by Stacy Schiff
Phillips left on the thirtieth, though not without first having witnessed some of his friend’s other old tricks. The pilot remained as indifferent as ever to the English language, the exclusive language of the Allied airwaves.* On an early flight the control tower was so much confused by the indecipherable messages coming in over the intercom that the antiaircraft batteries were put on alert. They were called off only when a perfectly clear “Merde!” came through and the controllers—equally clumsy when it came to pronouncing the pilot’s name—were able to announce that the approaching aircraft was only that of “Major X.” (For his part Saint-Exupéry complained that his headphones served no purpose other than to give him a migraine. He barely understood a word of what was said to him.) At this point in his career it was difficult to maintain that he was not absentminded, or out of his depth, in the cockpit. The gentlest way of framing this truth was perhaps Gavoille’s, who in a weak moment later admitted to Pélissier that Saint-Exupéry was not distracted in the air—where he was in fact meticulous—but that he was distracted on the ground, when receiving his instructions. He maintained his tendency of lowering his landing gear only at the very last minute; an ambulance rushed to the field to meet him on one occasion, when it looked as if he was not going to do so at all. On June 24 he took off for a test flight which he inadvertently performed with only one engine. Fooled by the fact that his right propeller continued to turn in the wind he did not notice until he landed that he had been flying a single-engined aircraft.
Nor were the peccadilloes confined to the air. Ten days after Phillips’s departure the thirteen pilots of the 2/33 paid a visit to the frantically busy control room for their sector. The highlight of the visit made its way into the squadron’s logbook: “Major Saint-Ex, stepping into a tangle of wires, pulls down a half-dozen telephones in a frightening crash, throwing the entire system out of commission.” He continued his lifelong habit of writing in the air; the 2/33’s mechanics routinely removed rumpled balls of paper in his cockpits. In Algiers he had been known to read while he shaved and now he read while he flew. On July 6 he appeared immersed in a detective novel when he was meant to take a P-38 to Tunis. He read in the operations rooms as his aircraft was readied and continued to do so when he was called to the field. Ultimately a Jeep arrived to carry him off; he read all the way to the airstrip. “He reads on the field while everyone waits for him to deign to get into his aircraft; he reads in the Lightning while someone goes back to fetch his bags, which naturally he has forgotten; he refuses to let go of the book before departure on the pretext that only a few pages remain; and he takes off with the book on his knee,” reported the logbook. On this or another occasion he circled the Tunis airfield for nearly an hour before landing. He said afterward he could not have approached the runway with a clear head had he done so without having learned the identity of the novel’s culprit.
Under the circumstances the 2/33 experienced a kind of collective worry every time their celebrated colleague flew. “We always admired him; he was our big brother and we loved him greatly and he could be incredibly foolish [il faisait les grosses bětises]” explained Lieutenant Raymond Duriez, the assistant operations officer. The major attempted a first mission on June 6 over Marseilles despite reports of bad weather but was forced to turn back when a fire broke out in his left engine. (The logbook noted that a gaping hole had opened in the engine cowling but had fortunately escaped the pilot’s notice, sparing him further worry.) He returned to the base to learn that the Allies had landed in Normandy, news which left some in the squadron to wonder if they might not be home for Christmas but which Saint-Exupéry greeted with no particular joy, at least on paper. He remained preoccupied not with the outcome of the war but with the ugliness that was certain to accompany the peace. He no longer boasted, as he had in May, of being “the dean of all war pilots,” but succumbed more and more to a deep pessimism about the future and his place in it. He summed up his concern with a simple formula: We are preparing a world capable of producing 5,000 perfect assembly-line pianos a day but incapable of cultivating a worthy pianist, he sighed, a twist on the “condemned Mozart” of Wind, Sand and Stars. As ever he expressed his disdain for the modern world by writing it off as “an anthill.” Phillips was not surprised to come across the writer lying on his stomach on the airfield one day, moving ants from one colony to another with a piece of straw so as to study their confusion.
