Avord airbase

Avord airbase is the setting of a decisive episode in Romain Gary’s military formation: after a long, unexplained delay, he entered the officers’ flying school and worked to recover the time he had lost. The training gave him the chance to fly, but the later consequences of his treatment there made Avord more than a school in his memory. Its graduation process became bound up with rank, recognition, and the fierce insistence on remaining alive that recurs during his wartime illness.

Arrival and delayed entry

With a certificate of advanced military preparation and a law degree, Romain Gary expected to proceed directly to the officers’ flying school at Avord. Instead, he remained at Salon-de-Provence for nearly six weeks. When he asked why, officers and noncommissioned officers could offer no instructions or explanation. He made repeated representations through official channels without result.

A sympathetic officer eventually took an interest in his case and supported his protests. Gary was then ordered to report to Avord, where he arrived a full month late, having missed almost a third of the course. The delay was not simply an inconvenience: it left him to make up substantial lost ground before graduation. His response was to treat reaching the school as a victory in itself and begin work with an unfamiliar determination.

Training and the flying school

Gary struggled with the theory of the compass, but managed to catch up. His marks were generally average; flying and infantry leadership were the exceptions. In those fields, he discovered that he could command with the authority of word and gesture he associated with his mother. Avord thus tested him in more than technical instruction: it gave him a setting in which a previously uncertain capacity for leadership became apparent to him.

His memories also preserve the material character of the training. Cadets spent long hours on the airfield in heavy, one-piece leather suits, helmets, gloves, and goggles, then climbed into the open cockpit of a Potez-25. The aircraft’s primitive instruments, slow pace, and the importance of individual initiative gave flying a quality he remembered fondly. The school also used the Leo-20 biplane, whose pilot could receive hand signals from a cadet standing in its nose. These details made the course vivid in retrospect, but they also carried a larger historical judgment: the methods and aircraft, in Gary’s account, showed a French military establishment preparing for a kind of war already out of date, shortly before the Battle of Britain.

Rank, recognition, and the Avord wound

As graduation approached, cadets awaited their final standing and the opportunity to choose the units to which they would be posted. The evidence does not recount the full outcome of that process, but it shows how strongly its consequences remained with Gary. A few weeks before his later illness in Damascus, he had been promoted to second lieutenant. There, an administrative error removed his name from the list of the living; he later complained that soldiers no longer saluted him and behaved as though he did not exist. He acknowledged that, after what had happened at Avord, he may have attached excessive importance to his insignia and to the outward signs of respect due to his rank.

The connection returns with force during the Damascus crisis. As he lay gravely ill, a guard of honor was being arranged for what was expected to be his funeral. In a brief return to awareness, he saw a coffin in his room and fled. In his delirium he had put on his second-lieutenant’s cap, with its newly acquired gold rank braid, and refused to be separated from it. Gary himself interpreted this attachment as evidence that the shock he had suffered three years earlier at Avord had been more severe than he had understood at the time. Rank, which the school had made newly attainable, had become an emblem he guarded even when he could barely recognize his surroundings.

Return and narrative significance

The story of Avord reaches its resolution not at the graduation parade but years later, under the Arc de Triomphe. Some months after his recovery, Charles de Gaulle pinned the Cross of the Liberation to Gary’s tunic. Gary described the honor as closing the Avord episode forever: the public recognition that had once seemed bound up with delayed orders, a missed portion of the course, and the marks of military rank now arrived at the highest symbolic level of the account.

Avord’s place in the narrative is therefore shaped by return. Its training offers a concrete beginning to Gary’s military career, with its missed weeks, difficult theory, and exhilarating early aircraft. Its lasting emotional consequence surfaces indirectly in Damascus, where the cap exposes how deeply the earlier injury to his sense of status endured. The final decoration does not erase that history; it gives it an ending by transforming the insignia he had clung to in delirium into a recognized honor. The airbase becomes the point where professional aspiration and personal vulnerability first meet, and to which the later story returns before it can move on.