08 10 HOURS, HEADING 201º, 8500 FEET. CEILING AND VISIBILITY OK.
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.
0900 HOURS, HEADING 201°, 4500 FEET. CEILING AND VISIBILITY OK.
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.”
0945 HOURS, ALGHERO FERTILIA, RUNWAY 03–21. WIND 160°, 6 KNOTS.
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.
1630 HOURS, IN SIGHT, 1000 FEET, 3/8 OF ALTOCUMULUS WITH BASE AT 5000 FEET.
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.
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