On June 14 he flew his first successful mission from Alghero, over the Riviera. He took off again the next morning but was forced to turn back after he had trouble with his oxygen mask and nearly passed out in flight. His missions over the course of the next month were generally to follow this pattern. Saint-Exupéry had prevailed upon Jean Leleu for those sorties that would take him over the southeast of France, a demand to which Leleu acceded, not without noting, however, that by some quirk of fate the pilot experienced a brush with danger every time he overflew the territory so dear to his heart. To Dalloz he summed up the record himself at the end of July. Since his return to the 2/33 he had known every kind of near-disaster: he had experienced engine trouble, he had nearly fainted in flight, he had been pursued by enemy aircraft, he had had a fire on board. On his forty-fourth birthday he took off for France for the fifth time, for a mission that was again to take him over Annecy and Chambéry. Over France his left engine gave him trouble and had to be switched off; handicapped by its loss he headed south through the Alps, where he was less likely to meet a German fighter. On radioing in from the Mediterranean he was directed not to Alghero but to Borgo, on Corsica’s eastern coast, where he spent the night. The mocha birthday cake and the mounds of ice cream that had been prepared for him by the 2/33’s gifted chef and ace pilot, Lieutenant André Henry, were consumed in his absence.
On his return to the squadron Saint-Exupéry was able to offer Gavoille what was at best “a rather fanciful account” of his flight. The photo developer was able to shed some light on his whimsy: the pilot had made his way back to the Mediterranean via the Po Valley, then dotted with enemy bases. Probably he owed his life to the fact that no German would have assumed a slow-moving aircraft flying 8,000 feet overhead to have been that of the enemy. He had neglected to turn off his cameras during this casual stroll from Turin to Genoa; inadvertently, he had produced a stunning series of photographs of the German installations below. (One photograph revealed an enemy aircraft, to which Saint-Exupéry claimed he had been oblivious.) Over these Gavoille made a fuss; he said nothing at the time of another group of photographs the pilot brought back from this mission. He had overflown and photographed the coast around Agay, another area that did not figure in his assigned itinerary, probably because he had learned that his sister’s home had been destroyed that spring by the Germans. A virtue was made in the end of Saint-Exupéry’s inexactitude which, transformed into audacity, earned him a posthumous Croix de Guerre avec Palme.
He knew well that he was trafficking in miracles. On the morning of his forty-fourth birthday his mind had not been on the present danger, however. While he had been casually gliding through the Po Valley with a feathered propeller Saint-Exupéry had been cursing a different enemy: the “superpatriots” in North Africa who had banned his books. “I love France, on my own, more than all of them put together. They love only themselves,” he had written that winter. He did not know any more than he had in 1940 what he was fighting for but this time he did know what would be said of him if he were to stop. He flew, as ever, out of duty, but also a little out of self-defense. In 1944 Saint-Exupéry had something to prove; he had been shaped, as he wrote in Citadelle, by the enemy. He was a writer who had never believed the pen to be mightier than the sword, yet in 1944 he felt as much defeated by internecine bickering and slander as by international conflict. His war missions were no longer his only peace, as he had claimed them to be the previous year. They did not offer the same taste of purity. Before one flight he asked André Henry for a seemingly unnecessary bit of advice. “Why,” aske
d Henry, “are you scared?” “No,” replied Saint-Exupéry, “but if only you knew, there are so many out there who would love to see me fail in my mission.” Even in the cockpit he gritted his teeth now with anger.
