by Stacy Schiff
Frustrated by what he perceived as the sheer ineffectuality of the French war effort, he applied himself to solving some of the more acute problems that plagued the 2/33. He met with Fernand Holweck several times; the two devised and applied—apparently without the sanction of the High Command—an elegant solution to the problem of the freezing guns, to which methylglyoxol was added. Later he met with the scientist to discuss his idea for “luminous camouflage.” Remembering from his Argentine year that a night pilot is blinded more effectively by sudden, bright light than by the dark, he suggested that a carpet of lights be set out to hide strategic sights from the enemy. Also this winter he invented a range finder; experimentation with both devices ended with the fall of France. Holweck summed up the talents of the irrepressible inventor: not being a trained man of science, Saint-Exupéry managed to see the forest for the trees. He was granted leave to make the trip to Paris whenever he liked, which was regularly, often in the company of a fellow officer. And, as ever, he provided the entertainment at Orconte. Almost immediately after his arrival Saint-Exupéry’s exploits begin to show up in the squadron’s logbook. On December 10 General Vuillemin, the commander of the French air force, came to make an inspection; he left overwhelmed by Saint-Exupéry’s virtuoso card tricks. The writer attracted a series of visitors to Orconte, in addition to the planned entertainment: Ramon Fernandez, Joseph Kessel, and Pierre Mac Orlan dropped in, as did Werth and Holweck and, on several occasions, Madame de B.
As he had been at Juby, he was in his element among his fellow officers at Orconte, even allowing for the fact that he was now the elder statesman. “In the kind of adolescent atmosphere in which live men who are entirely willing to die, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, more than anyone else, became again the marvelous child he was,” remembered one comrade. He saw to the spirits of the group, entertaining with his mathematical conundrums, his word games, among the few consolations that spring, when the 2/33 at last began flying on a regular basis and their numbers quickly began to dwindle. He asked Becker to send him the best portable phonograph available in New York and a selection of French music of the fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth centuries, as well as some Bach and Handel, which Becker did, via the diplomatic pouch. At one point the prized phonograph went on the blink; terrified of electric shocks, Saint-Exupéry invited his colleagues to see to its repair. In part he seems to have ordered up the music in an attempt to coax barrack standards up to his own. As much as he claimed to be delighted to be “an entirely anonymous soldier,” to share with his comrades the cold, the rain, the rheumatism, the fear and the long, empty evenings, he now admitted that he had all his life preferred those who admired Bach to those who liked the tango. Like all squadrons the 2/33 sang a good deal: Werth observed during his visit to the squadron’s mess that this gaiety was probably the only means of keeping the terror of war at bay. When Saint-Exupéry arrived the 2/33’s repertoire was typically earthy; he introduced a number of frivolous but somewhat more refined airs.
In plenty of earthbound ways Captain de Saint-Exupéry proved his mettle this winter. In 1939 Henri Jeanson had been arrested and charged, because of an irreverent article he had published, with inciting military disobedience. His friend turned up unexpectedly at the Palais de Justice to testify in his defense, making what sounds from Jeanson’s description to have been an entrance worthy of Cyrano. Looking like “a sort of aerial deep-sea diver, from a[n H. G.] Wells screenplay, directed by Fritz Lang,” Saint-Exupéry introduced himself to a military judge who asked him to spell his name. In Jeanson’s eyes it was as if the two men hailed not from different planets but from different solar systems. Without a hint of condescension or impatience Saint-Exupéry made his argument, though he could see it falling on deaf ears. Later in the winter, in a scene worthy more of Louis Malle than of Fritz Lang, he issued what may have been the only order of his military career. Having returned from a mission, he sat down for dinner with a friend in a restaurant outside of Laon. A group of noncommissioned officers occupied a second of the restaurant’s tables; at a third sat a woman in mourning and her two young daughters, who appeared to be waiting for a car to come for them. The soldiers had had a good deal to drink, and they began to sing, raucously. When they worked their way up to a particularly bawdy tune Saint-Exupéry turned to them and motioned toward the two young girls. The soldiers paid him no heed and continued on with their concert, moving to a yet more tasteless song, of which the rendition was made as obscene as possible. In three steps Saint-Exupéry was upon the ringleader. “I order you to be quiet,” he said evenly. Slowly, after a few objections, the table fell silent. The captain returned to his place, accompanied only by the sound of rattling dishes. The woman who had been at the center of the incident acknowledged him with some embarrassment: “Ah, Monsieur, thank heavens there are still men like you!”
