Whoops

Man, how would you like to lie awake at night and ruminate on the fact that you might have killed Antoine Saint-Exupery? That would bum one. But irony takes a cruel turn when it transpires that the Luftwaffe pilot who may have shot Saint-Exupery down over the south of France was - oh dear - a huge fan of Saint-Exupery's writing. Nobody is sure if the Luftwaffe pilot, Horst Rippert, really shot Saint-Exupery's P-38 Lightning down or not, but Rippert believes he did, and that's all that matters from irony's point of view.

It's akin to the fate of Archimedes during the siege of Syracuse during the Second Punic War. Marcellus, commanding the Roman forces during the siege, gave orders that the famous mathematician and engineer Archimedes was not to be killed. But after the Romans successfully carried the walls and broke into the city, some nameless legionary killed Archimedes, apparently without realizing who he was. Later, one imagines, he clapped his hands to his head and cried "shittus!" How'd you like to spend the rest of your modest life being known as the guy who killed Archimedes?

Not that I'm making light of the deaths of Saint-Exupery or Archimedes. Far from it.

When I was a kid (eight, maybe ten) I had a book on the battle of Stalingrad, and in it was a picture of some nameless German sergeant sheltering behind a pile of dirt and waving the rest of his men to come up. This was Stalingrad, a true meatgrinder and no mistake, and the odds are that he didn't survive the battle. The part that always got me was that he was an absolute dead ringer for Leonard Nimoy, and I remember being somewhat upset and confused by the strange, unhappy notion that Leonard Nimoy might have been killed before he could play Spock on TV.

It was my first realization that war might be significantly worse than had been depicted in the war movies of the day. I was just reminded of that by reading about Saint-Exupery this evening. I'd go read something cheerful, but neither of the books I'm currently reading - Lisey's Story by Stephen King and I, Claudius by Robert Graves - are the least bit cheerful.