About the book: year / The date of writing this text (not published during the writer’s lifetime) has not been precisely established; it could have been written in 1940 or 1941 - before the United States entered World War II. In the collection “Military Notes” it is placed before the texts relating to the May campaign of 1940. It contains the idea, characteristic of Saint-Exupery (cf., for example, the book “Military Pilot”), that only help from the United States can save France from inevitable defeat in a war with superior German forces. It is significant, however, that on May 23, 1940, the writer rejected the offer of then Prime Minister P. Reynaud to urgently go to America to mobilize US public opinion in support of France. He did not want to leave his comrades at the critical moment of Hitler’s invasion of France, and also, apparently, no longer believed in the ability of the Reynaud government to organize, even with foreign help, an effective rebuff to the enemy. Sergey Zenkin