His demeanor did not alone undermine his claim to be a “soldat anonyme”; his very presence at the front did. He had pulled strings to sit out the winter at Orconte and he continued to pull them so as to stay. Giraudoux, who had been appointed Ministre de l’Information during the summer, before France was even at war, had elicited from him a text that he read over the airwaves in mid-October, titled “Pan-Germanism and Its Propaganda.” (Saint-Exupéry’s mother graded it severely—“Diction excellent though a little hurried”—but was proud of her son and thought his address an effective weapon against the pernicious broadcasts of Radio Stuttgart.) Giraudoux felt Saint-Exupéry could be put to better use in this line of work and made a formal request in December that he be assigned to the propaganda service. The pilot refused. He had, he said, no Bible to offer Frenchmen, and he felt a Bible of some sort—as opposed to neat clichés about patriotism and the glories of France—was what they now needed.
By the day he was becoming a more valuable spokesman, however. In January, Le Figaro recommended that all young men heading off to the front pack a copy of Terre des hommes in their bags. In February, the American Booksellers Association named Saint-Exupéry the winner of the National Book Award. In May the Ministère de l’Information argued its case more vehemently; by all reports, Saint-Exupéry was the Frenchman whose word carried the most weight in America. The ministry hoped it could enlist him for a mission to America, where Lindbergh was doing his best to keep his country out of the conflict, and pleaded with Henri Alias, then Saint-Exupéry’s commanding officer, to talk him into it. “We urgently request that you explore with Saint-Exupéry the conditions under which he might be able to reconcile his officer’s duties with his responsibilities as a man of letters,” wrote the general secretary of the information ministry, appealing to the luminary on his own terms. Major Alias claimed the letter never arrived.
In January 1940, the National Center of Scientific Research (CNRS), France’s prestigious government-run research bureau, attempted to recruit him as well. Again he dug in his heels. This required some doing: for the second time, he was forced to plead his case with the Ministre de l’Air. Alias accompanied him on this visit; while Saint-Exupéry met with Guy La Chambre, the minister’s chief-of-staff confided in Alias that the assignment had been concocted by friends of Saint-Exupéry’s, eager to see he did not kill himself. To the same end Didier Daurat asked his former pilot to meet him in Paris for lunch that winter. Saint-Exupéry knew full well what Daurat wanted and this time prevailed upon Captain Max Gelée to accompany him. Explaining that he had never been able to say no to Daurat and would not be able to do so now, he begged Gelée to steer the conversation away from any discussion of a reassignment. Gelée succeeded until the end of the meal, when Daurat was forced to tackle the matter head-on. The captain managed to reason with the World War I hero all the same: Saint-Exupéry had not yet flown a single war mission; how could he be asked to leave the squadron now? Infuriated by his friend’s stubbornness, Werth reminded him over the winter that he was worth more alive than dead and begged him to reconsider his assignment. To this Saint-Exupéry replied, “That would be discour
teous toward my comrades.” Dorothy Thompson told him the same thing in May; she was in Paris and asked Madame de B to arrange for her to see the writer again. It was outrageous, she told him, that he should be flying reconnaissance missions, which were claiming such high casualties. “You are absolutely wrong.… If I did not resist with my life, I should be unable to write.… One must write with one’s body,” the pilot informed Thompson, heading off on a long, mystical riff about making the word flesh. (On the other side of the world Anne Lindbergh read Thompson’s account of her talk with Saint-Exupéry with a lump in her throat and tears in her eyes. She spent the next few days attempting to apply his philosophy to her own life, sorry that—in light of her husband’s public opposition to America entering the war—she seemed to stand on the other side of his heroism.) Paradoxically, Saint-Exupéry had to make himself the exception to the rule in order to keep from being treated preferentially.
