Potez-25

The Potez-25 becomes the emblem of a band of older French servicemen who, after being kept from flying duties, take their training into their own hands as defeat closes in. While generals wait and the airfield fills with aircraft and people fleeing a military collapse, these planes keep taking off and landing: not a force capable of reversing events, but a visible, purposeful refusal to accept despair.

Assignment and Improvised Use

For months, the Potez-25 pilots had been promised that they would receive training and return to flying crews, performing liaison duties. Instead, the men—despite proudly wearing pilots’ insignia—had been assigned to non-flying work such as clerical duties and writing. When the promised restoration never came, they seized whatever Potez-25s were available and began teaching themselves to fly, steadily accumulating hours.

The narrator remembers roughly twenty men, mostly in their late forties, some veterans of World War I. They expected to be ready “for the first real battles,” treating the battles already lost, and the disaster still unfolding around them, as if these were merely a prelude to their own arrival in the sky. Their conviction gives the aircraft a practical purpose, even when the prospect of reaching the front in time seems increasingly remote.

The Aircraft Above the Airfield

The Potez-25s recur against a scene of disintegration. Defeated generals stand near the control tower; strange aircraft crowd the sky; and heavily armed Senegalese troops guard the machines against sabotage the narrator describes as hypothetical. Against this jumble, the old pilots’ planes continue to roar, land, and take off again. Their flight is compared to passengers taking swimming lessons in the middle of a shipwreck: an absurdly calm activity set inside catastrophe, and all the more striking for its persistence.

The pilots are not an anonymous military unit. They include schoolmasters, workmen, butchers, insurance clerks, grocers, men living as bums, and a priest. When they land, they maintain that they will still reach the front and take matters into their experienced hands. The narrator and his comrades wave to them affectionately; from their open cockpits, the pilots answer with grinning, determined faces. The greeting makes their repeated flights a human encounter as well as a visual sign of resolve.

The Veteran Aviators and Their Meaning

One returning pilot gives the Potez-25 episode its most comic, physical detail. He emerges dressed like a knight of the air from an earlier era, with a silk stocking over his head and cavalry breeches, panting after the effort of climbing out of the cockpit. He pushes aside the two friends who helped him down and heads straight for the beer waiting on the grass. His companions—one in a decorated khaki tunic, the other in a Saumur cavalry tunic and puttees—wink at the narrator and insist that they will prevail.

The planes’ significance lies in the contrast between their pilots’ modest circumstances and the scale of the collapse around them. They cannot undo defeat, and the narrator does not claim that their self-training changes the military outcome. Instead, their steady circuits become an image of the France of good wine and sunlit anger, rising from deep roots and blooming against the odds. The Potez-25 thus carries a defiant hope that is at once comic, vulnerable, and purposeful: its pilots continue preparing for a battle they believe they will reach, even as the airfield around them resembles the wreckage of a lost world.