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By Root 1041 0

‘Unless it was of short duration and taken at speed the truck would bog to the axles. Pebbly going was usually good, but sometimes it was a deceptive crust with soft sand underneath which only the experienced eye could detect at a distance. In some places the desert was smooth and firm as a race-track for miles on end and in every direction; in others it was treacherous as treacle.’ Both sides were sometimes confused by their enemies’ use of captured transport. Again and again, British troops received unwelcome surprises from approaching British vehicles and even tanks which proved to be driven by Rommel’s men. The Italian Bologna Division was panicked one day by the sight of a column of British trucks in their midst, until they discovered that it carried Germans.

Between offensives, there were long intervals of boredom, training and preparation. ‘The chief occupation of soldiers in wartime is hanging around doing nothing, though preferably purposefully,’ wrote a British soldier. Men dug incessantly, laid minefields, patrolled and conducted sniping duels. They suffered from desert sores, jaundice, dysentery. Both sides learned to curse khamsins, sandstorms that reduced vision to a few yards and drove yellow grit into every crevice of vehicles, equipment and human bodies. Italians called them ghibli. Pietro Ostellino wrote home: ‘You would think it impossible to take two and a half hours to cover the two hundred metres which separated the mess from my tent but that is the truth. I have never seen a night so dark: you stopped for a moment to clear your eyes and immediately lost your bearings. When finally I got to my tent I found everything under five centimetres of sand. At any moment, the canvas seemed likely to blow away.’

Even during long lulls between battles there were few diversions save the arrival of mail, every soldier’s obsession. Many men wrote home almost daily, because there was nothing else to do. The act of writing maintained a link with their other lives which became ever more precious as the passage of months extended into years. Eighth Army’s soldiers were granted occasional brief leaves in Cairo, a city they learned to hate. Olivia Manning, who later became famous as author of The Balkan Trilogy, arrived there as a refugee from Greece in April 1941: ‘The unreality had something to do with the light … It was too white. It flattened everything. It drained the colour out of everything. It lay on things like dust … we were shocked by the colourless summer delta. The squalor of the delta shocked us horribly – not only the squalor, the people’s contentment with squalor. For weeks we lived in a state of recoil.’

Having been abroad since 1939, Manning gazed curiously at the throng of British soldiers in the streets: ‘Sweat shining, hair bleached to sameness, the pink burn of English skin disguising differences; much of a size, not tall … Their worn, thin, washed-out khaki was wrinkled with heat. Dark patches of sweat showed between their shoulder blades and under their arms.’ Officers found consolations in the smart rendezvous of Egypt: ‘Groppi’s at Cairo and Pastroudi’s at Alexandria stay in the mind,’ wrote one. ‘There is a splendid decadence in having morning coffees and éclairs amid gilt mirrors and all the kitsch of affluence.’ Other ranks, however, knew only Cairo’s sordid bars and brothels, which inflicted alarming disease rates on Eighth Army.

For Mussolini’s soldiers, from the outset the North African campaign was a nightmare. The usual hazards of war were rendered almost unendurable by Italian shortages of food, ammunition, vehicles, medical supplies and belief in their cause. A transport driver, Vittorio Vallicella, kept a diary which is an unflagging tale of woe. The campaign was hopeless, he said, ‘not because of our incompetence or the enemy’s courage, but because the other side was so much better organised’. He added bitterly: ‘This is “the war of the poor” wished upon us by the Fascist hierarchy, comfortably ensconced in Rome’s Palazzo Venezia.’

Vallicella claimed to have seen only one Italian