Saint-Exupéry flew reconnaissance during the collapse of France in May 1940, and this is one flight — low over Arras, through flak, to photograph German positions in a sector already lost. Everybody in the squadron knows the mission is pointless. Crews go anyway, and most don’t come back. He straps into a cold cockpit, runs through the checks, and the plane climbs, and while it does his mind goes elsewhere: To the roads jammed with refugees, to a governess from his childhood, to what a country is and what a man owes one when the thing is already finished. He was a working pilot before he was a writer, and the flying is exact — the smell of oxygen, frozen controls, the strange calm of being shot at from 700 meters.
Flight to Arras