Congo

Congo enters the memoir as a place of perilous air routes rather than as a developed geographic portrait. Its flooded forest becomes the site of a fatal crash, while its forests later swallow the aircraft and pilot on whom the narrator’s hoped-for reunion with Louison depends.

Setting and Air Links

The passages associate Congo with military liaison flights connecting the narrator’s wartime service to Brazzaville. Every fortnight, Hirlemann piloted a Blenheim on that route. A separate flying wing, piloted twice a month by Warrant Officer Soubabère between Brazzaville and Bangui, had carried Louison away and was expected to provide the narrator’s later passage to her. The place is thus defined by the routes crossing its forests—and by how easily those routes fail.

Hirlemann’s Crash

On a flight over Congo, Hirlemann’s plane lost an airscrew and crashed in a flooded forest. Hirlemann, Bequart, and Crouzet were killed at the scene; Courtiaud, the mechanic, survived with a broken leg. For three nights and four days, he fought off red ants reaching the wound and nearly lost his reason. The narrator had been due to travel with Hirlemann, but a bout of malaria left him unconscious for a week, keeping him away from the crash. The accident therefore brings the dangers of the Congo route into the narrator’s personal circle of friends, while illness inadvertently spares him from the flight.

The Failed Journey to Brazzaville

After the crash, the narrator’s journey to Brazzaville was postponed until Soubabère returned the following month. Soubabère vanished in the forests of Congo with the flying wing, an aircraft described as one only he and Jim Mollison knew how to handle. The narrator was then ordered back to his squadron on the Abyssinian front. He obeyed and never saw Louison again. Congo’s forests consequently mark not only a place of aviation disaster but also the point at which a hoped-for reunion is repeatedly deferred and ultimately lost: first by the crash, then by Soubabère’s disappearance, and finally by military reassignment.