Flight to Arras

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

• Publisher: Mariner Books
• Year: 1969
• ISBN:
  9780547539607
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World War II
• Index: History

The World War II aviator and author of The Little Prince tells his true story of flying a reconnaissance plane during the Battle of France in 1940. When the Germans first invaded France in May of 1940, the French Air Force had a mere fifty reconnaissance crews, twenty-three of which served in Antoine de Saint-Exupéry's Group II/33. After only a few days, seventeen of the crews in Saint-Exupéry's unit had already perished. Flight to Arras is the harrowing story of a single mission over the French town of Arras, an endeavor Saint-Exupéry realized the futility of even as he witnessed it unfolding. Filled with tension, emotion, philosophy, and historical detail, and penned by a master storyteller, this extraordinary memoir serves as a record of a little-known chapter of the Second World War, and an unforgettable portrait of the brave souls who fought despite desperate odds.

XXIII

Who would call this a creed for the weak? A chief is a man who assumes responsibility. He says, “I was beaten.” He does not say, “My men were beaten.” Thus speaks a real man. Hochedé would say, “I was responsible.”

I know the meaning of humility. It is not self-disparagement. It is the motive power of action. If, intending to absolve myself, I plead fate as the excuse for my misfortunes, I subject myself to fate. If I plead treason as their excuse, I subject myself to treason. But if I accept responsibility, I affirm my strength as a man. I am able to influence that of which I form part. I declare myself a constituent part of the community of mankind.

Thus there is a creature within me against whom I struggle in order that I may rise superior to myself. Except for that flight to Arras I should never have been able to distinguish between that creature and the man I seek to be. A metaphor comes into my mind. What it is worth, I do not know, but here it is: the individual is a mere path. What matters is Man, who takes that path.

The kind of truth advanced in verbal bickerings can no longer satisfy me. I know now that the freezing of my controls is not to be explained by the negligence of government clerks, nor the absence of friendly nations at the side of France by the egoism of those nations. It is true that we can explain defeat by pointing to the incapacity of specific individuals. But a civilization is a thing that kneads and moulds men. If the civilization to which I belong was brought low by the incapacity of individuals, then my question must be, why did my civilization not create a different type of individual?

A civilization, like a religion, accuses itself when it complains of the tepid faith of its members. Its duty is to indue them with fervor. It accuses itself when it complains of the hatred of other men not its members. Its duty is to convert those other men. Yet there was a time when my civilization proved its worth—when it inflamed its apostles, cast down the cruel, freed peoples enslaved—though to-day it can neither exalt nor convert. If what I seek is to dig down to the root of the many causes of my defeat; if my ambition is to be born anew, I must begin by recovering the animating power of my civilization, which has become lost.

For what is true of wheat is true also of a civilization. Wheat nourishes man, but man in turn preserves wheat from extinction by storing up its seed. The seed stored up is a kind of heritage received by one generation of wheat after another. If wheat is to flourish in my fields, it is not enough that I be able to describe it and desire it. I must possess the seed whence it springs. And so with my civilization, for it too springs from energy contained within a seed. If what I wish is to preserve on earth a given type of man, and the particular energy that radiates from him, I must begin by salvaging the principles that animate that kind of man.

My civilization had ceased to be radiant energy. I was able to describe it glibly enough; but I had lost sight of the principle that animated it and bore it along through the ages. And what I have learnt this night is that the words I used to describe my civilization never went to the heart of the matter. Thus I have preached Democracy, for example, without the least notion that, in respect of the qualities and destiny of Man, I was merely giving expression to an aggregate of wishes and not an aggregate of principles. I wished man to be fraternal, free, and strong. Of course! Who would not wish the same? I was able to describe how man ought to act—but not what he ought to be. I used words like mankind, but without defining them. The idea of a community of men seemed to me natural and self-evident. But what is there natural and self-evident about it? The moral climate I had in mind is not natural—it is the product of a particular architecture. A fascist band, a slave market is a community of men—of a sort.

