West of Tripoli
While we were resting at Castel Benito, the indefatigable Eighth Army was driving the Axis out of the last corners of Tripolitania; and after a while, we moved forward to rejoin them. It was a glorious sunny morning when we pulled out of our olive grove and drove through Tripoli’s suburbs, with Alec and myself riding on the high roof of the gharry to lift trailing telephone wires over the aerial.1 We passed through the oasis of Sansur, drove through a magnificent palm grove at Zavia and past the tiny Italian railway with its comical stations, and came towards the end of the first day to the village of Sorman (Fig. 9). Near Sorman we saw our first troglodyte dwellings. Just off the main road, and within a few yards of the traffic, was a shallow pit with an uneven mouth. The floor of the pit, which was about fifteen feet below the surface of the road, was littered with fodder, wet and decaying, and from it opened four or five rude caves, some with a door, others with a clumsy ill-fitting framework of boards to keep out rain and cold. None of the caves had windows or chimneys, but they were inhabited. Outside one opening, an old man sat in the sun, cross-legged like a tailor. He seemed blind and infirm. The flies settled on his head and face, but he made no effort to drive them off. He sat with his head down, feeling for his skin under his rags, and scratching. In the well space with him were a cow and a donkey, both eating the wet and stinking fodder, and the ground everywhere was dotted with dung. Presently an old woman came out of the darkness of one of the caves and climbed slowly out of the pit. She was old and hideous. Her clothes were filthy rags. When she saw us she pulled the hem of her garment across her face and looked past it with one eye. I caught a glimpse of her face before she hid it. It was scabbed and mottled blue with some dreadful disease.
I do not think I have ever seen human beings so wretched. How could humanity, and humanity under the protection of a modern power, live so vilely? Age and infirmity, dirt and disease, vermin and darkness – even animals lived cleaner than this. Here humanity drew near to the reptile in the cave. Pity was swamped by nausea. Fortunately the events of the next few days helped me to forget this dreadful sight. We drove on from there, and before darkness came, put up our tent on the outskirts of an oasis a mile or two away.
There we leaguered for a while in an admirable place. The homes of the villagers, whose neighbours we became, were primitive, loosely-built huts of dry palm branches, put up without skill or care, and incapable of holding out the weather. But the villagers themselves were clean, diligent and friendly. Their wells were carefully built and rigged, and the small cultivated patches near the houses planned and orderly. Their bigger fields were hedged with dykes of soil piled high and flattened into the shape of a thick wall. They had pride in their agriculture, and any children who wantonly damaged these walls were strictly taken to task. We pitched our tent under the palms, and their clustered trunks gave us shade and shelter, a sense of security and cosiness. Water was plentiful and good, and the natives, in addition to being unusually industrious, turned out to be less servile, more frank, less greedy and more amusing than we had met before.
As soon as we had settled, the boys came running to see who we were and what we had (for every unit was to them a body of potential tradesmen). When they found we had tea to spare, they ran off excitedly, and man and boy came in procession to offer us eggs, carrots, and dried dates in barter. The conversation that invariably followed the arrival of the egg-bringers was no masterpiece of colloquial Arabic. It was conducted in a working vocabulary of far less than a dozen words – quoiz and mushquoiz – good and no good; shufti, show; bucra, tomorrow; a few numerals, and of course, backsheesh. But accompanied by a versatile display of miming, these few words were adequate. Initial generosity, patent fair play, astonishment at dissatisfaction, indignation and final softening on our part – dismay, protest and supplication on theirs, culminating in the final magnanimity of the backsheesh – that was the routine comedy of the transaction, richly enjoyed by both sides.
