CHAPTER 6
Out of the Libyan Desert
Privation at Tamet
By New Year’s Eve, we were at Tamet, beyond Sirte, at the eastern end of the big salt lakes that stretched west to Misurata and the beginnings of colonized Tripolitania (Fig. 8). Near Sirte, a lonely little town that looked pleasant with its greens and whites, the country was level and misted over with little ragged-petalled flowers that gave off a pleasant scent at evening. Now too, castor oil shrubs with their reddish spiky fruit grew by the roadside. But travelling was tedious and uncomfortable. Almost every bridge and culvert had been blown and every mile brought a difficult up hill and down dale detour round the blown bridge and through the familiar lanes of white ribbon.1 It was sometimes hazardous to find the safe lane, and on one occasion the huge Crossley sank to the axles in the soft sand. Only the combined use of desert tracks,2 a digging party and a draught team of three other lorries drew us out of the deep boggy sand.
In the afternoon of New Year’s Eve we pitched camp in a stony gully. It was a most forbidding district. Except for a little valley bottom covered with shrubs and flowers it was barren and rocky. Slit trenches could not be dug near the gharry. Two hours work produced only a shallow depression in the rock and two broken precious pick shafts. There was no fuel at hand and no water. Shortly after our arrival there, a dead air-gunner was found nearby and buried in the only place where a grave could be easily dug – the valley bottom less than fifty yards from the mouth of the tent.
The days at Tamet were the most miserable of all our days in North Africa (Fig 8). Normally we had adequate air cover wherever we moved, but here we were undefended for days.3 Day after day, raiding parties of ME109s came over and swept the landing ground with machine gun fire. At times we would peep out and watch them diving like fishes through the flak; at others we were flat on the ground with faces down while they passed overhead. We heard reports of casualties daily, and during one raid the commander of one of our armoured cars was mortally wounded.4 Night too brought little respite, except a short interval of peace between sundown and black dark. During those intervals we sat in our hooded camp, devoting the time to one half mug of beer – anticipating it, talking or reading to forget it, deciding when to have it, having it and talking ecstatically about it until the night bombers came. We had managed by this time to dig an efficient slit trench in a stretch of ploughed land nearby: and many a time we had to fall flat, then race across to the trench. But it was bitterly cold there. In the end we would put out our single light and go to bed, opening one eyelid at the distant bumps, two at the closer, and scuttling off at the really close.
This was a wretched, troubled time, and I do not know which was worse – the sudden quick panics of a raid, or the prolonged privations of hunger, thirst and dirt. It seemed that our Christmas banquet had exhausted all our reserves of food. The piled tins of milk, sausage and bacon we had loaded on at El Alamein were used up. We had to depend entirely on our weekly rations – a bad thing, because on active service, supplies are always irregular. At one stage, for four or five days we had no sugar, milk, no bacon, no bread – I do not think we saw one loaf of bread between El Alamein and Tripoli – no sausage, no tomatoes, no cheese, no fruit of any sort, no beans. We had nothing to eat, breakfast, tiffin, dinner, but bully beef, tea without milk and sugar and brewed with brackish water, and marmalade. It was a wretched diet even when supplemented by our dehydrated potatoes. To vary it we took to exchanging surplus tea for margarine and flour from a few soldiers near us, and making pasties. Praise be to those pasties. We whiled away many a tedious hour making flour, cleaning out old derelict mess tins, rendering down margarine and frying (we could do no baking) our sausage-shaped pasties in pools of smoking margarine. The finished articles were a strain on even the soundest digestion – but they were a change from the everyday bully and sodden chips: and what was more, cooking diverted us. In the evenings the tent became a self-contained pastry factory, where, with eyes smarting from the margarine vapour and petrol fumes, we mixed flour, rolled pastry, chopped up bully, and fried and finally devoured the burnt and oil-soaked rolls.
We were hungry. We were exposed to hazard day and night, even from our own primus stove, charged no longer with paraffin, but pure petrol and liable to explode at any moment. We were dirty. We had no more water than the regulation half gallon a day per man, for all purposes: and out of that we could save about half a pint every two or three days for shaving, washing and laundry. Dhobieing5 was out of the question. Stockings rotted with dirt, and shirts cracked. Our bodies were dirty, our plates were dirty, our utensils dirty, towels dirty, knives, forks and spoons all dirty.
