I do not know how much of the old structure was left when in the mid-1930s General Balbo conceived the idea of building the new arch and dedicating it to the new fascism. At any rate, only the fascist monument remains now, a high slender erection, threaded through by the Libyan highway, connecting miles of nothingness to more miles of nothingness. The archway is high, a geometric shape of masonry, sloping inward very gently, bearing four cornices at the top, and ending in two triangular ears. On the underside of the arch are bas-reliefs showing the Italians building their famous highway and ploughing up new land for settlers. Two lengthy quotations in Latin are cut on the eastern and western face of the arch and over one of them is a briefer sentence in big well-cut letters. Alme Sol possis nihil Roma visere maius. (Gracious sun, may you never look upon anything greater than the City of Rome). The longer inscriptions say that the Arch portends to show to the whole world the new culture and the new humanity, which are the greatest gifts to mankind of a Rome whose glory and greatness have been restored.
Although the Arch, considered (as it was mainly meant to be) as a piece of publicity, cannot have attracted widespread notice (for Sirtica is too desolate to attract many tourists) it must have impressed those who did pass through it. The land on either side for many miles is so empty of any interest that the most casual traveller must have looked forward to it, as we did, as a break in the visual monotony of the desert. It has a certain elegance, and the view from the unparapeted roof is worthwhile. But it has no strength to its architecture. Compared with the Arch of Marcus Aurelius in Tripoli, or even with the London Marble Arch, its shortcomings are obvious. There is an immature eagerness to gain height and to dominate that robs the structure of solidity and gives an air of flimsiness.
In horizontal niches above the arch are two big male bronze nudes, which must have puzzled many of the Eighth Army soldiers who stopped to look up at the Arch. They are Balbo’s bows to the past – the effigies of the Philaeni brothers, whose courageous action prompted this piece of Italian bombast.
Many heroes keep the Philaeni company there now, for in this area the land was treacherously sown with mines of all descriptions. Every step, every turn of the wheel west of El Agheila was a hazard. All along the road the sappers were at work with their detectors, feeling their way like blind men. But they could not detect all the mines, and in the hurry of pursuit, there was always some doubt as to where safe lanes were. One noon, near Nofilia (Fig. 8), one of our airmen, in spite of repeated warnings, cut across a corner at a crossroads. There was a report, and he fell. He had trodden on a small mine that leapt three or four feet into the air and threw pellets outwards in every direction. He was very fortunate, however. Only two of the pellets caught him, one in the shoulder and one in the buttocks, and after a few weeks in a field hospital he recovered.
The crew of one of our sister units had a bad experience.14 They were landed by aircraft on a landing ground and had to pick their own way through the field to safety. No sooner had they begun to walk than a Bofors unit passed over a mine and all the guncrew was killed. Nevertheless they had to get out of the landing ground to safety. Every step was an adventure but in the end they got to the road without mishap.15
We heard many tales of German and Italian cunning. It was said that they laid landmines and booby traps in fruit trees, behind doors and pictures, under the bodies of dead and even wounded soldiers. I cannot speak with any authority about those things, but I do know that the ground all along the line of our advance was as thick with mines as a garden with crocus bulbs.
A few days before Christmas we encamped on the coast near Soltan (Fig. 8). It was considered a dangerous site. Our sergeant, whose weakness was a fondness for exaggerating danger, told us this story:
Meeting an army officer, he asked,
‘Just what is there in front of us now sir?’
The officer looked at his watch and said,
‘A few minutes ago, there was one patrol between here and the enemy. At the moment there’s sweet Fanny Adams.’16
But the sergeant had a fondness for shooting a line: no enemy raids came, and the Axis stragglers who were supposed to be working their way along the beaches towards their own lines never showed up. Our greatest anxiety was the presence of mines. It was earnestly dangerous to wander outside the circle of the armoured cars.17 One had only to watch the sappers at work to know that. A hundred yards away from us, a gang was locating and destroying big Teller mines that had been buried on the road fringes. As each one went off, a monstrous spurt of flame leapt thirty to forty feet in the air with volumed smoke billowing after it; and a noise like a thunderclap made the loose walls of the gharry shake.