As for my community of men, I waited until I was in jeopardy before I took thought of it. As soon as danger threatened, I took shelter behind it. “What!” I cried. “Are you not ashamed to attack such a beautiful cathedral!” But I had long ceased to be the architect of that cathedral. I had been living in it as sexton, as beadle. Which is to say, as a man defeated in advance. I had been taking advantage of its tranquillity, its tolerance, its warmth. I had been a parasite upon it. It had meant to me no more than a place where I was snug and secure, like a passenger on a ship. The passenger makes use of the ship and gives it nothing in return. The ship is to him a water-tight playground. He is indifferent to the straining of the timbers against the ceaseless hostility of the sea. How he would cry out if the ship were capsized by a storm! But what has he sacrified to the ship? If the members of my civilization have degenerated, and if I have been defeated, against whom am I to lodge a complaint?

There exists a common denominator that integrates all the qualities I demand in the men of my civilization. There exists a keystone that sustains the arch of the particular community which men are called to found. There exists a principle, an animating force, out of which everything once emerged—root, trunk, branches, fruit. That principle was once a radiating seed in the loam of mankind. Only by it can I be made victorious. What is it?

It seemed to me that I was learning many thing in the course of my strange village night. There was something extraordinary in the quality of its silence. The least sound filled all space like a bell. Nothing existed that was not part of me—neither the moaning of the cattle, nor a sudden distant cry, nor the sound of a door as it shut. Each little happening seemed to happen within me, and each stirred up a feeling so poignant that I sought to seize it and fix it before it could vanish.

“That gun-fire over Arras,” I said to myself. It had cracked my stubborn shell, and I was released. Within that shell, I must have been setting my house in order the whole day through. I had been the grumbling agent of an absentee landlord. I had been, in other words, an individual. And then Man had appeared. Very simply, he had taken the place of the individual within me. He had sent one look down upon that mob on the highway, and had seen in that mob a people. His people. Man, the common denominator uniting me with that people. Because Man inhabited me I had flown homeward to the Group with the feeling that I was hurrying to a fire in a hearth. Because Man was looking at men through my eyes—Man, the common denominator of all comrades.

Was it a sign? I was so ready to believe in signs. The night was filled with an apprehension of tacit concord. Each sound reached me like a message at once limpid and obscure. I heard suddenly the footsteps of a man on his way home.

“Good evening, Captain.”

“Good evening.”

I did not know the man. We were like two fishermen hailing each other from bark to bark. Yet once again I sensed the existence of a miraculous relationship. Man, dwelling this night within me, would never make an end of counting his own. Man, the common denominator of peoples and nations.

That man was on his way home with his budget of cares and ruminations and images. With his own cargo locked up within himself. I might have gone up to him and spoken. On the white strip of a village street we might have exchanged a few of our memories. So merchants on the way home from faraway lands used to exchange treasures when they met.

In my civilization, he who is different from me does not impoverish me—he enriches me. Our unity is constituted in something higher than ourselves—in Man. When we of Group 2-33 argue of an evening, our arguments do not strain our fraternity, they reenforce it. For no man seeks to hear his own echo, or to find his reflection in the glass. Staring into the glass called Man, the Frenchman of France sees the Norwegian of Norway; for Man heightens and absorbs them both, finds room in himself for the customs of the French as easily as for the manners of the Norwegians. Tales of snow are told in Norway, tulips are grown in Holland, flamencos are sung in Spain—and we, participating in Man, are enriched by them all. This, perhaps, was why my Group longed and volunteered to fight for Norway.

And now I seem to have come to the end of a long pilgrimage. I have made no discovery. Like a man waking out of sleep, I am once again looking at that to which I had for so long been blind. I see now that in my civilization it is Man who holds the power to bind into unity all the individual diversities. There is in Man, as in all beings, something more than the mere sum of the materials that went to his making. A cathedral is a good deal more than the sum of its stones. It is geometry and architecture. The cathedral is not to be defined by its stones, since those stones have no meaning apart from the cathedral, receive from it their sole significance. And how diverse the stones that have entered into this unity! The most grimacing of the gargoyles are easily absorbed into the canticle of the cathedral.

