Elephants

Elephants appear both in a wartime episode that exposes the cost of treating life carelessly and in the narrator’s later search for companionship among animals. The herd is not merely scenery: its presence interrupts the pilots’ reckless play with consequences, while elephants also belong to the natural world the narrator turns to as he lives with the absence of fallen comrades.

The Crash in Africa

While posted with three Blenheims to Bangui, the narrator describes the airmen’s frustration with routine flights and their attempts to release that tension through dangerous games in worn-out aircraft. During one such episode, a plane diving close to the ground over a herd of elephants touched one of the animals and crashed. The elephant and the pilot were killed; the narrator climbed out of the wreckage unharmed.

A Belgian game warden rebuked the airmen for treating life as if it could be risked without consequence. The narrator was sentenced to fifteen days’ close arrest, which he spent clearing the garden at his bungalow. The episode turns bored bravado into a reckoning: the animal’s death is not incidental to the danger but the event that makes the recklessness impossible to dismiss.

Animals and the Work of Memory

Elsewhere, the narrator describes the emptiness left by successive losses among his wartime comrades. He seeks out open places, including the beach at Big Sur, where he imagines there is room for those who are gone. His attempts to find company among animals include dogs, birds, and elephants; seals that swim toward shore and seabirds circling overhead can awaken a hope of friendship that he recognizes as childish, yet cannot help feeling.

Elephants therefore recur in sharply different circumstances: first as animals caught in the consequences of human risk-taking, later as part of the company the narrator longs for. The contrast does not erase the earlier death. Instead, it places the narrator’s yearning for animal companionship beside a memory of an animal whose life was lost through his squadron’s conduct.

Defense of Life

The narrator connects the wartime episode to the defense of elephants associated with his own Morel. In his broader argument against prudence that counsels people to keep out of danger, he invokes Morel’s defense of elephants alongside resistance fighters and the makers of art and civilization. The reference gives the animals significance beyond the crash: their protection becomes one example of choosing to act for vulnerable life, even when such action entails risk.

Across these passages, elephants are neither simply symbols nor a backdrop to human affairs. The crash gives an elephant’s death a concrete place in the narrator’s account of wartime irresponsibility; the later recollections place elephants among the creatures through which he seeks connection; and the reference to Morel makes their defense part of a larger rejection of passive submission.