Why was he so much invested in flying missions he knew to be entirely futile? He was old enough to have outgrown any childish confidence in his own invulnerability, scarred enough to have relinquished the notion that he led a charmed life, acquainted enough with what he termed his ”absences de moi-měme” that he could brag to his commanding officer that he had reported his car stolen when he had in fact forgotten where he had parked it. Furthermore, he admitted that he knew he could be of far greater use to his country in another capacity. He had no logical argument with which to defend himself against those who sought his transfer. At the same time he could not shake his instinctive sense that he should be at the front, where he knew the odds were absurd. He was the first to admit that France’s war effort amounted to a game of “cops and robbers,” a “grim charade”; there was nothing vaguely rational about the reconnaissance missions flown by the 2/33, the hard-won information from which would be useless if it made its way to the General Staff, which it generally did not. (On one occasion when it did—in mid-May an observer on a low-altitude mission reported German tanks in the Ardennes, which the French staff continued to think of as impermeable—it was roundly disbelieved. The observer was told he had been hallucinating.) But the alternative to what seemed certain death did not interest Saint-Exupéry. “We face the prospect of a return to our native sordidness—the greasy food of avaricious relatives, the cantankerousness of family squabbles, the bad conscience born of money cares, the disappointed hopes, the degrading flight before the rent-collector, the arrogance of the landlord; squalor, and the stinking death in hospital. Up here at any rate death is clean,” he wrote, having known some of these ills.
Because he should not have been at the front, his reasons for flying were necessarily more complex than those of his comrades, as expressed by Jean Dutertre: “We knew that the Germans were stronger, but we had a job to do, and we did it. We didn’t pay attention to whether it served a purpose or not.” Among other things, a certain noblesse oblige colored the issue for Saint-Exupéry. Even his mother, mobilized as a nurse in September 1939, wrote that she was delighted to be of use; she could not bear the idea of inaction. Her son admitted to “a desire to take charge of everything,” and more and more thought of himself as a kind of shepherd. He realized a truth vital to his existence: “When you are in danger, you are responsible for everyone.” Moreover, he had always mistrusted intellectuals; he had no stomach now for the formulae they concocted with which to assuage the pain of a miserable country. Over and over he insisted that true passion could be measured only in acts. He was unable to admit, with Sartre, that “words are deeds,” still believing—as he had told Renée de Saussine years before—that he had to live in order to write, which naturally meant to risk not living.
He was much pained in January when accused in the press of making literature of his failed flights. A jealous writer led the charge, but managed to hit a nerve. Saint-Exupéry knew he was in large part fighting this battle for himself: He was the first to admit that he loved and needed that which forced him out of himself, that he found a certain serenity when under siege. He knew well the purifying power of sacrifice. In December he had written to Madame de B that he had loved his crash landing in Libya, the necessity which had forced him to walk and to keep walking. He told the Lindberghs that in his twenties he had sometimes found the desert flat and uninteresting—until he was fired at, when it became beautiful again. The philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty saw this clearly on reading Flight to Arras: he recognized Saint-Exupéry as a man who found himself “to the extent to which he runs into danger.” While he had no taste for blood, or for high altitude, he needed to fight this war, which for all its futility and absurdity, for all it reminded him of his age, was the closest thing he had known to Aéropostale and its life of action, a front from which he had for nearly ten years now been exiled. He stayed on with the 2/33 when, as he well knew, he could have been of greater service to his country elsewhere, for the most noble and selfish of reasons.
~
On February 27 Saint-Exupéry left for Marseilles for two weeks to train on a Bloch 174, the new pride of the French air force, an aircraft that could, at an altitude of 30,000 feet, rival the Messerschmitt. At the end of March the first Blochs arrived in Orconte; the 2/33—one of the three reconnaissance groups that reported directly to the High Command—received them before any other squadron. There was a tussle over who would claim the honor of the first mission in the new aircraft, which Laux, Gelée, and Saint-Exupéry were all qualified to fly. Each had his own good reason for making the trip over eastern France and Belgium; Saint-Exupéry based his claim on the fact that he was the only one of the three who had experience as a test pilot. Laux won the day, but had a problem with his oxygen mask and was forced to abort his mission. With his gunner and observer Saint-Exupéry took off on Laux’s return, gloating a little. “I knew that the first sortie was mine ex officio,” he informed Laux before heading off on what was as well his own first mission. He turned back when at 27,000 feet his controls froze.
Three days later, on April 1, having flown two missions, Saint-Exupéry was scheduled to go up again as Gelée’s observer. Like a child insisting he must ride in the front seat, he protested that he got sick in bad weather if he was not at the controls. He so much pressed the case that his commanding officer wound up as observer and Saint-Exupéry as pilot, overflying western Germany together at 30,000 feet. On the return to Orconte, Gelée could not help but remind him over the intercom of the mnemonic he had taught him for preparing his landing gear. Threatening to fine Gelée if he distracted him again, Saint-Exupéry executed a perfect landing. He remained as gluttonous, and as stubborn, as he had been years before when polishing off Escot’s plate. “If you had your way,” Alias exploded one day, “you would fly all the missions.” With the campaign of 1940 in mind, Alias coined the formula that fairly summed up his illustrious colleague’s flying career: “When the flight is normal Saint-Exupéry is dangerous; given complications he’s brilliant.” On April 16 the 2/33’s confidence in the Bloch was shattered when Laux was shot down over Belgium. His gunner and observer were killed, and Laux was badly burned. Everyone wanted to know how it had happened—the 1,140-horsepower Bloch had been thought invulnerable to attack—but only one person made the trip to Laux’s bedside, posing as a Paris-Soir reporter, to find out. In his Neufchâteau hospital room on the twentieth Laux was surprised to see through the gauze of his bandages what looked like Saint-Exupéry. He stayed for a few hours, leaving Laux with a check for 1,000 francs, which the captain never cashed. With him Saint-Exupéry took back to France the unhappy news that a new model Messerschmitt was in the air.
The 2/33 had moved on April 11 to Athies-sous-Laon, eighty miles northwest of Orconte. Saint-Exupéry had by this time begun to suffer from a high fever that attacked without warning, sometimes even when he was on the runway. He got little satisfaction from the doctors he consulted, who seemed to want to blame his gallbladder, a theory with which he disagreed. With the help of sulfa drugs he managed to get along, barely; he carried a
supply of the medicine in his pocket at all times, in the event he was taken prisoner. He told no one of the problem. “If anyone in the group had suspected these attacks they would have seen to it that I was sent back to my desk and not entrusted with the responsibility of an airplane and a crew. Since I couldn’t complain without being forcibly cashiered, I flew high-altitude missions with a raging fever,” he explained later. It does not appear to have crossed his mind that his gunner and observer may have had a vested interest in his health. Trouble came in the form of an unannounced medical examination, for which he had to invent an absurd story about an attack of malaria, an illness from which he had never suffered. It seems likely that a military doctor—who would almost certainly have known that Saint-Exupéry had been deemed unfit to fly in the first place—simply chose to look the other way; he probably would not have believed that anyone would attempt a war mission with a 104-degree fever. On May 10, when the Battle of France actually began, Saint-Exupéry was in Paris for medical reasons that—so far as his squadron knew—had to do with trouble he was having with some old fractures, which can be painful at 30,000 feet, at which altitude the body’s tissues swell.
At 4:00 a.m. that day he was awakened in Paris by a phone call from René Delange, the newspaper editor. The Germans had invaded Holland, Belgium, and Luxembourg. The drôle de guerre was over; on Saint-Exupéry’s return to Laon he found—as did most of the 2/33’s pilots, nearly all of whom were on leave when the Blitzkrieg began—that the terrain had been bombed. The aircraft had been camouflaged and had all survived the incident. By the fifteenth, however, when Holland surrendered, the enemy was within sixteen miles of the base. The 2/33 again moved west, in what was to be the first step in a pell-mell race across France. Saint-Exupéry was back in Paris on the sixteenth, partly to vent his outrage. Why had no one made it clear to the French people that the situation was dire, that the front was not holding? Did the leaders of France know where the Germans were? He did; he had seen them along the road outside Laon, a little over an hour’s drive from Paris. He found the capital’s calm extraordinary, as indeed it was. It was as inconceivable that the Germans would march into Paris as it had been that tanks would roll through the Ardennes, and the Luxembourg Punch-and-Judy show, the Drouot auctions, went on for weeks after this visit.
