But to do it as one honors ancient rites when they have no longer any significance. When the god that lived in them has withdrawn from them. I should wait for night, I said to myself; and if I was still alive I would walk alone on the highway that runs through our village. Alone and safely isolated in my beloved solitude. So that I might discover why it is I ought to die.

II

I awoke out of my daydream—was startled out of it by an astonishing proposal.

“If this sortie bothers you, Saint-Ex; if you don’t feel up to it today, I can—”

“Oh, come, Major!”

He knew perfectly well that his proposal was idiotic. And I knew why he made it. If a pilot doesn’t get back you begin to recall how solemn he was when he was ordered out. You say to yourself that he must have had a premonition of his end. And you accuse yourself of having wilfully brushed it aside. You take time out for an attack of conscience.

The major’s scruple reminded me of Israel. Two days before, I had been sitting smoking at the window of the Intelligence Room. Israel, when I caught sight of him through the window, was walking swiftly past. His nose was red. A big nose, very Jewish and very red. Suddenly there seemed to me something queer about that big red nose.

This Israel, whose nose I was staring at, was a man I profoundly liked. He was one of the most courageous pilots of the Group. One of the most courageous and one of the most modest. He had heard so much talk of Jewish craftiness that he probably mistook his courage for a form of craftiness. To gain a victory is to act craftily.

There I sat, watching that red nose that gleamed in my sight only for an instant, so swift were the steps that carried Israel and his nose out of view. I turned to Gavoille, and without meaning to make a joke of it, I said:

“Why do you suppose his nose is like that?”

Gavoille answered: “His mother made it like that.” And then added quickly: “Low-altitude sortie. Can’t blame the fellow.”

That night, when we had given up looking for Israel to get back, I thought again of that nose, planted in the middle of a totally expressionless face and yet revealing, with a sort of genius of its own, the burden of the thoughts revolving in the man’s mind. If it had been my job to order Israel on that sortie, the memory of his nose would have haunted me like a reproach. Israel, surely, had responded to the order with no more than a “Yes, sir,” a “Very good, sir.” Israel, surely, had not allowed a single muscle of his face to quiver on hearing the order. But gently, insidiously, treacherously, his nose had reddened. Israel had been able to control the muscles of his face, but not the color of his nose. And in the silence in which he had received the order, his nose had taken advantage of him. Unknown to Israel, it had made clear to the major its emphatic disapproval of the sortie.

This was the kind of thing that made Alias hesitate to send into action men he imagined might be subject to premonitions. Premonitions are more often false than true; but when you are seized by one, a military order will sound like a court sentence. And Alias was not a judge, after all, but a group commander.

There was the case the other day of the gunner I shall call T. As Israel was all courage, so T.