First I dug myself a pit in the sand, about eight feet by five feet and about four feet deep. I would have gone deeper, but after four feet the sand gave way to rock, and digging became too arduous and slow to be profitable. The walls were very insecure but I strengthened them with sandbags and petrol tins filled with sand. This area had once been fortified and bags and tins could be found everywhere. When the walls had been built up to about five feet, I laid three sheets of corrugated iron across them, weighted the roof down with more sandbags and covered it with a few inches of sand and soil and stones (Plate 5). I soon found that although the desert looked at first sight so empty and barren, it was a treasure house of useful junk. It provided me with girders and sheets for the roof, and canvas flaps for blacking out my window and door, and fly netting to stretch across all apertures by day. It gave me a steel framework, which, covered with another stretch of tough canvas and mounted on four ammunition boxes, made an excellent bed. Wooden pegs driven in the walls were my wardrobe, an empty beer can with a candle in it was my light, more boxes were my seat and table, and two weights my bookends. I even installed an upcurved metal ledge above the bedhead to prevent sand and beetles from falling in on me during the night.
PLATE 5 Fred in his dugout at Alam el Osmaili
I spent a considerable time on my home. At best it was nothing more than a hermit’s cell – no bigger, and certainly lower, than a small English bathroom. But being sunk so deep, it gave me a feeling of security (Fig. 10). It was a refuge from the ubiquitous and pitiless flies by day: and at night, by means of a careful arrangement of the curtains (blacking out the room but allowing it to be well ventilated) I could write by the light of my candle and smoke in fair comfort. My books were arranged on a shelf at the head of the bed, and before me was hung – another gift from the desert – a small reproduction of Gauguin’s Spirits of the Dead.
This was my first desert home and I have dear memories of it. I came to the desert with foreboding, and having been used so long to quietness and neatness I anticipated the absence of privacy and the squalor with misgiving. Yet the weeks I spent in my little cell were not unsatisfactory. It was almost a monastic existence. Over and above my operational work,12 which was light, I was often called upon to spend some of the daylight in manual work. Latrines and pits for refuse had constantly to be dug. Wood had to be brought in daily and on many an afternoon I sweated like a Caliban. Visitors were few. Our only constant caller was the driver of the ration lorry who, every two or three days, brought us hard loaves, tins of meat and vegetables and many unwanted marrows. We lived in almost complete seclusion in a wall-less monastery (Plates 6, 7, 8 and 9). We ate simple food, we drank simple drinks, and spent most of the hours of daylight in some form of labour.
But the evenings I dedicated to study. Through those long autumn evenings, by the light first of a candle and later of a hurricane lamp, I read and wrote. The well-being that came from labour in the sun and air invested me during those evenings, and my pleasures were keen. I remember reading Romeo and Juliet there and being moved more poignantly by its beauty than ever before. I remember too how vividly the image of my wife would come to me through the darkness and silence as I wrote; and always, after my reading, it was my habit to throw back the curtains and look before sleeping, for a few moments, at the multitudinous assembly of stars in the unclouded oriental sky.
Black Book: Thursday 10 or Friday 11 September 1942
Snakes alive! Last night while I was on guard, I walked over to the fire, to relieve the monotony of sitting and watching. Halfway across I heard a noise of scampering and hissing, loud enough to make me suspect a large rat or desert dog. I backed and flashed on my torch and in the ring of light saw a snake, the largest I have ever seen wild, although it was no more than 18 inches long. Instinctively I picked up a stone and a luckily accurate shot broke the snake’s back. Later I crushed its head with a spade; and left it in a ring of stones, so that I should find it easily in the morning. It was dead enough by morning – an 18 inch-long coil, maybe half an inch in thickness, and light fawn in colour, with darker sandy-coloured spots, and a small head with pinhead jet-black eyes. In a way I regret killing him so brutally and crudely. But he is probably a menace to us, and he and his ilk must go. (Written with a new fountain pen bought from a travelling canteen that has been up in this remote corner of the desert for the last few days.)
