Flight to Arras by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry Page A

was potentially the cause of death among those people. For, moving upstream against the flow, the lorry could not but bottle up the whole highway.
    â€œYou are mad! Let us through! The children are dying!”
    â€œWe’re fighting a war.”
    â€œWhat war? Where are you fighting it? It will take you three days to go a mile against this current.”
    Here was a handful of French soldiers in a lorry, trying to reach a point to which they had been ordered and which had certainly been abandoned to the enemy hours before. All that they could think about was their plain duty:
    â€œGangway, there!”
    â€œWhy don’t you let us ride with you? You are beasts!”
    A child bawls.
    â€œAnd the kid...”
    But the kid has stopped crying. It takes milk to make a child cry.
    â€œWe’re fighting a war.”
    There was a kind of despairing stupidity in the way they repeated it.
    â€œBut you will never find your war! You will croak on the road with the rest of us!”
    â€œWe’re fighting a war.”
    They were by no means sure of what they were saying. They were by no means sure that they were fighting a war. They had never seen the enemy. They were rolling in a lorry towards a goal more fugitive than a mirage. They were moving towards nothing more than a peace that was a pool of putrefaction. And as they were caught up inextricably in the chaos, they jumped down from the lorry. Instantly they were surrounded.
    â€œHave you any water?”
    So they shared their water.
    â€œHave you any bread?”
    And they shared their bread.
    â€œBut you can’t leave her here to die!”
    So into their lorry they put the woman who lay dying in a car wrecked by the side of the road.
    â€œAnd what about this child?”
    The child went in beside the dying woman.
    â€œAnd this woman in labor.”
    They put her in beside the living child.
    And for another woman they found room merely because she was crying so bitterly.
    It took an hour to free the lorry and turn it round till it too faced south. Rising like an erratic block, it too would now be carried downstream by the civilian flood. The soldiers had been converted to this peace. Because they hadn’t been able to find the war. Because the musculature of the war was invisible, Because the gun aimed at you kills a child. Because on your way up to the lines you stumble upon women in labor. Because it is as useless to tty to transmit information or receive a command as to communicate with the inhabitants of Mars. There is no longer an army. There are only men.
    They have been converted to this peace. They have been changed by the force of things into mechanics, doctors, shepherds, stretcher-bearers. Because, since these little people are ignorant of how to cure the ills of their scrap-iron, the soldiers have taken to repairing their cars. And not one of them could tell you, in the midst of his sweating labor, whether he was a hero or a man who deserved to be court-martialled. It would not astonish him if he were decorated on the spot. Nor if he were stood up against a wall with a dozen bullets in his skull. Nor if he were demobilized. Nothing would astonish him. It is a long time since he and his kind have crossed the frontiers of astonishment.
    Here is an immense stew in which not an order, not a movement, not a scrap of news, not a wave of anything at all can run on beyond a single mile. Exactly as the villages topple one by one into the common sewer, so these army lorries, absorbed into this peace, are one by one converted to this peace. These handfuls of men who would have accepted without question the notion of their imminent death—assuming they had so much as thought of it—now accept the duties they meet; and they fall to their job of repairing an antique carryall into which three nuns, embarked upon God knows what pilgrimage, off for God knows what haven invented in a fairytale, have hustled a dozen children threatened by