Before you gave allegiance to the military you gave allegiance to life.

The other pilots out past my wings in the dark, I thought, Jim Roudabush and Pat Flanagan and Ed Carpinello, are they thinking too? We never talked about it, not once a word about what our life might be like after we had murdered a city. Roudy and Pat, Carp and I, were here not because we wanted to kill people but because every one of us loved to fly airplanes, and the highest-performance airplanes happen to be owned by the military forces of every country in the world. Air forces seduce pilots by shouting, Fly! If instead they shouted Kill! would there be young men and women in military cockpits today?

“If you are to be,” his words echoed that night, “you must begin by assuming responsibility.“ And you alone are responsible for every moment of your life, for every one of your acts. Not the general. You.

What would be the penalty, I thought suddenly, if one of us, or three or twelve ... what sentence if every pilot of every nation just happened to drop bombs that didn’t detonate? Could it be worse than the penalty we’d pay if we dropped bombs that did?

I listened, waiting in my airplane for the war to start. I’ll never know what I would have done had the order come to incinerate that city. But I was hearing his words, I was watching myself, and I was thinking about it.

In Wind, Sand and Stars, in Flight to Arras, how carefully he watched, with such calm judgment Saint-Exupéry measured his own choices, his own humanity. Whether he lived or died didn’t seem to make much difference to him—time and again he set off on adventures that placed human values over personal survival. His books are plays of light around a person who cared most of all for the community of humankind, who loved most of all to be part of that community, fashioning its destiny on our little planet.

I don’t agree with everything he says, this old friend I’ve never met, and some of his views still sound to me clipped and stiffened by his time. Yet the power of an idea is not measured by its eagerness to please or the date of its words; it is measured by the change that it brings in the lives of its readers.

“If what I wish is to preserve on earth a given type of man and the particular energy that radiates from him,” says Saint-Exupéry, “I must begin by salvaging the principles that animate that kind of man.”

Change man to person and we have the core of the latest force for change in the whole of world society. The principle is Affirm Life, and at this writing it looks as if barely, one by one by ten by a hundred, just barely enough of us have begun a change that might yet steer the planet this side of destruction.

Saint-Exupéry writes with grace and beauty, surely; he blends adventure with reflection in a way few writers have. Along the way, he writes with a whimsical sense of life, writes with the kindness and courtesy to catch sparkling detail that he knows we’ll enjoy.

Adventure and reflection—that’s how he makes lifelong friends of kids with polishing rags. He invites communication, and he stays around to talk in spite of what happened that last day of July, 1944.

The world, he said, it isn’t Us and Them, it’s only Us!

Once set afire, ideas burn till they’re quenched in action. Twenty years from now, in the night cockpits and passenger cabins of our hypersonic transports, on the soft-lit decks of our space colonies, will a lot of kids turned friends of his ideas be seeing them for truth, watching the planet turn safely beneath their wings?

What would he say if they told him that he hadn’t died in the war?

RICHARD BACH

Wind, Sand and Stars

Translated from the French by Lewis Galantière

I. The Craft

In 1926 I was enrolled as student airline pilot by the Latécoère Company, the predecessors of Aéropostale (now Air France) in the operation of the line between Toulouse, in southwestern France, and Dakar, in French West Africa. I was learning the craft, undergoing an apprenticeship served by all young pilots before they were allowed to carry the mails. We took ships up on trial spins, made meek little hops between Toulouse and Perpignan, and had dreary lessons in meteorology in a freezing hangar. We lived in fear of the mountains of Spain, over which we had yet to fly, and in awe of our elders.

These veterans were to be seen in the field restaurant—gruff, not particularly approachable, and inclined somewhat to condescension when giving us the benefit of their experience. When one of them landed, rain-soaked and behind schedule, from Alicante or Casablanca, and one of us asked humble questions about his flight, the very curtness of his replies on these tempestuous days was matter enough out of which to build a fabulous world filled with snares and pitfalls, with cliffs suddenly looming out of fog and whirling air-currents of a strength to uproot cedars. Black dragons guarded the mouths of the valleys and clusters of lightning crowned the crests—for our elders were always at some pains to feed our reverence. But from time to time one or another of them, eternally to be revered, would fail to come back.

I remember, once, a homecoming of Bury, he who was later to die in a spur of the Pyrenees. He came into the restaurant, sat down at the common table, and went stolidly at his food, shoulders still bowed by the fatigue of his recent trial. It was at the end of one of those foul days when from end to end of the line the skies are filled with dirty weather, when the mountains seem to a pilot to be wallowing in slime like exploded cannon on the decks of an antique man-o’-war.

I stared at Bury, swallowed my saliva, and ventured after a bit to ask if he had had a hard flight. Bury, bent over his plate in frowning absorption, could not hear me. In those days we flew open ships and thrust our heads out round the windshield, in bad weather, to take our bearings: the wind that whistled in our ears was a long time clearing out of our heads. Finally Bury looked up, seemed to understand me, to think back to what I was referring to, and suddenly he gave a bright laugh. This brief burst of laughter, from a man who laughed little, startled me. For a moment his weary being was bright with it. But he spoke no word, lowered his head, and went on chewing in silence.