Flight To Arras - Antoine de Saint-Exupery

Flight To Arras (Saint-Exupery, 1942)

A memoir of the final days of France's fight against the invading Germans in 1940, Flight to Arras covers a lot of philosophical and emotional ground. Saint-Exupery uses a flight into German territory as a springboard for portraying the disillusion, disorder, and seeming futility of the final missions of a French army in defeat. Forced to offer his life on a meaningless mission almost certain to end in death, his brush with mortality reawakens him to the reason he is fighting in the first place.

The stirring realism of the book puts you in the cockpit of a touchy, malfunctioning fighter plane, attacked by invisible bands of German pilots and an intense barrage of anti-aircraft gunnery as it attempts to gather intelligence on the German position and arms. There is no glorification or bragging here, rather the picture of men performing duty, the details and immediate needs of their situation distracting them from comprehending the shadow of impending death.

Since Saint-Exupery is a poet at heart, there are several deeply poetic scenes and images mixing freely with the exploding shells and rising flames of the burning town. He also chronicles the general picture of France's retreat: streets clogged with evacuating people, lines cut between commanders and front line soldiers, men fighting and dying to no purpose, with no ability to stop the invading army.

At the end, Saint-Exupery has several epiphanies which contain a lot of truth, but his conclusions ultimately fall short for me.  The next to last chapter is the most convincing sermon for secular humanism that I've ever heard, but I'm still not convinced. He concludes (truly) that men must have something greater than themselves to live and die for; that each person and culture has value beyond the mere number of people or the individual identities of each person; that equality transcends identity or sameness; and that a great community will risk one for many AND many for one. The recurring image he has is that of a heap of stones opposed to a cathedral. The problem is, his cathedral has significance merely as a work of architectural art and cultural heritage. Feeling that God can no longer be used as our greater purpose, he proposes Man as the replacement - Man in the abstract, representing the potential for all human goodness and creativity. He makes a very good argument, but it rings hollow for me. Nevertheless, it does not negate the chronicle of thought that preceded it, and it is still a benefit to wrestle with the ideas that came forth from the author's soul-searching.

Arbitrary rating: 4 out of 5 shadows of impending death