But the significance of Man, in whom my civilization is summed up, is not self-evident: it is a thing to be taught. There is in mankind no natural predisposition to acknowledge the existence of Man, for Man is not made evident by the mere existence of men. It is because Man exists that we are men, not the other way round. My civilization is founded upon the reverence for Man present in all men, in each individual. My civilization has sought through the ages to reveal Man to men, as it might have taught us to perceive the cathedral in a mere heap of stones. This has been the text of its sermon—that Man is higher than the individual.

And this, the true significance of my civilization, is what I had little by little forgotten. I had thought that it stood for a sum of men as stone stands for a sum of stones. I had mistaken the sum of stones for the cathedral, wherefore little by little my heritage, my civilization, had vanished. It is Man who must be restored to his place among men. It is Man that is the essence of our culture. Man, the keystone in the arch of the community. Man, the seed whence springs our victory.

It is easy to establish a society upon the foundation of rigid rules. It is easy to shape the kind of man who submits blindly and without protest to a master, to the precepts of a Koran. The real task is to succeed in setting man free by making him master of himself.

But what do we mean by setting man free? You cannot free a man who dwells in a desert and is an unfeeling brute. There is no liberty except the liberty of someone making his way towards something. Such a man can be set free if you will teach him the meaning of thirst, and how to trace a path to a well. Only then will he embark upon a course of action that will not be without significance. You could not liberate a stone if there were no law of gravity—for where will the stone go, once it is quarried?

My civilization sought to found human relations upon the belief in Man above and beyond the individual, in order that the attitude of each person towards himself and towards others should not be one of blind conformity to the habits of the ant-hill, but the free expression of love. The invisible path of gravity liberates the stone. The invisible slope of love liberates man. My civilization sought to make every man the ambassador of their common prince. It looked upon the individual as the path or the message of a thing greater than himself. It pointed the human compass towards magnetized directions in which man would ascend to attain his freedom.

I know how this field of energy came to be. For centuries my civilization contemplated God in the person of man. Man was created in the image of God. God was revered in Man. Men were brothers in God. It was this reflection of God that conferred an inalienable dignity upon every man. The duties of each towards himself and towards his kind were evident from the fact of the relations between God and man. My civilization was the inheritor of Christian values.

It was the contemplation of God that created men who were equal, for it was in God that they were equal This equality possessed an unmistakable significance. For we cannot be equal except we be equal in something. The private and the captain are equal in the Nation. Equality is a word devoid of meaning if nothing exists in which it can be expressed.

This equality in the rights of God—rights that are inherent in the individual—forbade the putting of obstacles in the way of the ascension of the individual; and I understand why. God had chosen to adopt the individual as His path. But as this choice also implied the equality of the rights of God “over” the individual, it was clear that individuals were themselves subjected to common duties and to a common respect for law. As the manifestation of God, they were equal in their rights. As the servants of God, they were also equal in their duties.

I understand why an equality that was founded upon God involved neither contradiction nor disorder. Demagogy enters at the moment when, for want of a common denominator, the principle of equality degenerates into a principle of identity. At that moment the private refuses to salute the captain, for by saluting the captain he is no longer doing honor to the Nation, but to the individual.

As the inheritor of God, my civilization made men equal in Man.

I understand the origin of the respect of men for one another. The scientist owed respect to the stoker, for what he respected in the stoker was God; and the stoker, no less than the scientist, was an ambassador of God. However great one man may be, however insignificant another, no man may claim the power to enslave another. One does not humble an ambassador. And yet this respect for man involved no degrading prostration before the insignificance of the individual, before brutishness or ignorance—since what was honored was not the individual himself but his status as ambassador of God. Thus the love of God founded relations of dignity between men, relations between ambassadors and not between mere individuals.

As the inheritor of God, my civilization founded the respect for Man present in every individual.

I understand the origin of brotherhood among men. Men were brothers in God. One can be a brother only in something. Where there is no tie that binds men, men are not united but merely lined up. One cannot be a brother to nobody. The pilots of Group 2-33 are brothers in the Group. Frenchmen are brothers in France.