However, once more our site was near the sea, and the foreshore still proved a treasure house. Ever since the beginning of our journey we had slept at the best in our little one-man bivvies. We had on board a biggish tent, picked up from heaven knows where, but we had not been able to put it up for lack of poles. However, on the beach at Soltan we found a pile of excellent lengths of wood, all shaped and cut to a uniform size – obviously the jetsam of some wreck. Out of these lengths Bob and Alec, our acknowledged carpenters, cut, sawed and nailed a framework; and two days after our arrival we were able to erect the tent. I think it must have measured about sixteen feet by twelve, and only in the very middle could a man stand up to his full height; but to us it was as roomy as a town hall.
Christmas at Soltan
While we were at Soltan, the enemy was falling back on the defence lines at Buerat (Fig. 8), and relying less on air attack than on mines to hold up the Eighth Army. This was therefore a slack time for us,18 and we had again a considerable amount of leisure; and we beguiled the time with a new sport. Here the sea was within a few hundred yards and the tracks to it were not mined. The beach was fairly wide, but the water itself was unusually turbulent and dangerous. The bed was strewn with sharp rocks and restless breakers and a heavy back drag made swimming out of the question. However we remembered the German dinghy we had found at Gambut and found we could put it to good use. We waded out with it high above the head, until we were clear of the breakers, then floated it, leapt on board and paddled out. It was surprisingly buoyant. Four of us could find a place for our buttocks on it and ride in on it back to back, with legs dangling over the side (Plate 21). The swell drove it in at first gently, until it was caught by the breakers. Then it rose higher and higher, and sank lower and lower, until the last breaker threw it up, and pitched it down plump, bodies and all, on the beach. Climbing aboard, scrambling for a seat, capsizing, the alarm of rocks below, and the final pitch on the rough sand – these were all part of the fun.
We spent Christmas on this site; in some ways it was the kind of Christmas a dozen castaways might have spent. In the morning we were in the sea with the dinghy; in the afternoon we prepared our banquet. First we arranged all our available tables (and even made a new one) to make one long banquet board down the middle of the tent; and those who had clean towels went into the depths of their kitbags and spread them for a table cloth. Cookie and Harry built a new oven out of tins and ammunition boxes, while we brought in firewood by relays from the beach. Someone collected flowers and stuck them into empty jars, while I hung the inside of the tent with red berries, the nearest I could find to holly. ‘Merry Xmas’ was laid out in camel thorn twigs and white shells on smoothed patches of the dunes. The port, the gin, the whisky, the beer, the lime – preserved in a box in the gharry for two months – were brought forth and admired. A fowl of vague kind and condition arrived with the rations, and so did a few mince pies and a slice of cake. The menu was chalked on the side of the gharry, stuffing was made, the ‘duck’ cleaned and washed, and everything made ready for the great evening meal.
PLATE 21 The German dinghy in the surf at Sirte.
Before we set to, we posed for our photographs, waited for the last watch to be over, and then attacked the finest meal for months. There was duck, pork, vegetables and stuffing, currant
dough and cream, Christmas cake, mince pies, biscuits and cheese, beer, oranges and a mug of extra fine Genuine Middle East Golden Brown Brew (as Cookie called his chai). Toasts were proposed – the King, God bless him, the Eighth Army (good old Desert Rats), our wives and sweethearts and mothers in England, 606, the orphans of the desert, the forgotten men – Sgt Clark (cries of Good old Binder,19 Good old Nobby20 – Outside with your kitbags). And then we sang. We began with carols, and tackled ‘Good King Wenceslas’ with myself as the King, and tenor-voiced Nobby as the page – but finding the words of these Christian songs a little unfamiliar, never got to the end. Our will to sing Christmas tunes was there, but memories were weak, and my solo ‘Coventry Carol’ was appreciated but not enthusiastically received. (A good tune, Fred – a good tune mind – but a bit serious).
