East African Campaign (World War II)

The East African Campaign (World War II) appears in the memoir through the narrator’s postings and the changing rhythm of his service, rather than as a full account of the campaign’s military course. After a period of boredom in Bangui, he rejoins his squadron on the Ethiopian front; later, following a severe illness, he returns to the unit in Sudan as the campaign is already drawing to a close. The episodes make the campaign a story of frustrated purpose: he wants to reach the fighting, but repeatedly finds himself separated from it by routine, misadventure, or illness.

From Bangui to the Ethiopian front

Before joining the operations on the Ethiopian front, the narrator is posted with three Blenheims to Bangui, in French Equatorial Africa. Their assignment is to provide air cover for a territory where, as he wryly observes, mosquitoes seem the only serious danger from the sky. The distance from active fighting breeds frustration among the airmen. They signal their discontent by dive-bombing the Governor’s Residence with light exercise bombs and organizing a street procession in which residents carry banners demanding that the airmen be sent to the front. The authorities do not punish them for these protests.

Boredom also drives the pilots toward dangerous games. During one low flight over elephants, their aircraft strikes an animal and crashes, killing both the animal and the pilot. The narrator survives without injury, but a Belgian game warden strikes him with a rifle butt and objects to treating life so carelessly. The narrator is sentenced to fifteen days’ close arrest. Colonel Astier de Villatte eventually secures his release from this confinement, and he rejoins his squadron, then operating on the Ethiopian front. In the memoir’s account, this transfer is the practical consequence of a stretch of idleness that had turned frustration into recklessness.

The campaign near its end

The narrator’s service on the Ethiopian front is interrupted by typhoid fever and a long period of delirium in a Damascus hospital. When he eventually rejoins the squadron in Sudan, the Ethiopian campaign is already nearing its conclusion. Operating from Gordon’s Tree airfield at Khartoum, the crews no longer encounter Italian fighters. The anti-aircraft fire they do meet is sparse, and the narrator likens its smoke to the last breaths of a dying force.

The missions continue, but their routine underscores how little remains of the campaign’s earlier intensity. The airmen return around sunset, spend the evening at nightclubs, and take off again at dawn to bomb Italian garrisons. The narrator gives no broader account of the campaign’s outcome; instead, its waning phase is conveyed through this repeated pattern of flight, return, and renewed bombing, with the enemy’s resistance reduced to occasional gunfire.

Illness, absence, and return

The narrator’s hospital stay places him away from the squadron during a separate catastrophe in Libya, where French and English aircraft collide during takeoff in a sandstorm. He survives his illness after receiving repeated blood transfusions from friends and being cared for by Sister Félicienne, an Armenian nun. His recovery is slow: the fever and mental confusion take weeks to recede, and lasting physical effects remain. By the time he resumes service in Sudan, however, the Ethiopian campaign is almost over. His return therefore brings him back to operational flying without restoring the opportunity to participate in the front’s decisive phase.

That mismatch also shapes the memoir’s account of his mother’s letters. She celebrates his supposed heroic exploits, while his own description of the Sudan posting stresses quiet airspace, routine sorties, and his search for relief from stagnation. The campaign is thus filtered through the distance between the life his mother imagines for him and the less glorious service he remembers. Its closing phase is not presented as triumph or defeat in strategic terms, but as a diminishing sequence of missions that leaves him conscious of how far his actual experience falls short of the expectations placed upon him.

Narrative significance

The episodes connect military service to the memoir’s recurring tension between action and helplessness. In Bangui, the airmen’s frustration produces conspicuous pranks and a fatal accident; in Sudan, the squadron keeps flying even as the campaign’s end makes its work feel repetitive and its chances for combat scarce. The narrator’s illness intensifies that sense of interruption: he is absent through a dangerous period, then returns only when the Ethiopian campaign is nearly finished.

The campaign’s importance in the narrative lies chiefly in this uneven experience of wartime purpose. The narrator moves from an outlying posting to the Ethiopian front, away from the squadron through illness, and back into service at a moment of diminishing activity. By setting his mother’s praise beside his own account of boredom and routine, the memoir makes the campaign a measure of the distance between heroic expectation and the life of a serviceman.