Biscuits were a welcome backsheesh, because there was at that time a great grain shortage. Probably cereals had been scarce for some time, for although the grown men were lean but strong and muscular, the children were all undernourished and undersized. They had an insatiable appetite for our hard service biscuits, and were always grateful for them. And not only were they permanently hungry; they were all badly clothed and shod. During our stay at Sorman it rained frequently and heavily, and a cold wind blew. Although all seemed pleased with the rain, and told us that it was good for the crops, the children fared badly. The ground was constantly damp under their bare feet, and they must have slept wet. Most of them had a cold and some of them coughed shockingly. Yet they were gay and grateful youngsters. We brought them around our fire and fed them. There they chatted and laughed, trotting out the few Italian words they had picked up in the fascist schools, and learning English words and names. Few would eat our English dinner but biscuits they never tired of, and any scrap of clothing was a welcome gift. Most of us had bush jackets given us by the South Africans,2 and these made long and absurd but warm overcoats for the boys. After they had been given clothing they ran off home and some brought their fathers, who thanked us not with words but with their eyes.
But the most grateful of all the natives of Sorman was a disreputable unsavoury old beggar who haunted our campsite. He came every day, but had nothing to sell or to exchange. He was ugly and dirty, and, like most human beings, we preferred to give to those who were pleasant and gay rather than the unpleasant and ugly. On the morning of our departure, however, we could not help feeling sorry for him. It was a very damp day. A light drizzling rain was falling and the air was chilly.
He had nothing to protect him from the weather but a ragged undergarment and an even more ragged blanket cloak pulled around his head and shoulders. He stood fearfully a few yards from us, pointing to his bare legs and crying ‘Saggar, saggar!’ (cold, cold). It seemed a shame to leave him cold and bare. Two of us gave him a shilling each, and told him as best we could to go to the Suq and buy himself cloth. He was transformed with delight, less at having received alms than at having been at last noticed and considered. He grinned and nodded, crying ‘Quoiz, quoiz!’ hopping now on one foot and then on the other. As he went off, he kept looking back, still dancing for pleasure and crying ‘Enta quoiz – enta quoizqateer’. He vanished into the palm grove still hopping in his strange way.
Our stay at Sorman was a happy one. These Senussi were nearer to us in spirit than any other natives we had met. One handsome young man named Miub came to be a great friend. He was a lightish-skinned boy who dressed well in white pantaloons, embroidered waistcoat and black velvet cloak hemmed with scarlet. He brought us eggs and dates, showed us which wells were good, and took us one day to the Suq. He was a good boy, a beggar of course, but a beggar who enjoyed the fun and was not greatly concerned with what he got out of it. At Sorman we found lemons and desert sandals, and it was during my stay there that I saw what was to me the finest of all the desert sights, the old theatre at Sabratha.
Sabratha
When I was at Sorman, I recalled my conversation with the Italian refugees at Castel Benito, and wondered if I were yet within easy distance of the Roman theatre at Sabratha (Fig. 9); and when Miub told me that the ruins were only a few kilometres away, I made up my mind to see them, by hook or by crook. One afternoon therefore, feeling sure that we were not likely to move at short notice, I begged Roy to take my watch, and set out.
Many months had gone by since I first sat, lonely and friendless by the side of Mussolini’s North African road. I had learnt since then that it was easier to travel there than anywhere else in the world, for the Eighth Army drivers would take any of their comrades anywhere, at any inconvenience. Within half an hour of leaving camp, I was put down in the middle of Sabratha village.
There still stood, undamaged, a big clean signpost pointing the way to the Scavi di Sabratha; and from it led a fine metalled road lined with decorative poplars and pointi
ng towards a high building in fawn-coloured stone. There were mines on either side of the avenue and booby traps in the houses. But my concern was not to dawdle and explore side tracks, but to reach the ruins as quickly as possible. I felt on that glorious Tripolitanian afternoon the awakening of an almost forgotten excitement. The day was cloudless and quiet; the slender cypresses moved their topmost branches lightly back and forward; hard heels rang pleasantly on the unaccustomed metal of the highway. In just such a pleasure of anticipation I had walked, in the days before the war, over the Northumbrian moors to see Borcovicus, or over the Surrey ploughland to see the mosaics at Bignor. To be drawing near again to antique beauty and all its surprises of art and poetry was to revive an old thrill.
