D'azur et de Sable – An Aviator in Syria in 1923

Refusing a pre-ordained career as a civil servant at the Ministry of Finance, he chose aviation out of a taste for adventure and travel. In January 1923, he departed for Syria, posted as a fighter pilot to the 53rd Levant Squadron based at Deir ez-Zor. Flying the Breguet XIV, he took part in the "pacification" operations in Syria, earning the Croix de guerre and the Médaille du Levant with bar. 

Every day, he recorded in his inseparable Moleskine notebook the significant events of his daily life: aerial missions, his relations with the local population, his discovery of Syrian towns and landscapes. These notes gave rise to a manuscript, unpublished until today.

Having become an insurance broker in his home city of Reims, Marcel Migeo wrote around ten books, the majority devoted to aviation. Among them are war narratives such as Batailles dans le ciel (Grand Prix littéraire de l'Aéro-Club de France) and biographies of Saint-Exupéry, Henri Guillaumet, Maryse Bastié and Didier Daurat. Nearly a hundred years on, his writings on Syria take on a particularly resonant and strikingly contemporary significance, as that country has been torn for half a dozen years by a civil war that has taken on an international dimension.

Journalist and writer Patrick Poivre d'Arvor, also a native of Reims, prefaces this work out of loyalty to the memory of Marcel Migeo, whom he knew personally and whose passionate accounts of youth played no small part in the passion he himself later developed for the heroic age of aviation.