Damascus is where Romain Gary nearly died of typhoid during the war and where his recovery was measured against the demands of military service. The city’s hospital and air base frame two linked ordeals: first, a prolonged illness that left him close to death; later, a medical review that delayed his return to an air crew but did not end his flying career.

Wartime illness and the threat of death

Gary was in the military hospital at Damascus when a typhoid infection with internal hemorrhages left his doctors giving him only a slight chance of survival. He had received five transfusions, and his friends came to his bedside to offer their blood. Sister Félicienne, an Armenian nun of the Order of Saint Joseph of the Lesser Apparition, nursed him. His delirium lasted a fortnight, and it took more than six weeks for his reason to return substantially. The illness also coincided with the deaths of French and English airmen in a collision during takeoffs in Libya; Gary survived that accident because he was already hospitalized in Damascus.

The possibility of his death became an official expectation. When doctors thought he had only hours to live, the Damascus air base was asked to provide a guard of honor for his remains in the hospital chapel, and a coffin was brought into his room. During a brief return to consciousness, Gary saw it and dragged himself into the garden. He was then a recently promoted second lieutenant, and he clung to his new officer’s cap, whose gold rank braid had particular significance after the earlier denial of a commission at Avord. He later recalled that an administrative error had removed his name from the list of the living, so that soldiers no longer saluted him. In this account, the cap and the missing salute make military recognition a small but persistent concern within a much larger fight for life.

Treatment, survival, and lasting effects

The doctors treated Gary with an icy-sheet procedure, which he also recalled having undergone during an earlier grave illness. His condition remained severe, and his recovery brought lasting consequences: an infection damaged a nerve in the lower left side of his face, leaving permanent paralysis there, while myocarditis and other complications continued after the fever subsided. For a time he could neither recognize people nor speak clearly. When his mind finally cleared enough for him to articulate a question, he wanted to know when he and his comrades could return to battle. The doctors told him that, as far as they were concerned, the war was over for him; they doubted he would walk normally and were unsure that his heart would allow him to fly again.

His later account gives survival meaning through his bond with his mother and his sense of unfinished obligations. He understood his life as something he had to carry back to her, along with the achievements he hoped to make. He describes that connection as an umbilical cord that had not been cut, a source of his mother’s will and vitality. Damascus is therefore not only the place where medical treatment kept him alive; it is also the setting in which his determination to live is tied to a promise and to the future he still hoped to build.

Return to the air

After leaving hospital, Gary did not immediately regain permission to fly. Three months later he was back with his Blenheim, hunting submarines over the Eastern Mediterranean, but he still had to face medical officers at the Damascus base. They had seen how ill he had been and knew that he continued to suffer blackouts and fainting spells. They ordered him to take a month’s leave in the Valley of the Kings before even considering his return to an air crew.

The Damascus review thus imposed a pause rather than a final bar. Gary spent the required leave at Luxor, where he visited the tombs, traveled along the Nile, resumed work on his book, and wrote to his mother after a long silence. His later return to flying contrasts with the doctors’ doubts in the hospital: the city marks both the point at which his operational life seemed finished and the medical checkpoint after which he could begin to resume it.