Those were the days of wild daydreaming. While we were sitting together in the vague light Sid would suddenly say, as if he had been thinking of it for hours, ‘Just think, Fred, – you go down a street in Blighty. There’s pubs to the left, pubs to the right, pubs in front of you and behind you. And inside these pubs there are gallons and gallons of beer – just ready to be pulled. God – all you have to do is to go in – and the girl just pulls like that. And there you have a pint of English beer, with froth at the top.’
And Jack would reply, ‘And what about the chocolate, Sid – eh? What about that? You go in, and the chap says, Wot kind would you like? – Wot kind would you like? Stap me. There’s stacks of it, Sid – Cadbury’s, Motoring Chocolate, Sandwich Block, Milk Tray, all stacked up……’ ‘And do you remember how you used to hum and ha? My God, I’d give five bob, cash, straight down now, for one sixpenny bar of Cadbury’s.’ And one evening we began to talk about water. Most of us had not been in a bath for a year, and the corporal for nearly two years. We began to reckon up how much water an average man used when he took a bath – then how much for his daily washes, how much a water closet used, how much a day’s laundry took up, how much for meals and washing up. Why, a man in England might use fifty gallons of water a day. Fifty gallons, and we were allowed half a gallon a day!
We dreamt wildly during the night too, and when we got to comparing our dreams, a curious thing came out. Quite independently, most of us dreamt of coming home, and instead of being welcomed and made much of, we were coldly ignored. Even the conversation in the dreams was alike. ‘Yes I’m back from Africa’, we would say and the reply, ‘Oh, that’s very interesting’. And before we could begin to shoot a real line, the conversation was switched to some little gossip about the neighbour, or neighbour’s wife.
‘I don’t think you understand me,’ we then said, ‘I was at El Alamein when the great breakthrough took place.’ But even this was received with the same indifference. ‘I was with the Eighth Army’, we protested – but no eyebrows were lifted, no eager audience settled to listen to our third-rate exploits. All night long we sat, bewildered, inexplicably ignored and hurt.
What motivated that dream? I think it was a real fear, the deep concern of every man forced to spend years away from his wife, his children, his mother and his father; the fear that time and distance would be too much for even the strongest ties. He feared that he would return, not as a welcomed son, husband or father, but like Ulysses unrecognized, a stranger, out of place in a new order of interests and loyalties that had grown up in his absence.
From the beginning to the end we had little but privation at Tamet. Our days were sometimes cheered by the visit of a mercurial sergeant, who was in charge of our sister station.6 The prince of scroungers, he had picked up somewhere an abandoned Spa truck, probably contemporary with the Ford T and just as capricious. Happy the moment when ‘Fanlight Fannie’ was seen approaching with bumps, jerks and snorts over the sand towards 606. If the sergeant did not actually bring much in his pockets, he always had a store of incredible anecdotes, and boundless promises.
But on the whole they were grim days, and they ended as they began. On our very last night, the bombers came while we were trying to play bridge.7 A bomb fell alarmingly close. We fell flat on the ground, waited and then ran for the trench
. Outside the air seemed full of planes. Flares were dropping all around us, and the ground gunners in a ring around us were firing tracers at the little white parachutes. When I come to look back I recall the unusual beauty of the light of the flares, and their pacific downward motion. But I did not stop in my run to make these observations consciously. Streams of bullets came over our heads from all directions, their lines coming closer and closer to the ground as the parachutes dropped; and more curved lines of tracers came from the rear gunners of the invisible German planes. Crouching there, we felt like little animals who had taken shelter in a thicket, but the hunter’s lamp was on them and the bead drawn.
Fortunately no one took hurt; and the next morning news came that Rommel had again been outflanked. On the night of 15–16 January he withdrew from the Buerat defences (Fig. 8). Now he was falling back upon Tripoli (Fig. 9), and again we were in pursuit.