The sergeant, feeling himself now in voice, broke into,
‘If I only had the key of your heart’
and even the unmelodious corporal was prevailed upon to quaver out in the thinnest of voices –
‘The sash my fa–ther wore’.
‘Do you know?’ he said incredulously at the end of it, ‘I once sang that in a pub in Ireland – and I got thrown out.’ Even Roy chirped out in a bird-like voice, ‘By the fireside, we two – just you’. And then Cookie, in the first stage of liquor, ‘If I might have a little order, gentlemen, please’, began stertorously upon his favourite song,
‘You can’t put a stop to misfortune
What has to be must be.
I might have been up in the world like you,
And you might have been down like me.’
Soon the war was forgotten; even Christmas was forgotten, in an uproar of maudlin bawling. Jack followed up his melancholy song with the equally dismal, ‘I am but a poor blind boy’, and finally clung to me weeping and protesting that he’d never had a chance like me, he’d never been educated like me, while the corporal and Roy slept in each other’s arms. Cookie was finally put to bed still blubbering and protesting; but this access of tears did not prevent him from rising in the middle of the night and picking the flesh off the duck as clean as a vulture.
So ended our desert Christmas. I had written this poem in October when we were still at Alamein.
No shepherds watching here by night,
But sullen armies poised for fight;
And the artillery’s wrathful fire
Silences the angelic choir.
Where once the Magi saw a star,
The heavens now hold a yellow flare,
And all the parting sky contains
Is Messerschmidts and Hurricanes.
Lord, this was once your country. Can
You not dispense your good again?
Oh wished-for most, expected least,
Be born again in the Middle East.
But another Christmas passed without a miracle. Indeed it was a kind of disaster for us. At one magnificent banquet we consumed all our spare rations, and after the feast came the famine. The days after Christmas were dark and hungry, and a mood of deep depression came over us.
I suppose we had reason to be downhearted. The smallness of the unit left us free from the more irksome forms of discipline, but it also left us more isolated than most. We had no spare gharry to fetch for us from ration dumps, from wells and from clothing stores. Ever since we came into the desert we had had to live from hand to mouth, and by the end of the year, we were in poor case. With our own hands and our own scavengings, we had built up some comforts, but there were limits to what could be combed from the desert.
In those days the only good footwear on the unit was several pairs of South African field boots, gifts from an artillery group we had met at Alam el Osmaili (Plate 11). We had only four blankets each. I do not think I could have kept warm through those cold nights if I had not picked up an extra blanket at Gambut; certainly none of us could have kept our beds free from vermin if it had not been for a big tin of anti-louse powder, which Cookie found in a ditch. We received no newspapers. We had no wireless set. Chocolate, sweets, fruit, and all those little extras that a soldier expects to help out his meals with, we rarely saw. All our food came from tins, and night after night, week after week, month after month, M & V21 was our dinner. We had few books and little light to read by. Tea, sugar and milk were so strictly rationed that for weeks we could not even sweeten the long evenings with a cup of tea. Nearly a thousand miles from Alex (Fig. 5), with Tripoli three hundred miles away to the west, and between us and Tripoli the German and Italian armies, we felt ourselves in civilisation’s no-man’s-land. Night after night, we had nothing to do but to huddle together in our gharry, in a little space no bigger than, and certainly less comfortable than, a railway compartment, to smoke a few borrowed cigarettes, to discuss endlessly where we could find a little water, where we could beg a tin of milk, where we could borrow a cigarette.
One day we were reduced to cutting down a hard block of ship’s tobacco which we found in a drawer, and wrapping the chips in any white paper we could find; and on another occasion, when I found a dead duck lying on a dune, although there was not a shot mark on it, we asked no questions, but ate it.
