North African campaign

The North African campaign enters this account through the second offensive against Rommel in Libya and, in particular, a disastrous accident during its opening days. A sandstorm turned a routine takeoff into a head-on collision between French and English Blenheim formations, killing fifteen airmen. The narrator recounts the catastrophe alongside his own absence from the flight: he was gravely ill in a military hospital in Damascus.

The Offensive and the Kamsin

The narrator places the accident in the first days of the second offensive against Rommel. A strong kamsin was blowing as three French Blenheims, commanded by Saint Péreuse, began taking off upwind. Out of a cloud of sand came three English Blenheims, approaching head-on: the pilots had started in the wrong direction, with the wind behind them.

The danger had become nearly irreversible. Both formations had already reached takeoff speed, carrying three thousand kilos of bombs between them. They were in the hundred-octane boost position, still on the ground but committed to going straight ahead and unable to maneuver. The wind and sand had brought the aircraft onto intersecting paths at the moment when neither group could turn aside.

Collision and Loss

The formations crashed into one another. Only Saint Péreuse and his observer, Bimont, escaped the collision; the other six French and nine English fliers were killed. The account emphasizes the violence of their deaths by describing dogs running across the sand for hours afterward with pieces of flesh in their jaws. The stark aftermath makes the accident more than a report of aircraft lost: it records the human remains left exposed in the desert.

The Narrator Elsewhere

The narrator survived the day partly because he was not flying. When the explosion occurred, he was in a military hospital in Damascus, dying from typhoid accompanied by internal hemorrhages. Captain Guyon and Major Vignes, the doctors caring for him, gave him no more than one chance in a thousand. Five transfusions had not stopped the hemorrhages, and his friends came to his bedside one after another to offer their blood.

A young Armenian nun, Sister Félicienne of the Order of Saint Joseph of the Lesser Apparition, nursed him with what he describes as Christian devotion. His delirium lasted a fortnight, and it took more than six weeks for his reason to return more or less completely. By placing this illness beside the airmen’s deaths, the narrative makes the campaign’s danger intimate and contingent: on the day the formations collided, the narrator’s own survival depended on hospital care and the blood offered by his friends.