For all of the obvious reasons Leleu did not accede to the pilot’s second demand, the same one with which he had tormented Alias in 1940. “For the rest of you,” the major argued, “one mission more or less makes no difference. For me, who started late, you must understand, it is vital.” The month of July—he returned after his Italian escapade on Sunday the second and spent much of the next week in Algiers—passed in one drawn-out attempt to ground the pilot and, on Saint-Exupéry’s end, in one sustained plot to thwart the intentions of his friends and superiors. On the eleventh he took off for a mission over Lyons, although he was told in no uncertain terms that the weather was unfavorable and returned after less than three hours with no photographs. Two days later he was scheduled to fly again but was forced to cede the mission to Duriez. He was told there was not enough oxygen for him to go up, which may have been a ruse; Gavoille had begun to do all he could to keep him out of the air. Polifka later claimed that he, too, had decided that Saint-Exupéry had had enough flying and that he attempted that month to ground the pilot, twice, although no official documents support the claim. The invasion of France was growing nearer, and as Polifka remembered, “I wanted Saint-Ex there when we hit the beach.” His decision, if indeed it was made, was overruled from above. All of the arguments that had been used on the pilot during the campaign of 1940 failed again; Chassin tried to talk some sense into his ex-student, who calmly replied: “I’ll follow through now. The end is no longer very far off, I think.” Several members of the squadron were surprised that Saint-Exupéry continued to fly as they had heard a rumor that Eaker had granted him exactly five missions, which was Phillips’s understanding as well. If Eaker had issued such an edict word of a limitation never made its way either to Gavoille or to Leleu, who could have enforced it. Saint-Exupéry could not have been relied upon to have done so himself; on this count it seems safe to say his honor would have failed him.
On July 14 President Roosevelt sent de Gaulle a telegram wishing the General a happy Bastille Day and acknowledging that the complete liberation of France seemed in sight. At about the same time the 2/33 moved physically closer to the homeland, to Corsica. They were billeted in a villa in Erbalunga, six miles north of Bastia. Here Gavoille decided to make a direct appeal to his pilot; he had long been haunted by a line he had uttered half-seriously in 1940, which had made its way into Arras: “Surely you don’t mean, Captain, that you expect to come out of the war alive?” On the eighteenth he paid Saint-Exupéry a late-night visit in his room. He found the 2/33’s record-holder of close calls reclining in his bed, fully dressed, his hands behind his head, thinking. Gavoille began rather awkwardly by teasing him about his birthday mission; Saint-Exupéry could see where the conversation was headed and quietly at first, then with great intensity, cut his commanding officer off at the pass. He would not survive being grounded again; it was clear to him he was going to disappear in one fashion or another, and he told Gavoille he would greatly prefer to do so on a war mission. This favor, at least, his old colleague could surely accord him. He had another service to ask as well: that evening he entrusted his pigskin bag and its papers to Gavoille, to whom he issued detailed instructions in the event of his death. The two men left each other in tears.
The following week Gavoille’s three-week-old son was baptized in La Marsa. Saint-Exupéry was named godfather, as he had asked to be. After the ceremony on the twenty-fourth he told Marie-Madeleine Mast, the wife of the governor-general of Tunisia and the child’s godmother, that flying was becoming more and more difficult, that it was likely he would not return. General Mast and Gavoille meanwhile engaged in a little plotting. They agreed that the easiest way to be sure Saint-Exupéry survived the war would be to see that he was told the details of the imminent landing, after which he would be unable, for security reasons, to fly. Henry and Leleu had already been grounded for this reason; Saint-Exupéry had taken to gliding past Henry with a curt “Henry, say hello to me, and then don’t utter another word.” (According to the squadron’s logbook the two pilots used their knowledge to extract whatever they wanted from their colleagues, “by threatening to reveal the information and thereby condemn them to the same fate.”) During the week that followed it was decided that Henry would inadvertently let the information slip, in the middle of a meal, or over a game of cards. It seemed a foolproof tactic; Saint-Exupéry would not be able to claim he had been grounded for the wrong reasons.
