Flight To Arras / Pilote de Guerre

What book could you read over and over again?

The Prince of the Sky.

Writer, poet, illustrator, pilot, and above all, a romantic guy regarding most aspects of life. Antoine de Saint-Exupery was blessed with quite a few qualities when he came to this world.

Saint-Ex, as friends and family knew him, became famous thanks to his book The Little Prince, a deceiving work that seems intended for children, but holds inside a rather deep analysis of life and human nature.

Because of The Little Prince, which can be considered his masterpiece, the name Saint-Exupery always floated around when the conversation was about books, either at school or at the local library. The name was familiar, but I had never read any of his works until the early 1990s. One day my wife and I (my girlfriend at the time) were wandering through the aisles of the public library (similar to surfing the net in the pre-internet era) when I found a little book entitled Piloto de Guerra (War Pilot, in Portuguese), needless to say, I grabbed the book, took it home and read it in 2 days. To be fair, it is a short book, but I read it wishing it would never end.

The book is a personal account of a single reconnaissance mission he flew over the town of Arras not long after the German invasion of France. As a master storyteller, Saint-Ex condenses months of the futile fight against a more powerful and skilled enemy into one terrifying mission.

At the beginning of the war, he was assigned to Reconnaissance Group II/33 flying the twin-engine Bloch MB.170. The French Air Force had no more than fifty reconnaissance crews, twenty-three of which served in Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s Group. After only a few days, seventeen of the crews in his unit had already perished.

 
The book is filled with human emotions, fear, frustration, friendship, and anger, but also with philosophy. With the French military in shambles, he sees the missions as a waste of human lives, “like glasses of water thrown onto a forest fire”.

Perhaps I should refrain from revealing more details and encourage you to read the book.

The book was initially published in 1942, the first time I read a copy of the 1951 edition. The English title, Flight to Arras, though relevant to the story, does not have the same impact as the original title. In my opinion, a direct translation would have been more appropriate for the work.

That is my copy of the book. I bought it online and for some reason, it traveled from the USA to Australia before arriving in Brazil; and I brought it with me when I moved to Canada. It certainly has quite a few hours of flight, perhaps it is a good homage to the author. I have read it more times than I care to count and I believe the time to read it again is near.