All this I see as I stare at the swaying branch. And I see too that schoolboys have no fear of facing life. They champ at the bit. The jealousies, the trials, the sorrows of the life of man do not intimidate the schoolboy.
But what a strange schoolboy I am! I sit in this schoolroom, a schoolboy conscious of my good fortune and in no hurry to face life. A schoolboy aware of its cares....
Dutertre comes by, and I stop him.
"Sit down. I'll do some card-tricks for you."
Dutertre sits facing me on a desk as worn as mine. I can see his dangling legs as he shuffles the cards. How pleased with myself I am when I pick out the card he has in mind! He laughs. Modestly, I smile. Penicot comes up and puts his arm across my shoulder.
"What do you say, old boy?"
How tenderly peaceful all this is!
A school usher--is it an usher?--opens the door and summons two among us. They drop their ruler, drop their compass, get up, and go out. We follow them with our eyes. Their schooldays are over. They have been released for the business of life. What they have learnt, they are now to make use of. Like grown men, they are about to try out against other men the formulas they have worked out.
Strange school, this, where each goes forth alone in turn. And without a word of farewell. Those two who have just gone through the door did not so much as glance at us who remain behind. And yet the hazard of life, it may be, will transport them farther away than China. So much farther! When schooldays are past, and life has scattered you, who can swear that you will meet again?
The rest of us, those still nestling in the cosy warmth of our incubator, go back to our murmured talk.
"Look here, Dutertre. Tonight--"
But once again the same door has opened. And like a court sentence the words ring out in the quiet schoolroom:
"Captain de Saint-Exupery and Lieutenant Dutertre report to the major!"
Schooldays are over. Life has begun.
"Did you know it was our turn?"
"Penicot flew this morning."
"Oh, yes."
The fact that we had been sent for meant that we were to be ordered out on a sortie. We had reached the last days of May, 1940, a time of full retreat, of full disaster. Crew after crew was being offered up as a sacrifice. It was as if you dashed glassfuls of water into a forest fire in the hope of putting it out. The last thing that could occur to anyone in this world that was tumbling round our ears was the notion of risk or danger. Fifty reconnaissance crews was all we had for the whole French army. Fifty crews of three men each--pilot, observer, and gunner. Out of the fifty, twenty-three made up our unit--Group 2-33. In three weeks, seventeen of the twenty-three had vanished. Our Group had melted like a lump of wax. Yesterday, speaking to Lieutenant Gavoille, I had let drop the words, "Oh, we'll see about that when the war is over." And Gavoille had answered, "I hope you don't mean, Cap tain, that you expect to come out of the war alive?"
Gavoille was not joking. He was sincerely shocked. We knew perfectly well that there was nothing for us but to go on flinging ourselves into the forest fire. Even though it serve no purpose. Fifty crews for the whole of France. The whole strategy of the French army rested upon our shoulders. An immense forest fire raging, and a hope that it might be put out by the sacrifice of a few glassfuls of water. They would be sacrificed.
And this was as it should be. Who ever thought of complaining? When did anyone ever hear, among us, anything else than "Very good, sir. Yes, sir. Thank you, sir. Quite right, sir." Throughout the closing days of the French campaign one impression dominated all others--an impression of absurdity. Everything was cracking up all round us. Everything was caving in. The collapse was so entire that death itself seemed to us absurd. Death, in such a tumult, had ceased to count. But we ourselves did not count.
Dutertre and I went into the major's office. The major's name was Alias. As I write, he is still in command of Group 2-33, at Tunis.
"Afternoon, Saint-Ex. Hello, Dutertre. Sit down."
We sat down. The major spread out a map on the table and turned to his clerk:
"Fetch me the weather reports."
He sat tapping on the table with his pencil, I stared at him. His face was drawn. He had had no sleep. Back and forth in a motorcar, he had driven all night in search of a phantom General Staff. He had been summoned to division headquarters. To brigade headquarters. He had argued and wrangled with supply depots that never delivered the spare parts they had promised. His car had been bottled up in the crazy traffic. He had supervised our last moving out and our most recent moving in--for we were driven by the enemy from one field to another like poor devils scrambling in the van of a relentless bailiff. Alias had succeeded in saving our planes, saving our lorries, saving the stores and files of the Group. He looked as if he had reached the end of his strength, of his nerves.
