‘I was completely technically incompetent,’ he observes cheerfully, ‘so I was put on signals.’
The desert held no terrors for him.
‘I’m an agoraphiliac. I loved it.’
A bagpiper, kilted and sporranned, walks behind him, causing Libyan heads to turn, and the young bugler, a boy from the Royal Green Jackets and the only one here who’s actually still in the army, looks around, pursing his lips nervously. I reckon he’s at least sixty-five years younger than the rest of the soldiers.
The Acroma-Knightsbridge Cemetery is a few miles outside Tobruk, in an area of stony ground and occasional fields, in which small birds dart and dive amongst resilient cornstalks. It is looked after, on behalf of the War Graves Commission, by a Libyan, Mohamed Haneish, and his wife. He’s a soft-spoken, courteous man with short-cropped grey hair, who calls the dead his ‘boys’. Mohamed has worked here for eighteen years and his father tended the graves for thirty years before that. He complains about the salinity of the water and the difficulty he has making things grow, but you wouldn’t know it. The place is immaculate. Enclosed within a well-built sandstone wall, with an arched gatehouse entrance, are 3649 graves, every one of identical size, set in neat rows on perfectly tilled ground, interspersed with trees and enough flowers to bring butterflies dancing around the headstones.
I wander down the lines. On closer examination, these apparently identical stones reveal rich diversity: Jewish stars, New Zealand ferns, inscriptions in Afrikaans and Urdu, French, Yugoslav, Polish and Arabic. Mohamed points out two VCs, one of whom, we learn from his inscription, was a chartered accountant, and only one woman, Janie Beryl Wright of the Nursing Reserve. The dedications range from the affecting ‘Good Night Little Brother’ to the conscience-tweaking ‘Fight to build as we have fought to destroy’. The effect of these ranks of white stones, set in the pale red sand, is terribly moving.
The service of remembrance gets underway as the weather deteriorates. It’s cool and feels like rain. The vets process in, led by Douglas Waller, wearing a beret and gripping the Rats of Tobruk standard for all he’s worth in the strengthening wind. As the trees swing about above the headstones, which seem to stand out more vividly now the sky has darkened, the words of Laurence Binyon’s poem, ‘For the Fallen’, are quietly but firmly recited by the living on behalf of the dead.
‘They shall grow not old as we that are left grow old:
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning
We will remember them.’
Then the piper plays, and, after prayers have been read, thanks given and wreaths laid, Paul, the bugler, sounds the Last Post.
There are, I notice, four Libyans buried in the Commonwealth cemetery at Acroma.
On their graves, instead of ‘Rest in Peace’, is an Arabic inscription. Translated, it reads ‘He is forgiven’.
On the way back into Tobruk, we pass the sombre bulk of the German war memorial. It is a replica of a Teutonic castle, on whose dark protective walls the names of the dead are inscribed, unaccompanied by details of rank or regiment. It is simple, powerful and completely different from the cemeteries we saw earlier. The contrast reveals a lot about national character and the myth and legend by which it is expressed. The Allied dead lie in gardens, as if in a state of Eden-like, prelapsarian innocence, as far away as could be imagined from war and suffering. The Germans lie in a different kind of sanctuary. A castle, a bastion, a place where warriors who have fought the good fight sleep with the gods. Both sorts of memorial show, sadly, that our ability to create order and dignity for the dead greatly exceeds our ability to do the same for the living.
The afternoon programme includes a reception at the hotel laid on by the Libyan government. Before the reception there are speeches by a group of distinguished figures. One is introduced as Brigadier Suleiman, ‘commander of all the forces in Eastern Libya’.
‘Strong Gaddafi man,’ Stephen Dawson whispers in my ear.
He is impressive in a suit, with a droopy grey moustache and a confidently authoritative manner, much of which is lost in translation. The interpreter is the complete opposite of the brigadier. He’s a sullen civilian in a suit two sizes too big for him. He’s also completely useless, and there are long periods of silence between his halting translations. At one stage he turns to the audience and shrugs his shoulders sulkily.
‘It’s just too many words.’
Finally, the brigadier’s patience snaps and he fixes the translator with a terrible eye.
‘Do not have breakfast with my language!’ he roars, before going on to deliver the rest of his speech in perfectly good English.
This knockabout disguises quite serious material. The gist of the brigadier’s message is that Libyans are still being killed and maimed by mines left over from the Second World War and he and his government want maps of the minefields handed over and a big international effort made to clear them.
At the side of the stage are display boards, which are so universally ignored that I feel duty bound to have a look. They don’t make comfortable viewing. Alongside photos of mines being laid by Germans and Allies alike are photographs of Libyans mutilated by them sixty years later.
A ceremony was to be held down at the waterfront, at the point where the defenders of Tobruk were finally relieved, but Lady Randell had found that this was now a sewage outlet, so it’s relocated to a small patch of open ground with the harbour on one side and a building site on the other. There is something about the banality of the surroundings that makes this last little piece of drama all the more affecting. As the blustery wind flicks at the yellow standard of the Tobruk Desert Rats, a message from the Queen is read out, and a wreath is tossed into the harbour. As it drifts away the eighteen octogenarians are brought to attention and marched off, one last time, in the direction of Tobruk.
‘Eyes left!’ Heads turn towards the British ambassador, who takes the salute, standing in the grounds of a half-finished house.
Day Eighty-One
TOBRUK TO BENGHAZI
This morning we part company with the Rats of Tobruk. They are going east, to Egypt, and we are turning west, across the northern edge of the Sahara, all the way to Tripoli and the Tunisian frontier, 1200 miles away.
Our coach is big and pink and accommodates not only ourselves but also a half-dozen Libyan escorts, including two government minders and a video cameraman whose job it is to record our every move. The staff from Apollonia Tours are attentive, regularly plying us with refreshments, coffee, tea, water, biscuits and sweeties, when really the only thing we want them to do is to turn off the Richard Clayderman tape.
Once we’re past the port of Darnah, the immaculately surfaced, virtually empty road rises and falls and snakes around pretty bays, as we run along the knuckle of land that brings Libya to within 250 miles of mainland Europe. Almost at the apex of this chunky headland are the remains of Apollonia, once the port for the Roman city of Cyrene, high up on the hills behind it. I’m not a great one for archaeological sites - I think I lack the patience required to imagine so much from so little - but Apollonia is enchanting. A strong offshore wind has swept away the murky humidity of Tobruk and turned the Mediterranean a glamorous, white-flecked blue. Beside it, along a mile of coastline, rise a series of graceful ruins. One of them, the Eastern Basilica, is especially elegant. A grove of slender columns made from green and white cipolin marble outlined against an azure sky. Between them are traces of a superb mosaic floor, with images of Africa, wild animals and palm trees. Such treasures would be dazzling enough in a museum, but to find them, intact and largely unspoiled, where they were laid 2000 years ago is almost unbelievable, and has me worrying immediately that they are not sufficiently protected. Not that there are any crowds here. A scattering of Italians, a few Dutch, otherwise we have it to ourselves.