Gibraltar

Gibraltar is both a wartime waystation and a moral turning point in the narrator’s journey. There, the British fleet’s return after the attack on French naval forces at Mers-el-Kébir seems to betray the last hope he had placed in Britain. Yet the harbor also brings him to French airmen continuing the fight, and forces him to distinguish his anger at the British from the larger need to resist Germany.

A Harbor at the Crossroads

The narrator arrives in Gibraltar as a French serviceman trying to reach the forces still fighting. Its setting, in the Mediterranean light where Spain meets Africa, gives the harbor a threshold quality: he is leaving one stage of the journey but has not yet reached England. The British fleet’s return makes that pause politically charged. It has just attacked French naval units at Mers-el-Kébir, and the news strikes the travelers as a blow against the hope that had carried them toward the British side.

The French Flag and the Change of Purpose

The narrator’s first response is to make for a French tricolor flying from a destroyer. His anger briefly turns toward thoughts of revenge against Admiral Somerville, but the long, cold swim gives him time to reconsider. He concludes that the British attack, however indefensible, also demonstrates Britain’s determination to continue the war. He therefore resolves to go to England after all: the need to keep fighting outweighs his desire to reject the British.

When he reaches the destroyer, an air-force sergeant explains that it is heading to England with twelve sergeants joining Charles de Gaulle. The men share the narrator’s condemnation of the attack, but also agree that Britain’s decision to continue the war is what matters most at that moment. The ship offers him a place aboard, along with a share of the potato work. He declines the offer and dives back into the sea, an episode that preserves the narrator’s comic resistance even as his larger decision has been made.

From Gibraltar Toward Glasgow

The crossing from Gibraltar to Glasgow takes seventeen days. Aboard Oakrest, the narrator encounters other French servicemen who have left to continue the fight; some use assumed names to protect relatives in France from reprisals, while others are trying to leave the past behind. Their company turns the passage into a meeting of exiles whose reasons for departure differ but whose destination is bound to the continuing war.

Among them is Bouquillard, the oldest of the group at thirty-five, whose quiet manner conceals a fierce commitment to France. The narrator later remembers him as the first French ace of the Battle of Britain, killed after his sixteenth victory. In that later recollection, Bouquillard’s fate gives the departure from Gibraltar a longer echo: the crossing carries not only the living toward another front, but also the memory of those who will not return.

Narrative Significance

Gibraltar concentrates the contradiction at the heart of this stage of the journey. The British action at Mers-el-Kébir deepens the narrator’s grief and distrust, while the French tricolor and the airmen bound for Charles de Gaulle make continued resistance tangible. The location does not resolve the conflict between France and Britain; it marks the narrator’s decision to act despite it. His movement through the harbor—from the British ship, toward the French flag, and onward toward England—turns a transit point into a test of allegiance and purpose.