In Algiers that week he bequeathed his chess set to a diplomat friend. “Keep it,” he advised Raoul Bertrand. “We’ll play again on another planet.” The next day both Gavoille and an American pilot took off for missions over France; the American, Lieutenant Eugene Meredith, was shot down on his return sixty miles from the base, minutes after waving to Gavoille in midair. Saint-Exupéry probably heard the news when he returned from Bastia, where he had been visiting with the American squadron and in particular with Colonel Paul Rockwell, whom he invited to dinner the next evening at the French mess. A flyer was most vulnerable as he made his descent toward Corsica, and—out of relief and fatigue—reconnaissance pilots often made this descent prematurely, exposing themselves to additional danger. Perhaps through Gavoille’s intervention, perhaps because of his frequent absences, each of which relegated a pilot to the bottom of the ladder, Saint-Exupéry had not flown a mission since the eighteenth, despite the fact that two of the 2/33’s pilots were out of commission, but he appears to have assumed he was to fly the following day. He may have managed to profit from Gavoille’s exhaustion on the thirtieth to see that he was assigned a mission; there was to be as much confusion about his departure on July 31 as about the subsequent mission itself. Gavoille claimed that he had not been scheduled to go anywhere; Leleu—who distributed the missions—felt certain he had; several American officers were under the impression that he had been grounded and that when he took off that Monday he did so against orders. Duriez, who saw him off, could not remember if Saint-Exupéry’s name figured at the top of the roster of pilots. He well enough remembered that if it had not he would have been incapable of denying Major de Saint-Exupéry a mission had the major imposed on him for one, however.
That afternoon or evening the pilot wrote two letters, one to Dalloz and one to Madame de B, in which he again expressed his loneliness, his distaste for the Gaullists, and his “breathtaking indifference” to life. To Consuelo a week or so earlier he had written that his only regret were he to be shot down would be to make her cry. He spent part of the evening of the thirtieth entertaining a group of young women with a deck of cards in a seaside restaurant in Miomo, from which he disappeared just before midnight, alone. If he went back to his room that evening he did not sleep there. He reappeared for a 7:30 breakfast, joining Duriez in the mess for a pain beurré and a café crème. The two men spoke little. The assistant operations officer drove the pilot to the field and checked the weather for him. It was glorious. He then helped Saint-Exupéry into his gear and into a P-38, which a mechanic had already warmed; he waited while the pilot completed his eleven engine checks. Several minutes later Saint-Exupéry motioned that he was ready to taxi. Two squadron mechanics pulled away the blocks from the Lightning’s wheels. Duriez waved him off. In English the pilot radioed to the control tower for permission to depart and at 8:30, according to Duriez, or at 8:45, according to the logbook, he took off for what was intended to be a mapping mission east of Lyons. Nothing about the previous twenty-four hours—not even the desperate letters in his room, which were to have been given to Colonel Rockwell that evening—was unusual, save for the unexplained absence, and for the fact that Gavoille was not on hand for the departure, which seems to support the notion that the pilot had traded or bargained for a mission. “In the name of God,” Gavoille bawled out Duriez later that afternoon, “what got in
to you that you didn’t find a way to prevent him from flying?” The radar at Cape Corse tracked Saint-Exupéry crossing into southern France. “When your gods die, you die. For you live by them,” he had written in Citadelle. He was due back at 12:30, but was not heard from again.
Two weeks later the remaining twelve pilots of the 2/33 participated in the Allied landing they had helped to prepare in the south of France. On August 25 Paris was liberated. The following day Charles de Gaulle led a triumphant procession down the Champs-Elysées.
* There was a glimmer of truth in the former accusation and none at all in the latter. Generally the best aircraft were reserved for combat missions and the most worn for training flights.
* Dunn argued that an American pilot would, at the very least, have been stripped of his rank for Saint-Exupéry’s accumulated record. Richard Rumbold, an RAF flyer and Saint-Exupéry biographer, has written that an RAF pilot would have been fined, while an equally careless French flyer would have been asked to stand the mess to a round of drinks.
* He was probably right.
† The February 1, 1944, issue of L’Arche included Lettre à un otage along with work by, among others, Gide, Maritain, Kessel, and Robert Aron.
* In a particularly black mood he imagined a conversation about himself: “A very nice man, very nice indeed, but he will have to be shot.” “Why?” “He’s the reason that the United States hasn’t recognized de Gaulle.”