As the inheritor of God, my civilization made men to be brothers in Man.

I understand the meaning of the duties of charity which were preached to me. Charity was the service of God performed through the individual. It was a thing owed to God, however insignificant the individual who was its recipient. Charity never humiliated him who profited from it, nor ever bound him by the chains of gratitude, since it was not to him but to God that the gift was made. And the practice of charity, meanwhile, was never at any time a kind of homage rendered to insignificance, to brutishness, or to ignorance. The physician owed it to himself to risk his life in the care of a plague-infested nobody, He was serving God thereby. He was never a lesser man for having spent a sleepless night at the bedside of a thief.

As the inheritor of God, my civilization made charity to be a gift to Man present in the individual.

I understand the profound meaning of the humility exacted from the individual. Humility did not cast down the individual, it raised him up. It made clear to him his role as ambassador. As it obliged him to respect the presence of God in others, so it obliged him to respect the presence of God in himself, to make himself the messenger of God or the path taken by God. It forced him to forget himself in order that he might wax and grow; for if the individual exults in his own importance, the path is transformed into a sea.

As the inheritor of God, my civilization preached self-respect, which is to say respect for Man present in oneself.

I understand, finally, why the love of God created men responsible for one another and gave them hope as a virtue. Since it made of each of them the ambassador of the same God, in the hands of each rested the salvation of all. No man had the right to despair, since each was the messenger of a thing greater than himself. Despair was the rejection of God within oneself. The duty of hope was translatable thus: “And dost thou think thyself important? But thy despair is self-conceit!”

As the inheritor of God, my civilization made each responsible for all, and all responsible for each. The individual was to sacrifice himself in order that by his sacrifice the community be saved; but this was no matter of idiotic arithmetic. It was a matter of the respect for Man present in the individual. What made my civilization grand was that a hundred miners were called upon to risk their lives in the rescue of a single miner entombed. And what they rescued in rescuing that miner was Man.

I understand by this bright light the meaning of liberty. It is liberty to grow as the tree grows in the field of energy of its seed. It is the climate permitting the ascension of Man. It is like a favorable wind. Only by the grace of the wind is the bark free on the waters.

A man built in this wise disposes of the power of the tree. What space may his roots not cover! What human pulp may he not absorb to grow and blossom in the sun!

But I had ruined everything. I had dissipated the inheritance. I had allowed the notion of Man to rot.

And yet my civilization had expended a good share of its genius and its energy to preserve the cult of a Prince revealed in the existence of individual men, and the high quality of human relations established by that cult. All the efforts of Humanism tended towards this end in the age of the Renaissance and after. Humanism assigned to itself the exclusive mission of brightening and perpetuating the ideal of the primacy of Man over the individual. What Humanism preached was Man.

But as soon as we seek to speak of Man, our language displays itself insufficient. Man is not the same as men. We say nothing essential about the cathedral when we speak of its stones. We say nothing essential about Man when we seek to define him by the qualities of men. Humanism strove in a direction blocked in advance when it sought to seize the notion of Man in terms of logic and ethics, and by these terms communicate that notion to the human consciousness. Unity of being is not communicable in words. If I knew men to whom the notion of the love of country or of home was strange, and I sought to teach them the meaning of these words, I could not summon a single argument that would waken the sense of country or home in them. I may, if I like, speak of a farm by referring to its fields, its streams, its pastures, its cattle. Each of these by itself, and all of them together, contribute to the existence of the farm. Yet in that farm there must be something which escapes material analysis, since there are farmers who are ready to ruin themselves for their farms. And it is that “something else” which is the essence of the farm and enhances the particles of which the farm is composed. The cattle, by that something else, become the cattle of a farm, the meadows the meadows of a farm, the fields the fields ...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Table of Contents
• Copyright
• I
• II
• III
• IV
• V
• VI
• VII
• VIII
• IX
• X
• XI
• XII
• XIII
• XIV
• XV
• XVI
• XVII
• XVIII
• XIX
• XX
• XXI
• XXII
• XXIII
• XXIV
• About the Author