Free Flight to Arras by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

our burnings and our dead.
    The question used to be asked, Are our men dying well or badly? Meaningless question! The Staff know that a given town can hold out for three hours. Yet our men are ordered to hold it forever. Having no means of offense, they as good as beg the enemy to destroy the town in order that the rules of war be respected. They are like a friendly opponent at chess who says, “But you have forgotten to take your pawn.” Our men spend their time challenging the enemy.
    â€œWe are the defenders of the village,” they say in effect. “You are the attackers. Ready? Play!”
    And under the burst of an enemy squadron the village is wiped out.
    â€œWell played, Nazi!”
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    Certainly inert men exist, but inertia is frustrated despair. Certainly fugitives exist, and I remember that twice or three times Major Alias had threatened to shoot occasional gloomy wretches picked up on the highways and evasive in the answers they gave to his questions. One’s impulse is so strong to make somebody responsible for disaster, and to believe that by putting him out of the way all can be saved. The fugitives are responsible for the rout, since there would be no rout if there were no fugitives. Therefore, flourish a gun and all is well.
    As well bury the sick in order to eliminate sickness. Major Alias always ended by slipping his gun back into its holster. He could see very well that there was something awfully pompous about that gun, like a comic-opera saber. Alias knew perfectly well that those mournful fellows were an effect, not a cause of the disaster. He knew absolutely that they were the same men, exactly the same men, as those who, somewhere else in France, at that very moment, were accepting the fact that they must die. In two short weeks one hundred and fifty thousand of them accepted the fact that they must die. But some men are stubborn and insist upon a reason why they should die.
    It is hard to find a reason.
    Here is a runner engaged in the race of life against other runners of his own class. The starter fires, the runner springs forward—and he discovers that he has a ball and chain attached to his leg. He quits.
    â€œThis race doesn’t count,” he says.
    â€œIt docs though, it does!” you protest.
    What are you going to tell a man to make him put his heart into a race that is not a race? Alias knew what those fugitives were thinking. “This race doesn’t count,” was what they were thinking.
    Alias put his gun back into the holster and tried to find a better argument.
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    There is but one better argument, but one logical argument, and I challenge anybody to find another. It is this: “Your death will have no effect at all. Defeat is inescapable. But it is proper that a defeat manifest itself by dead. There must be mourning. Your part is to play the dead.”
    â€œVery good, sir.”
    Alias did not despise the fugitives. He knew well enough that his argument always worked. He himself accepted the expectancy of death. All his crews accepted the expectancy of death. His argument, slightly disguised, never failed to work with us: “It’s damned awkward. But the General Staff want it done. They very much want it done.... And that’s that.”
    â€œVery good, sir.”
    Alias knew that we had accepted.
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    My very simple notion is that those who died served as bondsmen for the rest.

XII
    I have aged so much that all that I was is left behind me. I stare out through the great glittering plate of my windscreen. Below me are men. Infusoria wriggling under a microscope. Who can work up interest in a family of infusoria?
    Were it not for this twinge of pain that seems to me a living thing, I could sink into drowsy rumination, like an aged tyrant. It is only ten minutes since I spoke of our crews as supernumeraries. Pure rhetoric and sickeningly false. When I saw the German fighters below, did my fancy speak of tender sighs? It