FIGURE 10: ‘Home, 606. September 1942.’ Fred’s pen-and-ink sketch of his dugout at Alam El Osmaili
PLATE 6 ‘Harry Allen (H. Cookie), 606, September 1942’. The figure on the right is Jack Scott (Cookie)
PLATE 7 ‘Five of us sitting on the roof and in the entrance of my dugout. It looks no great shakes here – but that was before the renovation.’ H. Cookie is in front, and the others from the left are: Cpl Pryce, Jack Scott (Cookie), Fred and Jimmy
PLATE 8 Sergeant Clark, Unit 606 (left) and Sergeant Budd, Unit 607 (right), Alam el Osmaili
PLATE 9 ‘Having my hair cut by an Indian,’ Alam el Osmaili
I soon began to find that the desert was not without beauty. The Arabs concede little charm to it. They have a legend that tells how Allah first made the mountains, rivers and seas, and then, when the light was failing and it was too dark for him to see clearly what he was doing, he made the sands; and the next morning, he was so ashamed of his handiwork, that he threw stones at it. Had I been compelled to find my living there, I should probably have echoed the feeling that motivated that legend, for the desert is hostile not only to men but to all big creatures. With all its immensity, it can provide only for little things. Lions and gazelles once abounded there, but I saw no wild animal bigger than a hare. I saw only modest creatures that can live on little – lizards, chameleons, ants, scorpions, small snakes, spiders and beetles; and most of the land supports only camel thorn, a dry little shrub whose existence seems a death-in-life. All the year round it seems brittle and leafless. In autumn only, it puts out little red blossoms that make a show for a few days, then quickly fade and shrivel.
Yet this almost inanimate scene can be lovely. In places, the hardness of the land is over-drifted with soft sand and smoothed into gentle contours. In summer, the sky is blue and unclouded; but in autumn and winter, big clouds build themselves up over the horizon, edged and coloured like white roses, and as they pass over the main of the sky, they throw down violet shadows, like the shadows of very still fish on the floor of a pond. Then the hollowed land, all dappled with shadows, shows varied and fair. The nights too are often beautiful and moving. Through the clear dry air, the stars shine brilliantly, seeming to look down with all their eyes; and the stillness is so profound that one can almost feel the darkness falling like leaves to the ground.
Black Book
I am writing this on Sunday 4 October. It is still very hot and the flies are buzzing furiously under my tin roof. A few miles away Stukas have been raiding from beyond no-man’s-land. A squadron of friendly fighters is returning eastwards along the coast from their interception. Every now and then comes a detonation from a bomb or a Bofors or blasting, we do not know which. Nor do we greatly care now. These noises are part of our environment, as natural as rain on an English day.
But on one or two occasions we have been scared. Once several Messerschmitts came hunting returning Hurricanes over our site. We knew there were hostile aircraft around us, but did not see them or realize how close they were until two Hurricanes came low and swerving towards us. Immediately there was a pandemonium of firing. Bofors opened up and Lewis guns and machine guns.13 The noise was so great and so bewilderingly varied that it was impossible to know what was happening. Amid all the din I can remember little accurately except seeing three spurts of white dust where something fell on the rocky ground outside the gharry. Then I flung myself face downward on the floor of the waggon behind the curtain and found Roy and Jack crouching there with me. For a few moments the din went on, and my heart beat as violently and noisily as the gunfire. Then suddenly it was qu
iet again, and when I looked out, about a mile away were two black ruins with a thin high column of very black smoke coming from each. The two Hurricanes were down and done with for good.
