The Narrator Nearly Dies of Typhoid in Damascus and Recovers

The narrator’s near-fatal illness in Damascus becomes a test of whether he can survive long enough to fulfill what he understands as a promise to his mother. In 1941, typhoid and internal hemorrhages left him close to death; after weeks of delirium and a slow recovery, he returned to flying. The episode is at once a medical crisis, a reckoning with maternal obligation, and a story in which the narrator gives survival an artistic and moral meaning.

Background and Earlier Illness

The Damascus crisis belongs to a pattern of grave illness in the narrator’s life. Earlier, after scarlet fever, acute kidney inflammation brought him close to death. At that time, his mother refused to let doctors operate on his right kidney, despite the recommendation of a specialist summoned from Berlin. Her decision arose from her belief that the operation might compromise his future sexual capacities. He survived that illness too, and the narrator later presents the episode as one of his mother’s forceful interventions on his behalf.

His mother’s own health had also become a source of fear. While managing the work of the family business, she collapsed after accidentally taking too much insulin; the episode disclosed to him that she had diabetes and had been giving herself daily injections without telling him. He feared that she might die before he had done what she expected of him. These earlier events give the later crisis in Damascus a family history: illness repeatedly threatens to separate mother and son, while the narrator experiences his survival as bound up with her future and the life she has imagined for him.

The Crisis in Damascus

During the second offensive against Rommel in Libya, the narrator was in a military hospital in Damascus rather than in the air. Typhoid with internal hemorrhages had made his condition so precarious that the doctors gave him only a one-in-a-thousand chance of recovery. Five transfusions did not stop the bleeding. His friends came to offer blood, and Sister Félicienne, an Armenian nun of the Order of Saint Joseph of the Lesser Apparition, nursed him. His delirium lasted a fortnight; it took more than six weeks for his reason to return substantially.

The hospital prepared for his death. After extreme unction had been administered, the air base was asked to provide a guard of honor for his remains, and a coffin was brought into his room. During a brief return to consciousness, he saw it and, in a confused attempt to escape what he regarded as a trap, made his way into the garden. He was delirious and physically depleted, yet still wore the cap of a second lieutenant. His attachment to the newly acquired insignia recalled the earlier injury to his pride at Avord, where he had been denied an officer’s commission. Even at the edge of death, the recognition attached to his rank remained important to him.

A Promise as a Reason to Live

The narrator describes his resistance to death through the promise he believes he must keep. His life, in his account, is not merely his own: it must become an instrument of justice and make it possible for his mother’s abilities to be recognized. He imagines returning with victories, writing a great book, and becoming an ambassador for France. These ambitions are not presented as completed achievements but as work still unfinished, and that incompletion gives his struggle a purpose he can hold onto amid the uncertainty of the hospital.

He understands this purpose through the language of art. To surrender would be to let life remain shapeless and absurd; survival would allow him to impose meaning on the material of his experience. The image of an umbilical cord makes that conviction intimate as well as literary: he imagines his mother’s will, vitality, and courage continuing to flow into him. The metaphor draws together the earlier illnesses, his fear of losing her, and his conviction that he cannot abandon the future she has anticipated.

His refusal of the priest’s final ministrations briefly breaks through his delirium, though he soon loses consciousness again. In another fevered vision, he imagines walking through the Buffa Market and along the Promenade des Anglais with his mother, celebrated as a returning heroine. The imagined public tribute reverses the helplessness of the hospital: his mother is honored, he has kept his promise, and their bond remains visible. It is a fantasy rather than an event that occurs, but it reveals the form of justice he hopes survival will make possible.

Recovery and Return to Service

Recovery was slow and did not restore him to his former condition. His fever subsided, but his mind continued to wander, and he could not initially recognize people or speak clearly. Phlebitis threatened his legs; infection in his jaw permanently paralyzed the lower left side of his face. His gall bladder had been affected, and myocarditis persisted. When he could finally articulate a question, he wanted to know when he and his comrades could return to battle. The doctors doubted that he would walk normally, warned that his heart might remain damaged, and did not expect him to fly operationally again.

Three months later, however, he was back with his Blenheim, hunting submarines over the Eastern Mediterranean with de Thuisy. This return to duty was a concrete reversal of the prognosis, though it did not undo the illness or its lasting consequences. He also had to negotiate further medical scrutiny: Ahmed, an Egyptian taxi driver, impersonated him before a medical board at an Royal Air Force hospital in Cairo and passed the examination. At the Damascus base, where the doctors knew how ill he had been, there was no comparable deception; he was told to take a month’s leave at Luxor before returning to an air crew. There he visited the tombs in the Valley of the Kings, fell in love with the Nile, and resumed work on his book.

The episode therefore ends not with an uncomplicated cure but with a return to action under altered conditions. The narrator flies again, while carrying lasting effects of the illness and the memory of how close he came to being counted among the dead. His survival lets him resume both military service and the unfinished work he associates with his mother’s hopes.