Khartoum is the Sudanese air base from which the narrator’s squadron operated as the Ethiopian campaign neared its end. The city’s role is marked by a contrast: missions continued, but the absence of Italian fighters and the narrator’s private unease made this phase feel less like decisive action than suspended purpose.

Airfield and Campaign

The squadron took off from Gordon’s Tree airfield at Khartoum. By then the Ethiopian campaign was already drawing to a close: the crews no longer encountered Italian fighters, and the few anti-aircraft bursts that greeted them seemed like the last breaths of a dying campaign. They still bombed Italian garrisons, but the work had lost the intensity of an active front.

Off-Duty Life

The aircraft usually returned at sunset, leaving time for visits to nightclubs where English authorities had “interned” companies of Hungarian dancers stranded in Egypt after their country entered the war against the Allies. The men spent the night there, then took off again at dawn for another bombing mission. Khartoum’s routine thus alternated between combat and leisure, with neither dispelling the sense of confinement and inactivity.

Narrative Significance

The narrator measures his experience at Khartoum against the heroic deeds celebrated in letters from his mother. Rather than feeling equal to her praise, he sought solace among the dancers, whose faces seemed to grow thinner under the Sudanese sun in May. He and his fellow airmen felt their manhood draining away while intense fighting continued in Libya; their attempts to reassure themselves and assert their virility expose the frustration beneath the squadron’s seemingly settled routine. Khartoum is therefore not simply a departure point for missions, but the setting for a disquieting mismatch between the glory imagined from afar and the stagnation the airmen experienced there.