At the end of the avenue, passing through a gate upon which some Eighth Army signwriter had generously painted ‘Ancient ruins – do not damage’ and leaving a big cream-coloured house on my left, I came at last upon the ruins. Here had stood one of the great cities of Roman Tripolitania; and here fascist Italy, with a care and devotion that it denied to human beings, had worked to restore ancient glory, and linked hands with a culture it envied but could not equal.
My first emotion was pleasurable bewilderment. Where to turn among such profusion of ruins? To the right and left of the excavated street where I stood were mosaic floors, some in sober blacks and greys, others gayer with buttercup yellow and willow-herb red, and almost pattern complete. In corners the broken pieces of even more floors were piled in treasure heaps, with fragments of figured pottery and lamps and vessels. Here columns, broken half way up, stood firm and vertical; there others, broken into drums and cylinders, lay across marbled floors. No two marbles seemed alike – they were milk-white and sheened, porphyry, a misted green veined with jade, blood red, gazelle brown. Near the forum, floors of more marble lay almost intact, and fragments of panelling stood upright, still flush with the solid stone, and hinting at rooms once cool and delightfully coloured in the African sun. Wells, conduits, baths, chambers, steps and stairs, Corinthian capitals, fragments of statuary, arms, fingers, and feet in alabaster, beautifully incised inscriptions provoking with incomplete statements. The wealth of the city seemed inexhaustible, ample evidence of a civic grandeur that was the pride of the old world. In the spacious forum, in the noble basilica, wealth had joined hands with art and with piety to build beautifully.
From the town led a paved roadway, its banks overhung with flowers and shrubs, and its flagstones clean and worn. This must have been the processional way, the road for priests and garlanded oxen from the town to the gem of all its buildings – the theatre.
Seen from the town, the theatre raises a high semicircle of superimposed arches, rising above the landscape and showing against the sea. From inside the semicircle, it can be seen that the diameter is a towering stage set, three flights of stone and marble columns and architraves rising above one another, and looking down upon a stage so spacious that the actors must have been dwarfed against this background of grandeur and elegance. Beyond the stage is a sunken orchestra, faced by a dropwall adorned with bas-reliefs, showing the chorus in their masks and cothurni, and the players resting in their dressing room, and backed by a dividing wall which curls in a semicircle around the priests’ seats, and ends in two carved dolphins. Behind this low wall the broad sets rise in concentric circles, tier after tier until from the topmost ring, the spectator can command a view not only of the vast stage, but of the fields beyond, and through the marble columns of the stage scene, the blue and sparkling Mediterranean.
The theatre does not impress by its size; its virtues are rather the lightness and elegance of its architecture, the charm of its colouring, and the felicity of its situation. Here, on the edge of a great alien continent, with its back towards the forbidding desert, and its face to the memorable Mediterranean and Rome and Europe, with the elements of land, sea and sky as the silent ever-present actors – here surely was a place to build a theatre, and here a fitting background against which to play out dramas of the destiny of man.
There was more beauty to see at Sabratha. The museum was a worthy building, and its gardens were tastefully set out with walks and alleys, adorned with tablets and statuary. The floor of the main room in the museum was an immense mosaic of the Tree of Life, taken from a hall in the old town. I learnt more there about the history of Sabratha, that the town and the theatre had probably been built in the second century AD when the Caesars had all the resources of the known world to draw upon and build with, that Professor Giacomo Guidi had spent years in excavation and reconstruction; that the Italians had, as recently as 1937, given a performance of Oedipus Rex there, that the stone setting was eighty feet high, and that the building could hold about ten thousand.
But the pleasure I took in this information was trivial compared with the first impact of the beauty and purity of the building upon my mind. To me, coming out of the desert, with months behind me in which my only link with the culture of yesterday had been an old Shakespeare and an older Golden Treasury,3 the sight of Sabratha was a major aesthetic experience. Europe, all that civic grace and architectural glory wedded to literary vision that Europe had stood for and might still stand for, rose up and welcomed me in the shape of that old theatre. It pointed the way west and north to Sophocles, Dante, Shakespeare, Paris, the medieval cathedrals….. My excitement was touched by a more poignant homesickness for Europe than I had felt for many weeks.
The end of Libya
The charm of Sabratha led us to expect finer country in the last western corner of Tripolitania, but we found that Libya was to end for us as it had begun – in wilderness. Between Sabratha and Zouara the country was level, neglected and wretchedly waterlogged by the recent rains (Fig. 9). The harbour of Zouara Marina was colourful with its native boats at anchor, but the town itself was a shabby little place with few traces of European colonization. It consisted of a few streets of huddled native shops with dark interiors, leading to an untidy and muddy market place. However, strangely enough, Zouara was a place where one could still buy. There we bought German razor blades, soap, peanuts, walnuts, an odd camera film and even a drink; and there was in the market place a Palestinian barber. To have a haircut by a professional barber who possessed shears was in itself a luxury. This was the first pair of shears I had seen for over a thousand miles. Since El Alamein we had taken turns at cutting each other’s hair with a broken comb and a pair of scissors from the first-aid box. It was a sad commentary on the state of things in Tripolitania at that time that the barber would not take my lire but asked me, aside, if I could bring him a packet of biscuits.
However, we saw little of the town, for typhus broke out there too, and we were confined for the remainder of our stay to our own campsite. That was far less of a hardship than it had been, for little by little we had perfected comforts and conveniences for ourselves. Completely patched and mended, our tent was now a fairly snug little home. Almost all had camp beds, and the tent was lit by a cable running from the gharry. There was even a press switch so that I, who was usually last to sleep, could turn off the light without getting out of bed. We had learnt cunning methods of folding the blankets so that there was most warmth in them. Best of all we had acquired a radio (though I hesitate to tell from where). Rewired and adjusted, it brought us the news faithfully every six o’clock in the evening; and it had long become a ritual for us to assemble and listen in closely to see how the war, in which we were taking a part, was going. Food was fairly plentiful after the fall of Tripoli, and eggs for service biscuits seemed a legitimate exchange. We had schooled ourselves to win water and fuel from every available source, and I had learnt to pick up useful reading matter from every dune, palm clump and abandoned campsite. The little scraps of information went into my notebook; notes on Gauguin, Renoir, Toulouse Lautrec (scavenged from the abandoned reading matter of four nations) I still value.
Then too, from bickering and squabbling in the early days, the ten of us had come to value each other
more and more. The rather humourless sergeant, Sergeant Clark, whose infirmity it was to call everything by its official RAF vocabulary title (so that topees became Wolseleys, and pay books, part two’s), was nevertheless a good workman and a devoted NCO. The corporal, Corporal Pryce, had a knack of doing even the simplest operation wrongly, but we could not have done without the humour he provided. Roy Hazlewood, who every night went to bed and cried out in his sleep, ‘Oh dear! Oh dear!’ was the kindest hearted of companions. Each man had his talent and his virtue and both came more and more into play each day. Sid Rapperport was a jester, Alec Young and Bob Holden the technicians, Norman Taylor the official photographer, Harry Allen (H. Cookie) and Jack Scott (Cookie)4 loyal cooks and handymen. We had learnt to pull together; and though we were often weary, this solidarity and the sense that we were working together in a winning battle buoyed us up.
We hoped that from Zouara for the rest of the campaign we would be allowed to keep to the coast road. But by this time it was obvious that Rommel was going to stand on the Mareth Line and our forces would have to be deployed along a fairly wide front (Fig. 9). We drove inland again to El Assa, of which I remember little except that it was another windy, dusty, sorry place that drove us back upon our old privations of hunger and thirst. We were not sorry when after a few days we packed again, drove without fuss over the western boundary of Libya, saw a little white hut flying the tricolor5 and knew that we were in Tunisia.
War's Nomads: A Mobile Radar Unit in Pursuit of Rommel during the Western Desert Campaign, 1942-3 Page 19
