Libya appears in the memoir as a wartime destination and operational setting, bound to the narrator’s enforced separation from Louison and to a deadly aviation accident during an offensive against Rommel. Rather than serving as a sustained portrait of place, it marks a point in his military trajectory where orders, illness, and loss converge.

Posting and separation

After two attempts to reach Louison in Brazzaville were thwarted, the narrator was ordered back to his squadron on the Abyssinian front. He obeyed, never saw her again, and later received only intermittent news that she was being cared for and hoped to recover. When those reports ceased and his inquiries met with official noncooperation, he was sent to Libya. The posting therefore follows a personal separation that remained unresolved: Louison had asked when he would return, but military orders carried him elsewhere.

The offensive and the air collision

The narrator’s account next places him in Libya for a second offensive against Rommel. In its first days, a violent kamsin contributed to a collision between three French Blenheims and three English ones. The English aircraft, emerging from a sand cloud in the wrong direction with the wind behind them, met the French formation head-on as both groups accelerated for take-off. At that speed, the pilots could not maneuver; six French and nine English airmen died. Saint-Péreuse and his observer, Bimont, were the only two in the French formation to avoid the collision.

The narrator was not flying that day. He was in a military hospital in Damascus, gravely ill with typhoid and internal hemorrhages. His survival depended on repeated blood transfusions, with friends coming to offer their blood, and on the care of Sister Félicienne, an Armenian nun. Libya’s offensive is thus narrated alongside a separate crisis far from the flight: the accident killed his comrades while he lay critically ill.

Place in the wartime narrative

Libya’s significance in the memoir rests on these linked circumstances rather than on a detailed description of its landscape or society. It is where the narrator’s orders place him after his failed effort to return to Louison, and the setting for an offensive whose opening days bring sudden, large-scale loss. His absence from the fatal flight is a matter of chance, while his illness in Damascus makes that chance part of a broader narrative of precarious survival. The account presents military service as a succession of duties and separations in which the narrator may escape one danger only to confront another.