If it die

FLIGHT TO ARRAS--Antoine de Saint-Exupery*--Reynal & Hitchcock ($2.75).

Flight to Arras is the most important book yet written about this war. Like all Saint-Exupery's books, it is a description of a flight-a pilot's reflections borne upon the arc of a few hours' intense action. But this particular flight, in which Saint-Exupery faced death, he transmutes into a magic text, at times almost Biblical, of why men fight, and how they feel in the presence of death.

On an afternoon in late May 1940, when the French collapse "was so entire that death itself seemed to us absurd," Pilot Saint-Exupery, his observer Dutertre and his young gunner were ordered to make a reconnaissance sortie over Arras. They were one of 50 reconnaissance crews in all France. Of the 23 which comprised their group, 17 had already perished. Their chances of survival even on a good day were one in three, and this sortie was an "awkward"' one. The information, even if they brought it back, would be useless, even if it were to reach the General Staff, which it would not. It was "as if you dashed glassfuls of water into a forest fire." And yet "it's no one's fault. . . . Everybody struggles as hard as he can to make war look like war." Their business was "to sketch the face of a war that has no face" and, all but certainly, to die.

The Why of Dying. While he got ready for the flight, a deep longing possessed Saint-Exupery to survive into the night, wherein "I might discover why it is I ought to die." He felt "like a Christian abandoned by grace." He knew he was about to do a job "honorably," but "as one honors ancient rites when they have no longer any significance."

Later, in the air, "time has ceased to run sterile through my fingers. Now, finally, I am installed in my function . . . an organism integrated into the plane. . . . The battle between the Nazi and the Occident was reduced to the scale of my job." At that point he realized that if they had avoided this assignment (he could have) it would have brought only "a sharp sense of discomfort. As if a necessary molting had miscarried." At 33,000 feet, with the controls frozen (it was 60 below zero), and with a village "a handful of gravel" beneath them, Dutertre sighted six enemy planes a quarter of a mile, ten seconds, below, and these planes swept upward. With an effort which at that altitude left him gently fainting. Saint-Exupery freed the frozen rudder and lost his enemies in the sun.

They flew over the chaotic tragedies of a landscape which from that height was as unpeopled as if it were in a museum case: "All that I see is the bric-a-brac of another age exhibited under a pure crystal without tremor." Saint-Exupery, in his mind, revisited strange depths of his childhood; and meditated upon death, defeat, victory, treachery and war.

He remembered (the image would have enchanted Melville) a wounded pilot who lay on the wing of his derelict ship, high in the air, in an infinite leisure between living and death. He realized how little of adventure there is in war, that war is the acceptance neither of duty nor of danger: "it is at certain moments the pure and simple acceptance of death." In some marvelously clear and compassionate writing on refugees, and on heartsick soldiers who threw in their cards, and on the cracked and frantic machineries of civil and military administration, he manages to tell more of the fall of his nation than any dozen books of Inside Stuff.

"If a man is to strive with all his heart, the significance of his striving must be unmistakable. The significance of the ashes of the village must be as telling as the significance of the village itself. But the ashes of our villages are meaningless. . . . Our dead die in a charade. The enemy's hundred and sixty divisions are not impressed by our burnings and our dead."

Revelation. He began also, dimly still, to realize why he was flying into death. "I do not die to preserve my honor, since I deny that my honor is at stake, and I challenge the jurisdiction of my judge. Nor do I die out of desperation. . . . You know nothing at all about defeat if you think there is room in it for despair. . . . "Piloting now my plane, I feel no love; but if this evening something is revealed to me, it will be because I shall have carried my heavy stones towards the building of the invisible structure. I am preparing a celebration. . . . There is nothing that I may expect of the hazard of war except this slow apprenticeship. Like grammar, it will repay me later."

A little later, he got the full revelation. On the left "great slabs of light among the showers" shone like the panes of a cathedral while he moved "gently forward, swaying to right and left like a loaded hay-wain," towards Arras, which stood at the root of a tree of flame. He flew over a plain stiff with guns, within range of every caliber, too low to bail out; at 2,000 feet "you drain the cannonade of a whole army." Nursing, from a memory of childhood, "the sense of sovereign protection," he was all but persuaded that each of his enemies, caught in some lassitude of the spring twilight or weariness of war, was going to pass him along.

"Something in this countryside suddenly exploded. . . . I flew drowned in a crop of trajectories as golden as stalks of wheat. . . . When a shell burst very near, the explosion rumbled along the plane like rock dropping through a chute."

In those moments, feeling absolutely certain of death, he learned this: "It is in your act that you exist, not in your body. Your act is yourself, and there is no other you. Your body belongs to you: it is not you. . . . The flames of the house, of the diving plane strip away the flesh; but they strip away the worship of the flesh too. Man ceases to be concerned with himself: he recognizes of a sudden what he forms part of. If he should die, he would not be cutting himself off from his kind, but making himself one with them. He would not be losing himself, but finding himself.

This that I affirm is not the wishful thinking of a moralist. It is an everyday fact. It is a commonplace truth. . . . I have never known a man to think of himself when dying. Never."

'' 'I wonder,' I said to myself, 'if those Germans below who are firing at us know that they are creating life within us?' "

Saint-Exupery brought plane and crew safely back. His gas and oil tanks were pierced, but the rubber lining sealed them. He also brought back a personal proof of the profoundest of Christian texts: Except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone, but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit.

By that text the closing pages of his book are continuously illuminated: "There is one way and only one by which we can create the Being which in turn creates us." It is one which, in centuries of mistaking the individual for Man, Western civilization has all but lost sight of: sacrifice. "Sacrifice is the stone contributed to the construction of the Being with which we identify ourselves. It is the root of true existence, and as such the sole source of joy."

Saint-Exupery's work seems to come from the center of great and steely pressures, at the intersection of scientific and poetic knowledge. Sometimes the pressure is too intense, producing mere conceits or wild generalizations. But usually he holds his stratospheric insights under complete and Gallic intellectual control. His perceptions are so sharp and deep, his language so pure, that most of Flight to Arras radiates poetry and a renewal of truth.

* Pronounced: Ex-eu'-pair-ee.

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