London

London is a wartime meeting place and communications link in Romain Gary’s account of exile and service. French volunteers assemble there at Olympia Hall, while letters routed to Charles de Gaulle in London carry the voice of the narrator’s mother across years of separation. The city joins military uncertainty to the private bond that helps him endure it.

Assembly and daily life

At Olympia Hall, the first French volunteers gather in London. Their presence marks the beginning of a life organized around the hope of fighting, though the narrator’s account of the hall dwells on an unexpectedly ordinary diversion: chess. English women from well-to-do families regularly visit the volunteers, and one blonde woman in military uniform plays game after game with him. She wins consistently and immediately proposes another match.

For a French volunteer eager for combat, repeated games with a formidable player become an exasperating interruption. He eventually avoids her and watches her play an artillery sergeant, who also appears to lose heart under the contest. The episode makes the volunteers’ waiting visible: military ambition is present, but so are long stretches of social contact and enforced idleness.

The narrator arrives without knowing English and has difficulty communicating with local people. Gestures sometimes make his wishes understood. He reflects that not knowing the language can simplify encounters by stripping away conversational preliminaries. In London, the practical barrier of exile is therefore also, briefly, a way of reducing social exchange to its essentials.

Leave, loss, and military service

London is also where the narrator is on leave when Lucien telephones him. Lucien says that all is well and morale is high; after putting down the receiver, he kills himself. The sudden change between the reassuring call and the news of Lucien’s death gives the London episode its starkest reversal. The narrator is furious at first, but says that his anger does not last. He is later assigned, with two corporals, to escort Lucien’s coffin to a small military cemetery.

The account does not make London the end of that journey: the cemetery is identified only by an initial, and the escort continues beyond the city. London is the point from which the narrator receives the call and learns of the death, linking a moment of ordinary leave to the losses that accompany military service.

Letters addressed to London

The first letters from the narrator’s mother reach him shortly after he arrives in England. She sends them secretly to a friend in Switzerland, who forwards them to London, care of Charles de Gaulle. They are brief, usually written in pencil, and undated. They continue to follow the narrator through his wartime wanderings until his return to Nice three years and six months later, on the eve of victory.

Their route makes London more than a location on the map of exile: it is an address through which the mother’s words can reach her son. He describes the letters as sustaining him with a courage stronger than his own. Their tone grows increasingly elevated, as his mother imagines him performing extraordinary feats, although he acknowledges that his career as a champion has not yet taken concrete shape. Meanwhile, he runs, exercises, plays ping-pong, juggles, and continues writing fiction. Her confidence accompanies these efforts even when the life she imagines and the life he is living do not match.

London in the story of belonging

The importance of London is sharpened by the narrator’s account of how he learned to imagine France. As a child in Lithuania, he encountered the country through his mother’s stories and devotion; later, he says that her voice was among those to which he rallied when he heard Charles de Gaulle’s call after the fall of France. In London, the mother’s wartime letters are routed through the same general whom he associates with that call. The city thus connects separation and continued allegiance without resolving the tension between them.

The letters reach him in England but are addressed to London, and this distinction matters: London is a point in the network that sustains him, not a substitute for the home his mother taught him to desire. Its narrative significance lies in these practical acts of assembly and transmission—volunteers gathering at Olympia Hall, a call received during leave, and undated notes finding their way to a serviceman far from home.