europ
e, no civilization. There are particles, detritus, nothing more. I feel no shame at this moment in praying for a miracle that should change the course of this afternoon. The miracle, for instance, of a speaking tube out of order. Speaking tubes are always going out of order. Trashy stuff! A speaking tube out of order would preserve us from the holocaust.

  Captain Vezin came in with a gloomy look. No pilot ever got off the ground without a dose of Captain Vezin's gloom. His job was to report upon the position of the Germain air outposts. To tell us where they were. Vezin is my friend and I am very fond of him; but he is a bird of ill omen. I prefer not to meet him when I am about to take off.

  "Looks bad, old boy," said Vezin. "Very bad. Very bad indeed."

  And didn't he pull a sheaf of papers out of his pocket, to impress me! Then, looking as me suspiciously, he said: "How are you going out?"

  "By the town of Albert."

  "I thought so. I knew it. Bad business."

  "Stop talking like a bloody fool! What's up?"

  "You'll never make it. You'll have to give up this sortie."

  Give up this sortie! Very kind of him to say so. Let him tell that to God the Father. Perhaps He'll put a curse on our speaking tubes.

  "You'll never get through, I tell you."

  "And why will I never get through?"

  "Because there are three groups of German fighters circling permanently over Albert. One at eighteen thousand feet, another at twenty-five thousand, and a third at thirty-three thousand. They fly in relays and hang on until they are relieved. It's what I call categorically blocked. You'll fly into a German net. See here...."

  He shoved a sheet of paper at me on which he had scribbled an absolutely unintelligible demonstration of his argument.

  Vezin had done much better to keep his nose out of my affairs. His pompous categorically blocked had impressed me, confound him! I thought instantly of red lights and traffic tickets. Only, this was a place where a ticket meant death. It was his categorically that particularly galled me. It seemed to be aimed at me personally.