We know that they are absurd; but the Staff knows that as well as we do. It gives orders because orders have to be given. Giving orders is its trade, in time of war. And everyone knows what war looks like. Handsome horsemen transmit the orders—or rather, to be modern about it, motorcyclists. The orders ordain events, change the face of the world. The handsome horsemen are like the stars—they bring tidings of the future. In the midst of turmoil and despair, orders arrive, flung to the troops from the backs of steaming horses. And then all is well—at least, so says the blueprint of war. So says the pretty picture-book of war. Everybody struggles as hard as he can to make war look like war. Piously respects the rules of the game. So that war may perhaps be good enough to agree to look like war.

Orders are given for the sacrifice of the air arm because war must be made to look like war. And nobody admits meanwhile that this war looks like nothing at all. That no part of it makes sense. That not a single blueprint fits the circumstances. That the puppets have been cut free of the strings which continue to be pulled.

In all seriousness the Staffs issue orders that never reach anybody. They ask us for intelligence impossible to provide. But the air arm cannot undertake to explain war to the Staffs. Reconnaissance pilots might be able to test or verify the Staffs’ hypotheses. But there are no longer any hypotheses. Fifty reconnaissance crews are asked to sketch the face of a war that has no face. The Staffs appeal to us as if we were a tribe of fortune-tellers.

While Alias was speaking I threw a glance at Dutertre—my fortune-telling observer. This was what he said afterwards.

“What do they take us for, sending us off on low-altitude sorties? Only yesterday I had to tick off a colonel from division headquarters who was talking the same rot. ‘Will you tell me,’ I said to him; ‘will you tell me how I am going to report the enemy’s position to you from an altitude of fifty feet when I’m doing three hundred miles an hour?’ He looked at me as if I was the one who was mad. ‘Why,’ he said, ‘that’s easy. You can tell according to whether they shoot or not. If they shoot at you, the positions are German.’ Imagine! The bloody fool!”

What Dutertre knew, and the colonel seemed to forget, was that the French army never saw French aeroplanes. We had roughly one thousand planes scattered between Dunkerque and Alsace. Diluted in infinity, so far as the men on the ground were concerned.