Marc's Reviews > Flight to Arras

I had already read some of Saint-Exupéry's earlier works and was charmed by his typical combination of action and reflection: both ‘Vol de Nuit’ (1931Night Flight) and ‘Terre des Hommes’ (1939, Wind, Sand and Stars) offer unique insights into how modern man through machines ( in this case always airplanes) is confronted with the essence of existence. Still, those two works didn't really captivate me: they got a little stuck in non-committal reflections, even if they floated on the adrenaline of a man forced to the limit in the battle with the elements.

Of course, the intense experience this book, 'Pilote de Guerre' (1942, literally 'War pilote'), offers, is even more extreme. Because Saint-Exupéry here describes a hallucinatory reconnaissance mission over occupied France in May 1940. The author-pilot already knows at that moment that the war is lost for France, that his mission is pointless, and that he can only have a minimal chance to survive the low flight over the German positions around the city of Arras.

Well, this time I wàs captivated by the book. Perhaps this was because the author literally takes us inside the mind of the pilot de Saint-Exupéry who is trying to come to terms with the question of why France, himself and his crew are willingly being slaughtered. And here he does it again through a combination of action scenes (steering his reluctant machine, a dizzying journey across the German barrage, a real hell-flight), of observations (of his taciturn crew, of the refugee flows, the advancing German tanks, and the land and sky seen from high altitude) and of contemplation (thoughts of killed and wounded colleagues, childhood memories, and above all musings about existence, man, sacrifice, love…).

So, in itself these elements don't really diff from those in his previous novels, but Saint-Exupéry here presents it all a bit more sharply, more focused. Perhaps the intensity of this journey through hell is not alien to this. Or is it the cocktail of jest, resignation, cynicism, sarcasm and vitalism that does it? What is particularly striking is that the main character, the pilot de Saint-Exupéry, undergoes a remarkable, philosophical evolution during this death flight. Where in the beginning he still takes a rather idealistic point of view ("the real space does not exist for the eye, it is only given to the mind. And that space is worth as much as language is worth, because language connects things"), the near-death experience over Arras opens him to the view that it is the ‘substance’, the body, that makes all human experience possible ("I certainly do not want to downplay the intellect, nor the victories of consciousness. I admire clear thinkers. But what is a man without substance? A man who is a look but not a being?"). This turn is not just a fall into flat materialism, because Saint-Exupéry appears to regard man above all as a junction of relations, and thus also of the principles of solidarity, the collective and the universal, which enables him to forge a link with the sense of sacrifice. And that brings us back to the starting point: the explanation why France seems willinngly to undergo the defeat in May 1940.

Certainly at the end of this novel, de Saint-Exupéry does not shy away from big words, in an emphatically pronounced confession of faith that founds humanism on a new, non-religious basis. Those final pages may seem a bit solemn, after the action scenes that preceded. Perhaps that is why he wrote the disarmingly simple ‘Le Petit Prince' (1943, The Little Prince) shortly after this novel, only to disappear in circumstances that still have not been clarified. To me this 'Flight to Arras' is his real spiritual testament.