Flight to Arras (3 page)

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-Exupéry 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-Exupéry 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.

“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 Europe, 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.

I made a great effort to think clearly. “The enemy,” I said to myself, “always defends his position
categorically.
Damned nonsense, these big words! And besides, why should I worry about German fighter planes? At thirty thousand feet they would get me before I so much as suspected their presence, and at two thousand feet it was the anti-aircraft that would bring me down, not the fighters. It couldn't possibly miss me.” Suddenly I became belligerent.

“In short, what you're telling me is that the Germans have an air force, and therefore my sortie is not altogether advisable. Run along and tell that to the General.”

It wouldn't have cost Vezin anything to reassure me pleasantly, instead of upsetting me. Why couldn't he have said, “Oh, by the way. The Germans have a few fighters aloft over Albert”?

It would have come to the same thing.

 

We climbed in. I had still to test the inter-com.

“Can you hear me, Dutertre?”

“I hear you, Captain.”

“You, gunner! Hear me?”

“I ... Yes, sir. Clearly.”

“Dutertre! Can you hear the gunner?”

“Clearly, Captain.”

“Gunner! Can you hear Lieutenant Dutertre?”

“I ... er ... Yes, sir. Clearly.”

“What makes you stutter back there? What are you hesitating about?”

“Sorry, sir. I was looking for my pencil.”

The speaking tubes were not out of order.

“Gunner! Have a look at your oxygen bottles. Air-pressure normal?”

“I ... Yes, sir. Normal.”

“In all three bottles?”

“All three, sir.”

“All set, Dutertre?”

“All set, Captain.”

“All set, gunner?”

“All set, sir.”

We took off.

Human anguish is the product of the loss by man of his true identity. I sit waiting for a telegram which is to announce to me either a death or a recovery. Time flows by unutilized and holds me in suspense. Time has ceased to be a stream that feeds me, nourishes me, adds growth to me as to a tree. The man that I shall be when the news comes, dwells outside me: he is moving towards me like a ghost about to fuse with me. And for want of knowing who I am, I am suspended in anguish. The bad news, when it comes, puts an end to my suspense. It causes me to suffer, which is not the same thing.

T. never knew whether, in the hour to come, he was to be transmuted into a living man or a dead man. He was aware of only one thing—the flow of time, running like sand through his fingers while he waited for the coming of a certain instant too rich in power for his resistance.

For me, piloting my plane, time has ceased to run sterile through my fingers. Now, finally, I am installed in my function. Time is no longer a thing apart from me. I have stopped projecting myself into the future. I am no longer he who may perhaps dive down the sky in a vortex of flame. The future is no longer a haunting phantom, for from this moment on I shall myself create the future by my own successive acts. I am he who checks the course and holds the compass at 313°. Who controls the revolutions of the propeller and the temperature of the oil. These are healthy and immediate cares. These are household cares, the little duties of the day that take away the sense of growing older. The day becomes a house brilliantly clean, a floor well waxed, oxygen prudently doled out.... Thinking which, I check the oxygen flow, for we have been rising fast and are at twenty-two thousand feet already.

“Oxygen all right, Dutertre? How do you feel?”

“First-rate, Captain.”

“You, gunner! How's your oxygen?”

“I ... er ... Shipshape, sir,”

“Haven't you found that pencil yet?”

And I am he who checks his machine guns, putting a finger on button S, on button A.... Which reminds me.

“Gunner! No good-sized town behind you, in your cone of fire?”

“Er ... all clear, sir.”

“Check your guns. Let fly.”

I hear the blast of the guns.

“Work all right?”

“Worked fine, sir.”

“All of them?”

“Er ... yes, sir. All of them.”

I test my own and wonder what becomes of all the bullets that we scatter so heedlessly over our home territory. They never kill anyone. The earth is vast.

Now time is nourishing me with every minute that passes. I am a thing as little the prey of anguish as a ripening fruit. Of course the circumstances of this flight will change round me. The circumstances and the problems. But I dwell now well inside the fabrication of the future. Time, little by little, is kneading me into shape. A child is not frightened at the thought of being patiently transmuted into an old man. He is a child and he plays like a child. I too play my games. I count the dials, the levers, the buttons, the knobs of my kingdom. I count one hundred and three objects to check, pull, turn, or press. (Perhaps I have cheated in counting my machine-gun controls at two—one for the fire-button, and another for the safety-catch.) Tonight when I get back I shall amaze the farmer with whom I am billeted. I shall say to him: