Sudan

Sudan is the setting for a late-war interval in which military routine persists while the narrator feels increasingly removed from meaningful combat. Rejoining his squadron there after a severe bout of typhoid, he flies from Khartoum as the Ethiopian campaign winds down; the relative quiet sharpens his sense of stagnation rather than bringing relief.

Air Service and the Khartoum Base

Sudan also lay along the continental ferry route used to deliver aircraft to the Libyan battlefields. The narrator’s account of service there centers on the Gordon’s Tree airfield at Khartoum, from which the squadron took off for bombing missions against Italian garrisons. By the time he returned to active duty, however, the Ethiopian campaign was already drawing to a close. The flights no longer encountered Italian fighters, and the few anti-aircraft bursts that met them seemed to belong to a campaign approaching its end.

Routine and Frustration

The missions settled into a repeated rhythm: the crews returned around sunset, spent the evening at nightclubs, and took off again at dawn. The clubs included companies of Hungarian dancers stranded in Egypt when Hungary entered the war against the Allies; the English had placed them in the clubs. Against this routine, the narrator read letters from his mother praising his supposed heroism, although his actual service seemed far short of the deeds she imagined.

The contrast between the quiet Sudanese sorties and the violent fighting in Libya became a source of acute frustration. In May, under the Sudanese sun, the dancers’ faces grew visibly thinner, while the men felt their vitality draining away. The narrator describes the period as one of stagnation and impotence: they were stationed within a war but felt unable to take part in its decisive action.

Narrative Significance

Sudan marks both the narrator’s return to his squadron after illness and his renewed confrontation with the distance between his mother’s expectations and his own experience. The campaign’s waning activity offers little sense of achievement; instead, the contrast with Libya makes his relative inactivity harder to bear. In this account, Khartoum is not simply a base for sorties but the setting of a suspended interval, where routine continues as morale declines.