The desert puts on its most glorious beauty at the hour of sunset (Plate 10). Then ‘the western conduits run with wine’. The pale clouds catch fire and blaze fiercely while the auriferous sun dispensing colour, seems to shrink from capture. It squeezes itself into strange shapes to keep above the horizon – then falls suddenly and the conflagration of clouds burns itself out to an ashen grey. At moments like these the desert appears very fair, but it can unloose furies, like any other land. On 16–17 October, there blew up the worst sandstorm I have ever experienced. An unnaturally fierce wind rode in from the west, a wind that seemed all the more violent because it followed weeks of still weather. The air was so thick with sand that it grew a deep apricot, and one could see no further than a man in a heavy yellow fog.
Sharp-edged sand grains beat on the sides of the lorry like hail and stung the face of anyone who ventured out, with a hundred sharp pricks, while the softer dust penetrated the smallest of crevices, choking the mouth and filling the nostrils. Almost all traffic was brought to a standstill, and the trucks that did try to go on through the storm soon lost their way. When I was young, I read that on the approach of a sandstorm, the Arab lies down behind his camel and covers himself till the wind dies. Such a measure would hardly have met this case, for the wind blew without abating for two days and nights. It was only on the morning of 18 October, that we were able to come out into the open without goggles and masks, and wash away all the accumulated grime and dust of forty-eight hours.
PLATE 10 Sunset in the desert, Unit 606, October 1942
A storm like this, however, was rare. The autumn climate in the desert was admirable, and in spite of the melancholy which possessed me when I first came there, I experienced many pleasures in my first desert home. One incident that stands out vividly in my memory took place towards the end of my stay. There came near to our site a regiment of Indian troops.14 They were very fond of singing and I often listened to them. One evening I stood at the mouth of my dugout listening to them chanting a strange song that seemed to my ears to consist of only one line. Over and over again they would sing that line – then leave off for a few minutes, only to begin again with the same monotonous simple melody. Impatient with their lack of variety, I was about to turn in, when, from the west I heard a most powerful and wonderful voice. I could not see the singer. The sound seemed to come from far away through the darkness – a sustained chant, deep, even-toned, beautifully articulated and carrying powerfully and easily over the sand. I do not think I have ever heard anywhere so impressive a singer. I listened with the delight that always accompanies such unexpected pleasures. Then I remembered that it was the sacred Muslim month of Ramadan and the singer was the muezzin calling the faithful to prayer, even on the field of campaign. Presently the invocation ceased, but I heard the singer again at sunrise; and for many sunrises and sunsets after that, I listened to him as the poet to the nightingale.
The journey begins
We spent over two months at Alam el Osmaili (Fig. 6). During these months the Axis forces were still held at the El Alamein line and the Eighth Army prepared for its offensive. We grew used to the daily noises of blasting, ack-ack fire, bombing and dog fights, and accepted the coming and going of aircraft, from both sides, as a townsman accepts the traffic of his town.
Black Book: 14 October 1942
The dogfight drifted towards us from its first skirmishing ground five miles away and out of the melee came two Kittyhawks apparently making for home. Then above them I saw two other planes white and circling.
‘They’re Macchi 2025,’ said the squadron leader.15
The Kittyhawks went past us to the south, low and swinging from side to side. But when they had gone four or five miles they seemed to swerve, and joined battle with the Macchis. Nothing was clearly discernible then until one plane left the melee with a thin column of smoke behind it.
‘Something’s hit, sir,’ I said.
‘That’s a glycol leak,’ said the squadron leader.
The handicapped plane dived quickly to make away, but four others dived after it and gave chase, a mile to two behind it.
‘They’re Kitties after it,’ said the squadron leader, looking through his binoculars.
Then the leading Kitty found a burst of speed – gained rapidly on the injured Macchi16 which was now trying to make off, flying low but slowly. The Kittyhawk gained air like a greyhound on a lame hare, and when it was no more than a thousand yards away, fired quickly. Then the Macchi turned over like a leaf. In a second it had hit the ground. I saw its nose go into the earth, and a huge sheet of flame rise and envelop it. The next moment there was nothing to be seen but the familiar slender upward-climbing column of black smoke.