"Well," he said, and he went on tapping with his pencil. He was still not looking at us.
A moment passed before he spoke again. "It's damned awkward," he said finally; and he shrugged his shoulders. "A damned awkward sortie. But the Staff want it done. They very much want it done. I argued with them; but they want it done.... And that's that."
Dutertre and I sat looking out of the window. Here too a branch was swaying in the breeze. I could hear the cackle of the hens. Our Intelligence Room had been set up in a schoolhouse; the major's office was in a farmhouse.
It would be easy to write a couple of fraudulent pages out of the contrast between this shining spring day, the ripening fruit, the chicks filling plumply out in the barnyard, the rising wheat--and death at our elbow. I shall not write that couple of pages because I see no reason why the peace of a spring day should constitute a contradiction of the idea of death. Why should the sweetness of life be a matter for irony?
But a vague notion did go through my mind as I stared out of Alias' window. "The spring has broken down," I said to myself. "The season is out of order." I had flown over abandoned threshing machines, abandoned binders. I had seen motorcars deserted in roadside ditches. I had come upon a village square standing under water while the village faucet--"the fountain" as our people call it--stood open and the stream flowed on.
And suddenly a completely ridiculous image came into my mind. I thought of clocks out of order. All the clocks of France--out of order. Clocks in their church steeples. Clocks on railway stations. Chimney clocks in empty houses. A charnelhouse of clocks. "The war," I said to myself, "is that thing in which clocks are no longer wound up. In which beets are no longer gathered in. In which farm carts are no longer greased. And that water, collected and piped to quench men's thirst and to whiten the Sunday laces of the village women--that water stands now in a pool flooding the square before the village church."
As for Alias, he was talking like a bedside physician. "Hm," says the doctor with a shake of the head, "rather awkward, this"; and you know that he is hinting that you ought to be making your will, thinking of those you are about to leave behind. There was no question in Dutertre's mind or mine that Alias was talking about sacrificing another crew.
"And," Alias went on, "things being as they are, it's no good worrying about the chances you run."
Quite so. No good at all. And it's no one's fault. It's not our fault that we feel none too cheerful. Not the major's fault that he is ill at ease with us. Not the Staff's fault that it gives orders. The major is out of sorts because the orders are absurd. We know that they are absurd; but the Staff knows that as well as we do. It gives orders because orders have to be given. Giving orders is its trade, in time of war. And everyone knows what war looks like. Handsome horsemen transmit the orders--or rather, to be modern about it, motorcyclists. The orders ordain events, change the face of the world. The handsome horsemen are like the stars--they bring tidings of the future. In the midst of turmoil and despair, orders arrive, flung to the troops from the backs of steaming horses. And then all is well--at least, so says the blueprint of war. So says the pretty picture-book of war. Everyb
ody struggles as hard as he can to make war look like war. Piously respects the rules of the game. So that war may perhaps be good enough to agree to look like war.
Orders are given for the sacrifice of the air arm because war must be made to look like war. And nobody admits meanwhile that this war looks like nothing at all. That no part of it makes sense. That not a single blueprint fits the circumstances. That the puppets have been cut free of the strings which continue to be pulled.
In all seriousness the Staffs issue orders that never reach anybody. They ask us for intelligence impossible to provide. But the air arm cannot undertake to explain war to the Staffs. Reconnaissance pilots might be able to test or verify the Staffs' hypotheses. But there are no longer any hypotheses. Fifty reconnaissance crews are asked to sketch the face of a war that has no face. The Staffs appeal to us as if we were a tribe of fortune-tellers.
While Alias was speaking I threw a glance at Dutertre--my fortune-telling observer. This was what he said afterwards.
"What do they take us for, sending us off on low-altitude sorties? Only yesterday I had to tick off a colonel from division headquarters who was talking the same rot. 'Will you tell me,' I said to him; 'will you tell me how I am going to report the enemy's position to you from an altitude of fifty feet when I'm doing three hundred miles an hour?' He looked at me as if I was the one who was mad. 'Why,' he said, 'that's easy. You can tell according to whether they shoot or not. If they shoot at you, the positions are German.' Imagine! The bloody fool!"