Bir Dufan
Of the few days after Tamet, I can remember scarcely anything. For the second time our route took us south, away from the sea, and into the heart of the Blue. Hour after hour we drove through an infinitely dreary landscape without a single landmark to draw our interest. Again the rocky desert pitched us about unmercifully, and the soft desert threw up fine sand into our eyes, nose and mouth. We had only one diversion – to take out a tattered old map of Libya, to reckon from it in what direction we were heading and how far we were from the nearest ‘green belt’. The closest cultivated area was Beni Ulid (Fig. 9): the map placed it in a little pool of green colour. So Beni Ulid was our hourly dream. Oh, only to get to Beni Ulid to see grass and trees, to have water and perhaps vegetables! But hour after hour went by and the land was still as dry, sterile and dispiriting as ever.
Near Sedada (Fig. 9), it began at last, to change. We started to drop into deep wadis, to find ourselves surrounded by curious flat-topped hills, hard cores of craggy table-topped rock, falling away at the edges in screes of smaller boulders and sand. Unfortunately the relief was temporary only; beyond Sedada the country levelled out again, and at Bir Dufan (Fig. 9),8 our next stopping place, we were on the familiar site. It was Burg el Arab, Antelat, Tamet, all over again – an undistinguished level of aridity made into a landing ground and given a name.
Shortly after we had pitched camp, a Senussi came to see us. By this time an Arab had come to be for us a man who probably knew where to find water; and water pure or impure we had to have. He told us there was a well four kilometres away, and immediately we prepared to walk it with him; but he put us off, saying it was too late, and we would be shot at by sentries on the way back. He promised to bring us some water the next day.
We let him go with misgiving. The way of all Arabs was to promise much (bucra the whole world; today a little backsheesh9 to be going on with) and to fulfil nothing. However the next morning, to our great surprise, he came back, a little boy with him, and a donkey with two dirty and dinted cans pannier-wise on its back.
The water turned out to be strange-looking stuff, very yellow and clayey, but it made wonderful tea. We showered gifts on the old man, out of pity for him and his son, who was shivering with a bad cold – but more out of gratitude, for water was gold to us. I gave him a white shirt I had picked up at Daba and meant to use for handkerchiefs and bandages, and he draped it tenderly around his little boy. Then we gave him tea, petrol for the sores on his donkeys and camels, and biscuits and marmalade. He was a peaceable old man, very hungry, very solicitous for his son, and grateful. When a second and older son appeared, he ordered him to take back the donkey for more water, and then made himself at home with us. We first feasted him, and then, when he expressed a desire to shave, as Sid was doing, we gave him an old razor, brush and soap, and even an old toothbrush and paste. He was amusingly at ease. That we were strangers did not embarrass him: that we were foreigners did not disconcert him: that we were armed and part of a victorious army did not alarm him. With sangfroid and amusing unconcern he meticulously shaved the little patch of hair above both ears (he would not be persuaded to touch his beard) – then scrubbed and scrubbed with inch after inch of paste at his big blackened teeth. We sat around him, amused at the entertainment, occasionally taunting him with long abusive sentences in English, which, not understood, neither amused nor offended him – and drinking the delicious ‘chai’.
A few days later I came across the pool from which the old man had drawn his much-enjoyed water. It was a little sausage-shaped pond under a clump of sturdy gnarled trees. It was filled with mud and old tins, and sheep and goat droppings floated on the surface. It was no more than a foul watering place for animals. Their mouths had slobbered in it, and their soiled feet had paddled in it; this was our delicious ‘chai’. This was the finest water we had tasted and drunk since Benghasi. Nevertheless we could not bring ourselves to throw it away: and in the end, puddle or not, we drank it all.
Near the pond I came across a fairly big deserted Arab village. It was apparently recently abandoned, for most of the houses, though unfurnished, were sound. These houses were all made of desert stone, roughly hewn, loosely masoned on the outside but plastered more carefully on the inside. Each separate house consisted of one room only, entered through a very narrow doorway big enough to admit one person only at a time. These doors evidenced the slimness of the Senussi. Poverty and hard living had kept them all, young and old, very lean. The simpler rooms were in two parts, one half-level with the ground, the other raised a foot or so: the bigger had two daises, leaving a well in the middle. The walls were as thick as a peel tower’s, pierced with small circular holes for ventilation and splashed on the inside with a rough pattern in whitewash.
