Palestine appears as an operational setting in Romain Gary (narrator)’s wartime service: after being posted back to his squadron, he spent what he calls a peaceful time pursuing Italian submarines off its coast. The passage gives the place a sharply defined role—as the setting for routine patrols and for a failure that would outlast the mission itself.

Patrols off the Coast

The narrator describes the assignment as uneventful and says he always took a picnic with him. That quiet routine sets the scene for an attack near Cyprus, where the squadron encountered an Italian submarine on the surface. Though he regarded it as an easy target, the depth charge overshot by about a hundred feet, and the submarine was missed.

Failure and Its Aftermath

The failed attack altered the meaning of the patrol in retrospect. Romain Gary (narrator) says that he learned guilt and remorse from the incident; later, he sometimes woke screaming and drenched in a cold sweat, dreaming that he had missed the submarine again. He frames the nightmare in terms of the twenty men aboard the vessel whom he had failed to kill, an admission that clashes with his professed respect for humanity. Palestine thus remains in the account not simply as a wartime posting, but as the setting attached to a failure that returned in memory as moral unease.