We drive down off the falaise and I join a group of them for local dates and strong mint tea. The sun slowly declines, turning the colour of Libya from gold to russet. It is a grand, remote, spectacular spot and for once a border lives up to its romantic expectations.
LIBYA
Day Seventy-Nine
TOBRUK
It’s a warm, clammy evening on the north coast of Libya. A coach has disgorged a number of elderly Britons at the door of the blandly modern Al-Masera hotel. Once in their rooms, they will be able to push aside the net curtains and look out over the sea, where a sharp curve of the coastline has created a perfect harbour. It will mean more to them than the average tourist, for sixty years ago they nearly died defending it.
At Tobruk, the Sahara meets the Mediterranean Sea and we are less than 250 miles from the Greek mainland, closer to Europe than at any time since leaving Gibraltar. A hundred and fifty miles the other way, to the south, is the Great Sand Sea, a massive wilderness of parallel sand ridges, hundreds of feet high, rolling across the desert like waves in a hurricane. In the Second World War, the battle for control of Egypt and the Suez Canal was confined to the area between these two seas, a thin strip of land, whose only outlet was the port of Tobruk. The fighting was fierce and Tobruk itself changed hands five times between 1940 and 1942. But for eight crucial months, between April and December 1941, despite being surrounded by the enemy and bombed from the air, Allied troops clung onto Tobruk and kept open a vital supply line. The siege cost many lives, and the men filing into the hotel, some shuffling in on the arms of others, some with sticks and some in wheelchairs, are returning, one last time, to the place where they lost so many friends.
Considering theirs is an eight-day trip and they’ve already done the battle site of El Alamein earlier today, the veterans are holding up well at the supper that’s been laid on for them. It could be something to do with Avril, Lady Randell, a vivacious woman with short-cropped blonde hair and unquenchable enthusiasm, who has organised many of these reunions. It could also be something to do with the fact that being together again reminds them of happy as well as hellish times.
I find myself sitting next to a smart, tweed-jacketed man called Ray Ellis, with thick white hair and a ruddy face. His regiment, the South Nottinghamshire Hussars, were trapped by the Germans in a corner of bleak desert known, ironically, as the Knightsbridge Box. They had already been in the desert for a year, without a day’s leave, when, under heavy attack, they were given orders ‘to fight until the last drop of ammo’. Ray it was who fired the last shot, before being captured, taken to Tripoli and put aboard a coal-carrying cargo ship bound for Italy. This journey, which he spent crammed together with all the other prisoners in a sealed hold, with one meal a day and the constant fear of being blown up by British air and sea patrols, was, he admits, more terrifying than anything he’d endured at the siege of Tobruk. On arrival, he and his colleagues, filthy and emaciated, were paraded through the streets of a small town near Naples. He was at his lowest ebb, when, out of the jeering crowd, came a young girl, who ran up to him and pressed a peach into his hand. He pauses here, not for breath but to let the emotion register, as if the peach had just that moment been handed to him. He nods gently at the memory, and goes on.
He escaped and was on the run for nine months, hidden by Italian families. He still sees them and has written a book about his experiences, which will soon be published in Italy, though not, it seems, in the UK. Ray has a bit of a double act with another South Notts man, Harry Day. Harry was a medical orderly - ‘Never a proper soldier,’ Ray chips in - who has given me a booklet issued by the Ministry of Information in 1941 called Destruction of an Army. It’s full of wonderful sepia photos of the Libyan campaign, as fought by decent chaps who smoked pipes a lot.
Ray nods sagely. ‘It’s a hundred per cent propaganda from start to finish.’
He’s not the only one who’s written about his experiences. Frank Harrison, once of the Royal Signals, is a painter and a poet as well as an author. Partly disabled after a recent stroke, he’s here with his wife. He talks almost lyrically about the appalling conditions they endured. Any guidebook I’ve ever read about desert survival emphasises the vital importance of drinking several litres of water a day. Frank and 25,000 others like him were expected to live, work, and, if necessary, fight on one cupful.
‘And that was for everything.’
Far from complaining, Frank suggests they developed a sort of evolutionary adaptation to the conditions.
‘The surprising thing was, none of us grew beards. I don’t know why, but it’s true. I don’t think I had a day’s illness in the nine months I was in Tobruk. We were fit. We were terribly fit.’
They didn’t have tents and mostly lived in holes, like shallow graves, that they’d managed to dig out of the compacted mud.
‘We loved our holes,’ says Frank, eyes wandering briefly into the middle distance. ‘That’s why we won the name rats. Desert Rats.’
The Desert Rats have more stamina than I. Leaving them burning the midnight oil, I retire to my eccentric room. The bathroom is like a Laurel and Hardy set, with a shower that sends out spray from every point apart from the head and a lavatory flush that requires both hands and one foot against the wall to operate. Over many years of travelling I have acquired the habit, though I often regret it, of checking the state of the bed sheets. I’m pleasantly surprised to find my sheet at the Al-Masera is as clean as a whistle, but as soon as I climb in my foot goes right through it. This is not the time to have a go at hard-working attempts to improve tourist facilities, but there are certain basics, like non-splitting sheets, that someone ought to have noticed. Tourist brochures are another. If you really want to bring in the visitors it is surely not too much to employ a translator who knows their language. The leaflet in my room invites me to visit ‘scenes of the Second World Ear’, and has a lot of trouble with the word ‘snacks’.
‘Lunch is mainly takeaway snakes. Dinner is the major meal. It is a full one consisting of different Slacks …’ It concludes with a wonderfully loopy passage about Libyan beaches that could have been written by the late, great Stanley Unwin: ‘You may enjoy the moonlighted nights and sleep smoothly on the sea waves songs in your tent.’
Clutching the two halves of the sheet around me, I at least drift off to sleep with a smile.
Day Eighty
TOBRUK
A busy day ahead for the vets. Already, groups are gathering in the lobby. In one of them is a Maori woman who lost her brother at Tobruk. Twenty Maoris were killed here, she says.
‘For what?’ She spreads her arms. ‘Senseless. We’ve tried to come to terms with it. We cry, then we laugh.’
Martyn, a New Zealander a little younger than myself, is here to try to find the grave of his uncle, Owen Gatman of the New Zealand Division. He and eleven others were killed when the Panzers overran their position. Their grave has never been found. Martyn has now moved on from searching files and archives to searching the desert with a pick and a sledgehammer. Though he says he found ‘a couple of promising mounds’, the hard ground has yielded no secrets so far. But he won’t give up.
Stephen Dawson of The Royal Horse Artillery, who served throughout the siege, is eighty-nine, tall and thin, with sunken El Greco cheeks. Part of the agreement with the Libyans is that uniforms should not be worn at the reunion, so Stephen is dressed for the day ahead in a bobble hat, a windcheater and trousers a little too short. Slung across his chest is an old bag, webbing blancoed and frayed, which he carried throughout the war.