On this lovely autumn afternoon a pilot died. I wonder who he was! God heal quickly the grief of whoever will be weeping for him tonight. This was a day of dogfights.
But I have no intention of dealing at length with the military events of this campaign. I have no right to do so, for the grim business of killing and being killed was, in the main, carried on out of our vision. Throughout our journey we were shielded by the heroic Eighth Army, and of the vicissitudes of the fighting, although they decided our movements, and the quality of our living, we were little more than moved and compassionate spectators. Our immunity from serious daily danger was Fortune’s gift, and we were grateful for it. It is rather for me to recall those less hazardous and sensational aspects of the desert campaigner’s life – his working, eating, sleeping and relaxations, the businesses of his day-to-day life, the beauties and uglinesses of the land he campaigned in, the inconveniences it imposed and the pleasures it afforded (Plate 11).
It is not without misgiving that I write about the liberties and pleasures we enjoyed in the desert, for to many it was the land of long nightmare. I later met two soldiers in Cairo, one of whom told me the moving story of a friend who, thinking in the last retreat from Tobruk that there was no end to the desert, lost heart and took his own life. The second soldier was a sapper whose nerve gave way in the last stages of the advance on Tripoli. After two months of rest in Cairo, he was still ill. He could not exorcise the memory of that day when his lorry had fouled a chain of mines and his friends had been killed. He sat at a little table, opposite me, blinking rapidly: as he talked he kept turning his head away as if he could not look for long at a human face, and putting the palm of his hand against his temple. I did not want him to continue talking about the desert, but he clung to the subject. It was a ghost he could not lay.
PLATE 11 Fred at Alam el Osmaili wearing his South African bush jacket and boots
After that, I felt that to write about the North African campaign with anything but pity and condemnation of all the forces that had sent us to Libya, was unpardonable. Yet, hoping to commemorate for those soldiers and airmen whose courage and endurance were more than admirable, those scenes over which they campaigned, and those little sights and happenings that relieved the harshness of their life, I have continued.
Our greatest inconvenience in the days of the autumn lull were flies and boredom. I have never seen as many flies as there were at Alamein. We welcomed neighbours – the South African and Indian troops who occasionally camped there, because they shared the flies with us: we regretted their departure less, I think, because we lost their company, than because the fly population, dispersed while they were near, fell back upon us as the only human victims. We learnt to fight them little by little, to use fly traps, the maximum of netting, to spray thoroughly before eating, to hide away every scrap of food and drop of water, and to burn and bury all refuse, and to train the corporal (who could not be trusted in those early days) not to fill the spray with lemon juice. In those days the flies were our worst enemy, our first allies the flit-sprays, and the white wagtails and martins that were arriving from Eu
rope: and we campaigned so well that only one of us caught dysentery, and that he had brought with him from the Delta.
Our establishment soon came to consist of five homes. To keep these adequately lit, we had even to start a candle-making industry, pouring melted fat into verey-light tubes and using tape for the wick. In their dim, smoky dugouts, the men played cards and read from cover to cover the old magazines foraged from the desert. Scavenging like this was one of our means of fighting le cafard – desert boredom. The oldest, dirtiest book found there was passed round the whole unit, the smallest piece of equipment was examined, repaired and put to some service.
By the middle of October it grew obvious that the Eighth Army was preparing to attack. The last task of the Indian Regiment, who were our neighbours, was to punch holes in thousands of petrol tins in the shape of a V. They told us these were to go over little lamps to light the path of their night advance. So skilful was the supplying of the forward areas, however, that we had no knowledge of the strength being brought forward to support the advance; but putting our ears to the ground we heard many rumours of the impending offensive, and since we knew that when the army began to advance, it would be our function to follow them, and lend what little aid we could, we began to make preparations for a long journey.
War's Nomads: A Mobile Radar Unit in Pursuit of Rommel during the Western Desert Campaign, 1942-3 Page 12