Just inside the entrance (always open for there was no door) was a hollow for a fire and a hook for a lamp: and some of the more ambitiously planned rooms had little stone cupboards in the walls. The floor was of stone, softened over with stamped down earth, and the roof had been made by laying beams of all shapes and thicknesses over the walls, filling in the gaps with smaller boughs, and then bushes and whins, and by covering everything with clay and stones. The houses were all built together haphazardly, crowding up against each other and sometimes walling in a sheep or goat fold. Apparently it is not only lack of living space that makes people build slums. With all the desert to build in, these Senussi had chosen to huddle their houses together as tight as sheep in a threatened flock. With space enough for a mansion each, they preferred to house a family in one room as small as a suburban kitchen.
Out of the desert
When we advanced from Bir Dufan it was with real expectancy (Fig. 9). We knew that little lay now between us and the ‘green belt’. Columbus drawing close to the coast of America could hardly have felt greater excitement than we did at the prospect of emerging at last from the howling wilderness. We were bound at last for Beni Ulid, and there we knew was humanity, food, water and shade.
Nevertheless we had still to spend many almost insufferable hours before we came at last to the edge of a valley steep-sided enough to resemble a canyon, with sharp walls that sloped to a flat built-up valley floor. On the edge of the slope were square battlemented buildings, washed over with a dispiriting pink colour. These were the barracks and prisons of the Italian garrison that watched over this outpost of its empire. The floor of the valley and the far slope were close set with native homes, each with its black, narrow slit of a doorway, and all crowded together until the village looked more like a big honeycomb than a human settlement. There were little palm groves, tiny allotments with seedbeds and small plots, small fields divided and sub-divided, water troughs, and pipes gushing with water.
This at last was Beni Ulid (Fig. 9) – the outpost of Tripolitania, won not so long ago by the Italians from a recalcitrant Arab people, and lost by them in a few days. There was not here the verdure we had hoped to find; but there were police courts, a school, road signs, the beginnings of a motor road, and even street lighting. We were in civilization’s suburbs. We would soon be in benevolent country
again.
About a score or more kilometres along the road, we were granted the vision long awaited. On 20 January 1943 the Eighth Army occupied, and on 21 January we entered the village of Tarhuna, twenty-two miles from Tripoli (Fig. 9).
Imagine coming at last out of the dreadful Sirtican Desert; out of the stony places, the dusty tracks, the barren, tawny hills, broken and infructuous, out of a naked flinty land, upon a village conceived by European minds, and built by European hands. Picture a gentle smoothed slope of fertile land, with a metalled road running over it: on each side of the road, grouped with charming irregularity, white and rose-tinted houses, varied in shape and size, but forming together the pleasing pattern of a European village. Imagine the lines and angles and planes of the houses broken, and their tints made more pure, by dark-lined cypresses, and tall tapering poplars. Imagine beyond the purlieus of this little grouping of tinted houses and sombre solid evergreens, orchards of slender-branched olives, gardens of vegetables with beans and peas in flower, and bright red chillies, almond trees in blossom – all an oasis of colour and life. That was how we saw Tarhuna. Who can blame us if we exaggerated the beauty of its position, and heightened to ourselves the colour of its walls and vegetation?
The coming to Tarhuna was perhaps the most exciting of all the events of our long journey ; and it is not difficult to understand the reasons for our pleasure. Now at last, we were on the threshold of humanity’s land. Before us were gardens, fruit, shops, roads – and water in abundance. At last we were reprieved from dirty clothes, dirty bodies. We were coming out of the darkness.
We leaguered near a village cistern that night, a few miles beyond Tarhuna. There were Italian colonials to talk with; they spoke quite openly about the mutinousness of the Arabs, who, in the interval between the departure of the Italian and the arrival of the British police, had threatened and looted; and they told us about the famine, the German retreat, the fortifications at Castel Benito (Fig. 9). We drew eighty gallons of water from the cistern, and bathed and supped sumptuously. There were young lettuce and thin spring onions to be had, and with their help our M & V acquired a new flavour. We put up our tents in a big pit, which the Axis soldiers had dug for their gharries. We were relieved and confident.
War's Nomads: A Mobile Radar Unit in Pursuit of Rommel during the Western Desert Campaign, 1942-3 Page 17