The miseries must be recorded, but the mind remembers most vividly the pleasures. I recall clearly those sorry hungry nights, but more clearly still my afternoons alone, on the beach of Soltan. It ought to have had sinister associations for me, for shortly before Christmas Day, the sea threw up the body of a dead sailor, bloated and unidentifiable; and he was buried where he was cast up, with only a stick to mark his grave. Yet on that beach I had hours of untroubled pleasure. Over the land the lightly clouded sky would often show a rose red. Far to the south it bloomed with the reflection of the tawny sands that reached down into the heart of the Sahara. But over the sea, the sky was green. At times even the clouds were tinted with green, their whiteness touched to a pale, pure apple green by the upthrown colour of the vivid sea; and beneath this rare sky, the level sea vibrated until it threw up, at its edge, the glorious untameable breakers, battering the beach with their dissolving violence. The land might be harsh and torn with shells and mines and bombs, but the sea could dissolve all disaster into itself. It threw off contamination and perpetually cleansed itself.
Is there an enchantment in the Mediterranean? It has come to be significant for us by a thousand ties. Yet had I never read Pericles or the Acts of the Apostles or known where Shelley died, those peaceful afternoons, those walks by the clamorous beach, the crayfish in the pools, the westward and homeward meditations by the rocks, would still have charmed me out of my hunger and melancholy.
Notes
1 According to the ‘Black Book’, on 16 November Unit 606 ‘came to our resting place near the drome [at Maturba] and bivvied down for the night’.
2 On the East of Scotland.
3 Peri Track 97, that is the perimeter of airfield or landing ground 97, about 20 miles inland from the Mediterranean between Burg el Arab and Alexandria – probably visited by Fred and other members of 606 during their sojourn at Alam el Osmaili in September–October 1942.
4 The ‘Black Book’ on Saturday 21 November records: ‘Fate settled. We are to go back to Gambut. Roy and Jim left us to go to 607 – poor lads. But we will catch them soon.’
5 Fred is here referring to the British advance from Egypt into Libya in 1941.
6 1942.
7 The fasces was a bundle of rods, bound up with an axe in the middle, its blade projecting; hence a symbol of authority adopted by the Italian fascists, led by Mussolini.
8 The JU88 was a high altitude observer plane.
9 The ‘friends’ were probably another AMES unit, possibly Unit 607.
10 Cpl Pryce.
11 One hour on radar duty, two hours off.
12 Italian governor of Libya.
13 General Balbo’s fascist arch was blown up by Col Gadafi in the 1970s, because it was seen as a piece of colonial architecture.
14 An Air Ministry official report recorded: �
��as had been foreseen during the preparations for this offensive, it was not always possible for the RDF stations using motor transport to keep up with the speed of the advance. The airborne LWS early warning station was therefore used on 18 December, when it was transported to the Marble Arch landing ground by air. The standard attained by its specially trained RDF crew was excellent – they were able to set up the station and give RDF cover to the landing ground within three-quarters of an hour’ (Radar in Raid Reporting, 1950, 192). German landmines were no doubt the reason why an AMES 6 series unit was landed.
15 The ORB for 260 Squadron provides interesting complementary details about the difficulty of passing through the minefields. On 19 December a special flying party of forty-eight ground personnel was flown from Belanda [Benghazi] to Marble Arch landing ground in two Lockheed Hudsons and two Bombays. Their purpose was to maintain and refuel the squadron’s aircraft until the ‘A’ party could pass through the minefields of El Agheila and arrive by road. The arrangements went smoothly, all rations, aviation fuel, bombs and ammunition being supplied by air, AIR 27/1537, TNA, PRO.
16 Nothing at all.
17 Probably provided by the RAF Regiment to supply armed cover for AMES 606 and other radar units in the vicinity.
18 Because there were no incoming German and Italian squadrons, whose detection was the task of Fred’s unit, 606.
19 ‘Binder’ – RAF slang for someone who complains excessively.
20 A nickname for anyone called Clark or Clarke. Historically, office clerks and gentry, or ‘nobs’, wore hats, hence ‘nobby’.
21 M & V was short for ‘Meat and Vegetables’.
War's Nomads: A Mobile Radar Unit in Pursuit of Rommel during the Western Desert Campaign, 1942-3 Page 16
