Read Online Flight to Arras by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry - Free Book Online

were employed. What we were up against was not the irresponsible attitude of the manufacturers. Men are for the most part decent and conscientious. I am sure that almost always their seeming lack of initiative is a result and not a cause of their ineffectualness.
    Ineffectualness weighed us down, all of us in the uniform of France, like a sort of doom. It hung over the infantry that stood with fixed bayonets in the face of German tanks. It lay upon the air crews that fought one against ten. It infected those very men whose job it should have been to see that our guns and controls did not freeze and jam.
    Â 
    We were living in the blind belly of an administration. An administration is a machine. The more perfect the machine, the more human initiative is eliminated from it. If, into a perfect machine, you introduce steel at one end, automobiles will come out of the other end. There will be no room for technical flaws, errors of measurement, human carelessness. And in a perfect administration, where man plays the part of a cog, such things as laziness, dishonesty, or injustice, cannot prevail.
    But a machine is not built for creation. It is built for administration. It administers the transformation of steel into motor cars. It goes unvaryingly through motions pre-ordained once and for always. And an administration, like a machine, does not create. It carries on. It applies a given penalty to a given breach of the rules, a given method to a given aim. An administration is not conceived for the purpose of solving fresh problems. If, into your automobile-manufacturing machine, you inserted wood at one end, furniture would not come out at the other end. For this to happen, a man would have to intervene with authority to rip the whole thing up. But an administration is conceived as a safeguard against disturbances resulting from human initiative. The gear-wheels of the watch stand guard against the intervention of man. The watchmaker has no place among them.
    Â 
    I was posted to Group 2-33 in November 1939. When I arrived, my fellow pilots gave me due warning.
    â€œYou’ll be flying over Germany,” they said, “without guns or controls.”
    And to console me, they added: “But don’t take it too hard, for it really doesn’t matter. The German fighters always down you before you know they are there.”
    Six months later, in May 1940, the guns and the controls were still freezing up.
    Â 
    In the spring of 1940, everybody was repeating an ancient French saw: “France is always saved at the eleventh hour by a miracle.”
    There was a reason for the miracle. It used to happen occasionally that the beautiful administrative machine would break down and everybody would agree that it could not be repaired. For want of better, men would be substituted for the machine. And men would save France.
    If a bomb had reduced the Air Ministry to ashes, a corporal—any corporal at all—would have been summoned, and the government would have said to him:
    â€œYou are ordered to see that the controls are thawed out. You have full authority. It’s up to you. But if they are still freezing up two weeks from now you go to prison.”
    The controls would perhaps have been thawed out.
    Â 
    I could cite a hundred examples of this flaw. The Requisitions Committee for the Department of the North, for example, used to requisition heifers quick with young, and the slaughter-houses of France were transformed into graveyards of fœtuses. The requisitioning administration was a perfect machine. And because it was, not a single cog in the machine, not a single colonel on the board, had the slightest authority to act otherwise than as a cog. Each cog, as if the machine were a watch, was obedient to another cog. Revolt against the whole was useless. And this is why, once the machine began to go out of order, the cogs light-heartedly took to slaughtering freshened heifers. It may have been the lesser evil.