What Dutertre knew, and the colonel seemed to forget, was that the French army never saw French aeroplanes. We had roughly one thousand planes scattered between Dunkerque and Alsace. Diluted in infinity, so far as the men on the ground were concerned. The result was that when a plane roared across our lines, it was virtually certain to be a German. You let fly with all the anti-aircraft guns you had even before you saw him, the instant you heard him; for otherwise he had dropped his bombs and was off before you could say "wink!"
"A precious lot of intelligence we'll bring home working their way!" Dutertre said.
Of course they take our intelligence into account, since the blueprint of war requires that intelligence officers make use of intelligence. But even their war-by-the-blueprint had broken down. We knew perfectly well that they would never be able to make use of our intelligence--luckily. It might be brought back by us; but it would never be transmitted to the Staff. The roads would be jammed. The telephone lines would be cut. The Staff would have moved in a hurry. The really important intelligence--the enemy's position--would have been furnished by the enemy himself.
For example. A few days earlier we of Group 2-33, having been driven back by successive stages to the vicinity of Laon, were wondering how near the front might now be--how soon we should be forced to move again. A lieutenant was sent off for information to the general in command who was seven miles away. Halfway between the airfield and the general's headquarters the lieutenant's motorcar ran up against a steam-roller behind which two armored cars were hidden. The lieutenant made a U-turn and started away, but a blast of machine-gun fire killed him instantly and wounded his chauffeur. The armored cars were German. They taught us where the "front" was.
The General Staff was like a first-rate bridge player who is asked by someone sitting in a game in the next room, "What do you think I ought to do with the queen of spades?" How can the expert, knowing nothing of that particular game, have an opinion about that queen of spades?
Actually, a General Staff has no right to be without an opinion. Besides, so long as certain elements are still in its hands, it is bound to make use of them--since otherwise it will lose its control over them. The opponents will work a squeeze play. Thus, the General Staff must take risks. So long as there is a war on it must act, even though it act blindly.
But it is, nevertheless, very hard to say what shall be done with the queen of spades when you haven't a hand in the game. What we had learnt, meanwhile--at first with surprise, and then with the feeling that we ought to have seen it coming--was that once the cracking up begins, the machine stops running. There is no soldiering for the soldier to do.
You might think that in retreat and disaster there ought to be such a flood of pressing problems that one could hardly decide which to tackle first. The truth is that for a defeated army the problems themselves vanish. I mean by this that a defeated army no longer has a hand in the game. What is one to do with a plane, a tank, in short a queen of spades, that is not part of any known game? You hold the card back; you hesitate; you rack your brains to find use for it--and then you fling it down on the chance that it may take a trick.
Commonly, people believe that defeat is characterized by a general bustle and a feverish rush. Bustle and rush are the signs of victory, not of defeat. Victory is a thing of action. It is a house in the act of being built. Every participant in victory sweats and puffs, carrying the stones for the building of the house. But defeat is a thing of weariness, of incoherence, of boredom. And above all of futility.
For in the first place these sorties on which we were sent off were futile. More murderous and more futile with every day that passed. Against the avalanche that was overwhelming them our generals could defend themselves only with what they had. They had to fling down their trumps; and Dutertre and I, as we sat listening to the major, were their trumps.
The major was sketching for us the afternoon's program. He was sending us off to fly a photography sortie at thirty thousand feet and thereafter to do a reconnaissance job at two thousand feet above the German tank parks scattered over a considerable area round Arras. His voice was as deliberate as if he were saying, "and then you take the second street on the right to a square where you will see a tobacco shop."
What could we answer but "Very good, sir"? The sortie was as futile as that--the language as lyrical as the futility of the sortie required.
I had my own thoughts. "Another crew flung away," I said to myself. My head was buzzing, buzzing with many things; but I said to myself that I'd wait. If we got back, if we were alive that night, I'd do my thinking then.
If we were alive. When a sortie was not "awkward," one plane out of three got back. Naturally, the ratio was not the same when the sortie was a nasty one. But I was not weighing my chances of getting back. Sitting there in the major's office, death seemed to me neither august, nor majestic, nor heroic, nor poignant. Death seemed to me a mere sign of disorder. A consequence of disorder. The Group was to lose us more or less as baggage becomes lost in the hubbub of changing trains.
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: