THERE IS UNIVERSAL agreement that it was a beautiful July day, a day not made for warfare, the sea and sun of Bastia on the right, the line of hills on the left and straight ahead the runway of closely mown grass, yellowing and scented in the heat. Lieutenant Duviez pulled shut the canopy of the plane and slid down from the wing. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry switched on his radio and said: “Colgate from Dress down number six, may I taxi and take off?” He had no love for the radio, belonging as he did to an age when the radio was unknown, nor for the English language. He had recently returned from an American trip where he had repaid the triumph of his books with a refusal to speak a word in any language other than French. That morning he was in Corsica, where his right to use his own tongue was not in dispute, but the aeroplane which was about to take off was American, the squadron was Franco-American, being made up of all that was left of the great strategic reconnaissance unit, Groupe II/33 de Grande Reconnaissance, with the addition of a few USA pilots and men from camera repair. Ground Control was also American, their radio call sign was Colgate, like the toothpaste. “Colgate from Dress down number six, permission to taxi and take off?” It was also the one morning when Gavoille, Captain René Gavoille whom he had described in Pilote de Guerre as France’s best, was not there to dress him in his thermic overall, to place him in his cockpit like a bear in a cage, to tie his straps, to check oxygen cylinder, revolver and camera switches in the belly of the plane, and give him last-minute advice. Two hours later, on arriving at the airstrip, Gavoille would be upset at that little act of treachery of Saint-Exupéry’s in taking off before he got there, and a further two hours on he would regret not having himself carried out a minor act of treachery at the expense of his friend, an act of treachery that morning already agreed with the American High Command: the treachery of revealing to him an important secret, like the date of the landing in Provence, so as to invoke the regulation preventing him from undertaking further sorties because of the risk of his being captured and talking. But what could Gavoille have done? The other would have paid no heed, would have been loud in his protests, Gavoille recalled all too clearly one evening a short time before, when they had wept together and Saint-Exupéry had begged to be allowed to fly again and had finally entrusted him with the enormous manuscript of Citadelle, from which he had, years previously, read some pages to Benjamin Crémieux and Drieu La Rochelle.
“OK number six, you can taxi and take off,” said the controller. The airman Charles Suty, a boy who, to escape call-up in the Vichy Republic, had taken refuge in North Africa and joined the II/33, removed the chocks from the undercarriage. Saint-Exupéry put the engines full on and released the brakes. The aeroplane began its take-off run, the hills and sea of Bastia, even the runway itself began to race forward as Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Tonio or Saint-Ex, lifted his shadow from this earth for the last time.
There follows a brief journey towards a long story, a story of flight, narration and childhood, but also of a civil and philosophical passion for companionship and for oneness with the earth, of a few men from the Thirties and Forties, some still alive, of the mystery of a writer who in all probability crashed at sea, and of coincidences, which govern everything. The journey, mine, could well begin here, seven thousand feet above the Po delta, with the heading of the aircraft pushed very slightly off course by a light wind, a southerly wind, a genial, gentle scirocco such as could be picked up only by electronic apparatus and compasses, which every so often deviate a degree or two from the set course and seem ready to forge ahead in that direction until pressure of the foot, or a slight trim to the left, bring them back within the agreed range, or rather, so as to offset the effect of the wind, to something under it. A glance over the instruments is no different from the round of rooms made by a butler last thing at night. Since I am that butler, it would be difficult for me to attribute some heroic or mystical sense to flight; flight is no more than a science of doing, a matter of errors and corrections, of position and behaviour. At least today that is how it is, perhaps it was different when Antoine de Saint-Exupéry made his night flights over the Andes to deliver the mail in Patagonia, or was Aéropostale’s station chief in Juby in the Sahara, or fighter pilot over Arras or Grenoble, other times, heroic times, today that heroism would have no sense, and neither, fortunately, would the grand rhetoric that often accompanied it. On this July morning, no one takes voluntary risks, on the contrary, I keep things in order so as to ensure that the C 172 of which I am butler glides peacefully along airway Red 22. If this were a sea voyage, I would be speaking of waves and the ship, if a journey on foot of the sort I used to undertake as a boy I would be talking of shoes, weariness and the countryside, but now after take-off over the lagoon, the Po valley down below is invisible under an all-enveloping mango jelly, the horizon high and blurred in the heat mist, while the events of the journey at this moment amount to no more than an occasional touch on the instruments, done with the delicacy with which one might straighten up a painting on a wall after it had been dusted. I busy myself with the Chioggia VOR behind me, the Bologna VOR ahead, the ADF over Ferrara, the LORAN which can call up three stations over the Mediterranean and can calculate position and route on its own, the DME which measures distances from places and report points not visible to me, the transponder, the gyroscopes, the variometers, the altimeters – in other words, the house in my charge has a certain number of rooms. All this paraphernalia, which in a couple of years will be obsolete, could break down at any moment, but there would always be the floating compass, swaying and dragging, which every aeroplane, from the largest to the smallest, carries in its cockpit. The clock and compass were what I was trained to use years ago, long before being initiated into the ways of the electronic Ramayana; and Bruno, whom I had to thank for my apprenticeship, is here beside me, seated across from me. Bruno is in retirement now, not that anyone would dare pronounce that word in his presence. He does not mind accompanying me on longer journeys, shows greater affability now, the effect of the invisible wear of the years, but the relationship remains unchanged. With his spectacles rammed over his nose, like a cat in a fairy tale, he holds up in front of him the aeronautical chart with the first leg of the flight, towards Alghero. The chart is folded inside the pages of a book of photographs of Saint-Exupéry and Squadron II/33, taken in Alghero in the spring of ‘44. At intervals, Bruno raises his eyes from chart and photographs, peers out over his lenses with one of those looks which once caused me more concern than any situation in which I landed myself, then returns to the photographs. He is absorbed mainly by the P38 Lightning, the plane in which Saint-Exupéry disappeared. What an aircraft! he exclaims, two Mustang fighters joined at the wings, and he accompanies this notion with a tiny gesture of the hand. Everything in this flight proceeds normally.
Quite suddenly, the horizon opened out over the Apennines, first the little circle of aerials whose signals I had been following appeared in the woods on the summit of Monte Croce, then the rest of the landscape rose gradually to the surface like a meaning making itself clear. Now Ginar and Marel are not simply virtual landmarks but points that coincide with the curve of a river, with the floor of a plain, with one of the cities – Empoli?, Pontedera?, who could say? – which grow more dense as they descend to the sea, a sea already in sight, and with it the island of Elba. We glide along Ambra Twelve, but the authentic contours of the countryside itself, a rolling, chaotic incline of fields, of water coursing towards the estuary, of jutting rock which all make that landscape seem the verification of a mental supposition, has been superimposed upon the imaginary abstraction of the straight lines, little triangles and radials which are the airway. At every report point, I speak to the Air Traffic Control Authority, there have been seven so far, courteous to a man, and with each I have exchanged swift words, honed down, as custom requires, to a professional minimum. In the days of Saint-Exupéry, messages were transmitted in Morse code, the radio operator transcribed and passed to the pilot a sheet with a few crucial words, and something of that concentration lingered on in his books, in those brief, deeply intense, somewhat peremptory phrases which circle around facts as though the facts were a framework which there was neither the need nor the time to describe (and in any case, a fact in aviation lasts a very few seconds). The fact radiated an energy of feeling, fear, euphoria, sense of conflict, which preceded and followed it: the fact united freedom and responsibility. This link made a considerable impact on André Gide, who introduced Vol de Nuit to the French public with the words: here a paradoxical truth is stated, that the fortune of man lies not in freedom but in the acceptance of a duty.
His characters and stories came from flight, but so too did the first inklings of a complex system of thought, elaborated over the years and not always totally coherent. The first strand was that notion of freedom as responsibility. It was that responsibility which weighed on his shoulders one evening in 1927 when Didier Daurat, the redoubtable director of the Latécoère company, announced to him that the following day he would be making his maiden postal flight from Toulouse to Casablanca. Responsibility was an anguished and inebriating experience, whose highest purpose was the transportation of the mail. With time it would become the freedom-cum-responsibility of those who chose the airline or desert “as others choose the monastery.” Those others, apart from him, were Guillaumet and Mermoz, pilots in an age when meteorology was a diviner’s art, when engines could cut out with no more warning than the sound of porcelain shattering and propellers spluttering, when radio bearings on ground beacons were non-existent and when the only rule, unwritten but passed by word of mouth, was the briefing given to Saint-Exupéry by the field manager on the eve of his maiden flight with the air postal service: navigating by compass in Spain is very fine, and most elegant, but just bear in mind that underneath those seas of cloud there is nothing but eternity.
We change altitude at the request of Control, who make us descend from 8500 to 6500 feet. I have the leisure to look over the populated areas along the Tuscan coast as far as the Punta di Piombino, and just beyond that I point Elba out to Bruno. From where do we “see” places when we name them?, when we say Palermo, Sassari, Ancona, Ventimiglia or Buenos Aires, in what perspective do we utter these words? What is the image which speeds through the mind in the infinitesimal fraction of a second separating the city in the mind from the word which denotes it? If it were a city I knew, the image which emerged would be of a street or a house, or the emotion of a meeting, or regret over having failed to meet anyone. Otherwise, I would imagine those cities in the region to which they belonged, within the political confines of a state, closed in a continent, I would name them from the point of view of a map. While flying, on the other hand, geography changes dimension, between the map which I keep folded on the lap-top table and what I see outside there is scarcely any variation, geography is not the earth in writing but the earth itself lived in the passing.
A more deeply rooted feeling of responsibility – not the mail but the nation – will make Saint-Exupéry beg to return to the Air Force in the very Squadron II/33 with which he had already fought the “phoney war” in France, and which had based itself in Algiers after the defeat. He was forty-three years old, too old for the Lightning, training for that aircraft was like starting from zero. Air reconnaissance was a complicated discipline, a mission could be entered as completed only if you came back with the photographs, the real blow was struck against the enemy in the dark room, in the developing baths. He played his part as far as they allowed him, he used to say; if I do not play my part, how can I talk of my country? Everyone gets what they want, he got his first sortie over the South of France; on the second, returning to Algiers, he overran the runway and slewed the plane into a vineyard. The Americans took his plane away from him.
Having passed the island of Montecristo on the left some time ago, we are over open sea, under a scorching sun, one hundred and fifteen miles of sea with only two report points, Bekos and Tallin, which only electronic devices can pinpoint on the unchanging, homogeneous, blue background broken only by a few tiny boats with white foam in their wake. These are still Italian territorial waters, but Bruno is already bickering with the powerful French military radar at Solenzara in Corsica which oversees the “prohibited zone” – practically the whole of this area of the Tyrrhenian – we are overflying; he observes correct aeronautical procedure as he argues, so it is only possible to know that the two are engaged in an argument from the harshness of the voices, his and the air traffic controller’s. That apart, each is happy to make his own case, and go no further; the zone is a firing range for jet fighters, either I climb to altitudes beyond the operational ceiling of our plane, or I enter a free, narrow air lane along the Corsican coast (“just in front of his house,” as Bruno puts it, switching off the microphone), extending the flight considerably. The controller is repeating what I had already read on the AIP in the airport before taking off, “The zone is out of bounds every working day from sunrise to sunset;” Bruno replies, “All right,” and I keep to the same course. If there are no problems, that is, if Solenzara does not call back, things generally proceed in this fashion: the operators say what they are required to say, we reply as we are required to reply, then I continue straight ahead, cutting across the sea as far as Olbia. Even flight has its Byzantine rituals.
An outstanding, instinctive, if undisciplined and absent-minded, pilot – that was the judgement of his superiors, Daurat in the days of the Aéropostale, Alias at the time of the reconnaissance flight over Arras, Gavoille in the last days in Alghero and Bastia. At ten, first take-off with a bicycle and sheet, take-off aborted; at twenty, crashed at Le Bourget with a Hanriot HF-14, which he had taken without authorisation; at thirty-three, capsized in the Bay of Saint-Raphaël with a Latécoère seaplane which he was test-piloting, a profession for which he could not have been more unsuited; instead of coming down on the rear of the floats, he touched the water in horizontal flight nose slightly down, sinking the plane and almost drowning. On another Latécoère seaplane, the pilot’s door, which he had neglected to secure, was wrenched off in mid-air. At thirty-five, on the Paris–Saigon run, for which he had prepared himself badly and at the last minute for the sake of the one-hundred-and-fifty-franc fee, he became convinced during the hours of darkness that he was over Cairo, pierced the bank of cloud to get a sight of the sea, was still searching when his Caudron Simoun buried itself in the sand at two hundred and seventy kilometres an hour. He and his mechanic, Prévot, emerged from the plane unscathed but lost in the middle of the desert; they were picked up three days later by M. Emile Raccaud, manager of a remote branch of the Egyptian Salt & Soda Co. Ltd. At thirty-eight, during a New York–Tierra del Fuego flight, which served no purpose, not even financial, he lands in Guatemala, at a site which is not so much an airfield as a strip of grass furnished with a fuel pump. Somehow he managed to communicate with the pump attendant and get his fuel, but neglected to calculate how much was put in, that is, how much more the aircraft would weigh. He had to ask the attendant the best direction for take-off, set off down the minuscule track, came to the end of it, got the Caudron Simoun airborne for a few seconds, only to see it belly-flop back to earth. Prévot emerged from the wreckage of the crash, which is one hundred percent unforgiving, with a broken leg, and Saint-Exupéry with a fractured jaw, cuts all over his body, and a laceration of the collar-bone which left him with anchylosis of the shoulder for the rest of his life. In later years, even if he had wished to eject from the Lightning, the old wound would have made it impossible, short of rolling the plane over, throwing open the canopy and dropping out.
For all that, he was an astonishing pilot and these were things which, at that time, with those planes, on exploits like those, could easily happen. He was distrait and, after take-off, became abstracted; some flights were long and tedious, he used to scribble notes in a log-book, and even on the morning of the last flight he had a little pad attached to his leg. “Pourquoi risquons-nous si facilement notre vie pour acheminer des lettres?” he asked the other pilots of Cap Juby, without expecting an answer, but anxious to know if they too were aware of the disproportion. Why risk our lives for a handful of letters? He was an excellent pilot, but not of the standard of Mermoz, or Guillaumet, his model, Guillaumet who had overflown the Andes three hundred and eighty-three times and on one occasion, after a crash, had survived five days on a glacier among the mountain peaks, Guillaumet who finally resolved to plod out of the mountains onto the plains so that his body would be discovered and his wife receive the insurance. When Guillaumet died many years later in the Mediterranean, Saint-Exupéry wrote: “I am Guillaumet’s.”
We were second in line to land, the DC9 which preceded us on final approach could be seen clearly on the opposite side of the circuit, then it was my turn. It is always an exhilarating moment, flight converting to glide, undercarriage down, full flaps, the perspective gradually flattening out and re-acquiring its normal appearance, then on the runway the pull-back with the control column and the waiting, waiting until the ground reclaims you. I ought to speak of how we were welcomed at the airport’s military base, of the courtesy of a group captain, of the charm of his office, of how he and his squadron-leader stared in amazement at photos of that very airport fifty years previously, listening intently to a story they knew nothing of, but recognising the hangar and the sheds which still stood around a runway which still ran in the same direction as then; of how the officer in his turn reconstructed the life of the base, left to run down after the war and reopened in the Fifties, of how, as we walked among the hangars, Bruno pointed to some ageing T6s, now covered in dust and left to rot, to the American twin-seater training machines on which, right here in Alghero, he had served his apprenticeship. I ought too to speak of the warm sun which filtered through the pinasters to light up the group captain’s office with its trophies and souvenirs of old ceremonies, of the cicadas outside, and of Bruno and the others talking of forgotten aeroplanes, forgotten friends and common memories and all the while asking question after question. They seemed like men of the sea, mariners meeting up in some port; and yet the airman is not the successor of the sailor, nor his modern equivalent, nor does the aircraft have the relationship to the sky that the ship has to the sea. Each ship has a character, soul and history of its own, but with aircraft the character adheres, if at all, to the model, mass produced by the thousand, and it is of the model alone that each pilot will gain familiarity and experience in a purely personal way. Further, relationships between people who fly are not forged in the air but on land, in discussions about flight, for on the aircraft there is not the human multiplicity of the crew, the passenger is alone with his neighbour, the crew will never number more than five or six, and however many there are, each one is too continually busy. An aeroplane is not like a ship where the moral laws of the mainland are transferred to a more restricted, autonomous domain and tested to breaking point, an aeroplane retains nothing of land and home, in a ship people sleep, relax, plot, enjoy lengthy hours of idleness, endure stifling delays in ports, in an aeroplane there is no space for humdrum routine and the only valid rules are the operational rules of the air. Mistakes are committed, but these are almost invariably of a technical, and scarcely ever of a moral, nature. The human spirit needs time and space to uncover its inner darkness, to display its ignominy and depravity, and on a plane there is too little of both time and space, in other words, while airborne, human beings are temporarily deprived of their own Evil, reduced to bewildered silence in the face of procedural routine. In flight, even those who make every effort to bring out the worst of themselves, find themselves implacably condemned to a certain nobility of spirit.
This was the route which Saint-Exupéry took. What mattered to him more than the facts, which, as they occur, weave together an individual’s destiny, were actions; the weight of intention is what distinguishes action from fact. His actions never had any savour of vitalism, indeed at conception they were often useless actions, whose necessity remained to be discovered or invented: the mission to Arras, the subject of Flight to Arras, was a wholly worthless enterprise in a France now on her knees, but was of value to him in allowing him to narrate a deep feeling of defeat, not merely the defeat of France but the defeat of the links which hold men together, an undoing of what unites man to Man, that is, to the best of himself, and of what permits the flow of the one to the other. In Night Flight, he had provided a genuine model of action, not in the pilot Fabien who runs the risks, goes missing and dies, but in Rivière, the airline chief, the man who does not take to the air, who remains behind his desk, who does not act himself but who determines the actions of others, experiencing even more torment over each and every act than if he were himself in the front line. The action was free of anything as trivial as adventure, courage was genuinely the last, the meanest, the most vainglorious of virtues. Above and beyond questions of aeroplanes, mail and war, his books constitute a meditation on the possibilities of Humanism at the height of the twentieth century, a stand against collectivism as the mere arithmetical sum of individualities, a metaphysical examination of Being in solidarity with all the others. Action served only to establish bonding between men, it liberated love, it was like a mellow apperception which brought to light the nature of mere facts and underwrote their significance. The mystique of the bonding made of him an essentially religious writer, even if he had no truck with the names of God, preferring to halt on the threshold of his own questioning. None of it entirely devoid of grandiloquence, and with elements of the intense and the imprecise.
Once I was given the photograph of a sheet of paper on which, in the early days of ’42 in America, he had listed, in lines of spidery writing scrawled over the page, the keys concepts of Citadelle – the concept of the nomadic and the sedentary, concept of landscape constructed in passage, concept of the “marvellous collaboration,” concept of questions which die, concept of the stones and silence, concept of Cook’s travel agency, concept of the silence which nourishes and of slowness, concept of time which flows and time which fills, concept of the domain, concept of the bucket, of the spade and of the mountain, concept of the peace which is beatitude, death of replies and non-reconciliation.
Low flight, I hug as closely to the coastline of Corsica as if I were engaged on a tracing exercise, from which I only tear myself away to cut off over the little inlets after Bonifacio, the Gulf of Santa Manza and the Gulf of Porto Vecchio, and then I follow the coast itself. The route is this shoreline, so close at hand, scurrying in and out, dotted with chalets and boats. With the autopilot off, I have less of the butler feeling, or rather, of the feeling of a butler afforded the freedom of staring out of the window and enjoying his ease. We had lingered too long with the officer in Alghero, and so I took Bruno to eat lobster and shell fish in the bay at Porto Conte. Put it down to the artificiality of flight, or to a need to compensate for nobility of spirit, but it is beyond doubt that there is an odd link between aeroplanes and food; in any case, with Bruno, it always ends like this. In reality, I brought him to Porto Conte for another meal, for a farewell lunch which took place fifty years ago – the lunch which Saint-Exupéry and John Phillips, the reporter and photographer of Life magazine, offered to Squadron II/33 the day before they left Alghero. They gathered in the villa where Gavoille and the other officers were billeted. The bay has remained as it was then, bleak and almost uninhabited. After the meal, I asked Bruno if he would like to help me find that villa; he cut a comic figure, sweating and engrossed, book in hand as he struggled among the brush. He peered at the two promontories which close off the gulf, compared them with the details of the photographs, said higher up!, a bit to the right!, no, that’s not it, taking the whole enterprise very seriously, as was his wont. The pictures of that party in the courtyard at nightfall give the impression of strange gentlemen, out of time, out of space, babbling in a mixture of languages; having exchanged missiles and machine-guns for cameras, they were as poetical and unarmed as the Lightnings on which they flew. Those who knew Saint-Exupéry in those days, or those who had known him even earlier in the Sahara, talk of the conjuring tricks he played, of his habit of playing the piano by rolling two oranges along the keyboard, of the chess matches or six-letter games which delighted him, and of the mathematical theorems he worked on hour after hour. He read few works of fiction, but devoured every kind of tract and curious work be requested of pilots returning from their travels. The outcome of such readings was invariably some experiment in physics or metaphysics, and some new number for his improvised performances. He was not given to pontificating, and appeared as curious as his listeners about the outcome of his own line of thought. He returned to Alghero after his sorties, approaching the landing strip with undercarriage still up, leading everyone to wonder if there had been some mishap or oversight and to fire off warning rockets, call out ambulances and fire-fighting appliances, but half way down the glide path he would flap the wings to signal it was all a joke, overshoot and come in again with the wheels in place.
Methodically, Bruno located the farewell lunch villa, partly modified, repainted at some unspecified time, then abandoned. I like museums, but I also like places seemingly without history, or more precisely, for which there was a history, but an unknown or forgotten one. My boyhood was filled with such houses, built with an eye for a space and design which defeat had ridiculed, abandoned after the war, silent houses with no tale to tell, where something had happened, but no one could say exactly what. “Condemned,” is the beautiful French expression for those walled-up doors and windows.
Ah yes, flying low along the coast, Bastia already in view, the tower operator a woman, who speaks the only kind of aeronautical English comprehensible in Corsica. I do a couple of rolls. I am happy. No, myths have nothing to do with it. Flight was inextricable from myth as long as it was not humanly feasible. After the invention of the aircraft, there remains only one thing in the world with which flight is really connected, and that is childhood. Pilots do not have feathered wings, they are not angels, much less heroes; they are child-adults, latent children, well looked after in their maturity, carefully preserved inside one of the professional guises life has assigned them, but tied to childhood by the elastic of the sling peeping out of their pockets. As to whether there is some special relationship between childhood and death, I wouldn’t know.
We are at the holding point of runway Sixteen, Bastia Porretta. I have omitted the weather report because it is a bit complicated. There are different types of cloud over the northwest Mediterranean, with their bases at different altitudes, but things are looking better now than a few hours ago. We await clearance for take-off. Last night, we slept in Erbalunga, where the II/33 pilots were billeted in their Corsica days. I went with Bruno for a walk along the seafront; a pleasant, healthy breeze was blowing after the heat of the day. At dinner, in an old trattoria in the harbour area, he declared himself satisfied with the place and the wine, satisfied, and more than a little drunk, so much so that he allowed himself to talk about his wife and daughters, as well as about his plans for the future. At a certain point, he changed tone and glanced behind him; do you think that this Saint-Exupéry, if he lived nearby, would have dropped in here to eat? I started laughing, said I’ve no idea, perhaps he did, could be, maybe he sat in that very seat facing the fishing boats, maybe he smoked or stared at the night, who knows what was in his mind?
Now, at the holding point of runway Sixteen, Bruno looks over at the control tower as though expecting clearance to arrive with a wave of the hand rather than over the radio. This morning I took him along to the old airport at Borgo, a dozen or so kilometres further up the road. Behind the barracks of the Armée de Terre, we came across the old grass airstrip which ran from the lagoon to the hill. A grass airstrip is in no way different from a grass field, and yet it can be clearly seen that this was once a runway. In the thin sunlight and the fresher air, we walked its full length, from one end almost to the other. It was still possible to make out, in the undergrowth, the beaten earth taxiways. On one side, there was a little metal ruin, a rusted, open turret, with traces of the original white and red still visible.
“India Golf India Oscar Mike, cleared for line-up and take-off, One Six. Then turn left.”
After take-off, we proceed in a wide, leftward curve, gaining enough height over the sea to allow us to overfly the hill. Then we turn the nose northwest. At one in the afternoon of 31st July 1944, Gavoille had already put out calls to all Allied radar stations in the northern Mediterranean. No one had seen them. Those who were with Gavoille in the operations room were to recall the frantic tones with which he demanded information, the increasingly implausible hypotheses he put forward to explain the late arrival, until time marked the limits of the Lightning’s self-sufficiency. Of waiting of this kind, when it had been the turn of Mermoz over the Atlantic, Saint-Exupéry had said: “I know nothing more tragic than these delays. A companion does not land at the expected time. There is silence from another who was due to arrive, or send a signal. And when ten minutes have passed, a period of waiting which in our day-to-day lives would scarcely even be noticed, suddenly everything grows tense. Fate has made its entry. It holds men in its thrall. Sentence has been delivered on them. Fate has made its judgement, and we can only hold our breath.” Towards evening, someone, after attaching a passport photo of Saint-Exupéry to the page, wrote in the squadron log-book, “Non rentrée.”
What Gavoille failed to discover that afternoon, he failed to discover for the rest of his days, and it was to remain a mystery to everyone else. Of all the possible or probable accounts, I preferred Gavoille’s own, which with time became an obsession; he never abandoned the quest. In the early stages, he believed there had been a failure of the oxygen supply. When they reached a certain altitude, the pilots opened the cylinders and took their first breath of paint-scented air from Massachusetts or Ohio. Saint-Exupéry, big and bulky as he was, consumed more oxygen than the others, he might have had some problem, he had once before forgotten to switch on the oxygen supply, he might have lost consciousness and fallen forward against the control column causing the plane, with its engines on full throttle, to go into a dive, to disintegrate as it plunged at speed through the air, and to end up in the sea. Then, towards the end of the Seventies, Gavoille, by now General René Gavoille (retired), who had never ceased asking at the foot of his articles on Saint-Exupéry if anyone had seen or heard anything, received from the Côte d’Azur recollections and eye witness accounts. The Côte d’Azur must have been beautiful that day in ‘44, even more beautiful than it is now to Bruno and me as, after a hundred miles of open sea, we catch our first glimpse of it under a sky of high cloud fleeing eastwards. Each morning the war had something to offer, and that morning too there was the spectacle of a Lightning flying very low from the mountains, from the valley to the north of Biot, flying low and fast, pursued by two German fighters: a stream of white smoke was coming out of the starboard engine of the Lightning, then the plane went over on one side, did a somersault over the water and disappeared. Several people described the same scene to Gavoille, each in full agreement over place and time – shortly after mid-day. Others simply remembered having seen a plane of the Lightning type crash into the sea, and Saint-Exupéry’s was the only one to have disappeared that morning in the northwest Mediterranean. The following day, the trainee-pilot Robert Heichele, who was twenty years old and who was to die in action two weeks later, wrote to a friend of his that he had shot down a Lightning on the 31st July 1944. He and Sergeant Hogel, on board their “Big Nose” FW 190, had intercepted it between Logis and Castellane, along Napoleon’s highway. “It was flying some two thousand feet above us,” said Heichele in his report, “so we were unable to attack it; to our astonishment, it turned and started a descent, it seemed to be coming towards us. I did a climbing spiral and took up firing position one hundred and fifty feet from its tail. I fired but missed. I executed a barrel roll, regaining a good position, fired once more but the shots passed in front of the plane. He attempted to shake me off by going into a nose-dive, I pursued him and when I was thirty metres from him, unleashed another volley. I saw a trail of white smoke emerge from his starboard engine; the plane flew low along the coast then plunged into the sea.”
It may be that I prefer this version because it is the least mysterious, less in keeping with any hypothesis of suicide, pilot error or accident, or perhaps because it is the most aeronautical, or perhaps because more than any other it lends itself to falsification, if it could be shown that Heichele had never existed and that his letter was a forgery. Be that as it may, the sea is the same sea here underneath us, so close it could be touched, the sea off Saint-Tropez, Saint-Raphaël, Antibes, the sea whose surface I am skimming at top speed. Bruno taps his index finger on the altimeter beside him, and when I fail to take notice taps the altimeter on my side, when you fly like this, you’ve got to be careful, there’s an optical illusion that makes you think you are higher than you are, better take your eyes off the water and fix them on the instrument panel. Bruno does no more than tap his finger on the instruments, because he is sure he taught me all this years ago. Bruno is still Bruno.
On the phone, René Gavoille had a calm, alert voice. I spoke to him before setting off, he said: “That morning, he was not supposed to be flying, it was pure chance, I stayed in my bed because we had been up late the night before, he got up early, he hardly ever slept at night, he went to the officer in charge and obtained permission for take-off. He shouldn’t have been flying, my orders were precise, but such is destiny. It was the only time I wasn’t there, a sortie he was not supposed to be on, a useless mission, considering the dangers involved and the imminent landing in Provence. He went over Savoy and took his photos. On his way back, when he had already been hit, he gave in to another of his surges of emotion and passed one more time over the places of his boyhood and adolescence. He lies there, in that sea. You can imagine what happens when an aeroplane doing four hundred kilometres an hour crashes into the water.”
I pulled at the control column, I have gained sufficient height, I dipped my wings twice or three times in salute. Bruno is calmer now. Nice and Menton appear on the left. We do not speak, but then we hardly ever speak in flight. Each of us is already thinking of Genoa and Milan, of Venice and of the almost straight line which will take us to Venice and home. At night-fall, after landing, we will take long, elastic strides to shake off the fatigue of the controls. We will smile, reunited once again with our shadows.