A Pilot Saved
ONE needs to be very guarded about this book, for it would be easy to be carried away into sentimentality by the circumstances of its writing. To be, therefore, as matter-of-fact and objective as its author—Flight-Lieut. Simpson was a regular officer of the peace- time Air Force, and on the outbreak of war automatically proceeded to France as a member of one of our exiguous strength of Battle Bomber squadrons based round about Rheims, and grandiloquently termed the A.A.S.F., " Advanced Air Striking Force."
The atmosphere of that nightmare time—" nightmare' because it was known by almost everyone out there to be a tragic farce—is accurately caught by the author, and is of absorbing interest.
In May of 1940 the storm burst, and. the real stuff started— within a day of the time that had been foreseen by our higher
Intelligence. The "Battles " mounting one forward-firing machine-gun (at a time when. the fighter aircraft of each side were using eight or more machine-guns or several cannon, were sent in bombing troop-columns and bridges. Says the writer, " the losses among fighter pilots—all honour to their skill—were small. Those of the bomber crews were very large." They were. The writer was shot down in flames on the first day of the beginning of the German break-through, and was pinned in his cockpit while quantities of his flesh were burnt off him. The un- stressed and unemotional recording of this makes almost unbearable reading. He then spent nearly the next two years of his life in various hospitals in unoccupied France, semi-blinded, semi- crippled, sometimes being treated with marked harshness, more often with marked kindness and sensitiveness. He eventually learnt enough French to be on terms of cordial friendship with countless French folk, not only his ward-mates, but with the population of French towns where he was allowed to walk about in perfect free- dom. The result is one of the most important and moving books of war-experiences yet published.
For those of us to whom " la France iternelle" is a reasoned hope as well as a blind faith, it brings authentic reassurance. On one of the last days of the retreat a very old French peasant, seeing his country overrun for the second (or maybe the third) time in his life-time, uttered to me the profound remark,' "Ii nous faut de it nous faut du courage "—a sentence in the great tradition if ever there was one. It is important to know, from someone who has been so very much more recently in touch with them, that this is still the prevailing mood, nearly three years later, with the majority of the population of France. The writer's own development of mind is illustrated (almost unconsciously) in the course of the book. The rather captious young man who didn't think much of the town
of Nantes in the early days of the war (Nantes possesses some of the glories of French architecture) is a very different young man from the sensitive and intellectually alive young man who is the writer of the book's last pages. And he, having obviously very little train- ing in professional writing, has fallen back on the method of sim- plicity, truthfulness, and reliance on observed impressions. As a
Previous page
