Sahara (2002)

by Michael Palin

  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.

  ‘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.

  Further on, looking out over the sea, is one of the most perfectly located theatres I have ever seen, and in excellent condition too. Time seems frozen as I climb on the stage, waves thumping against the rocks a hundred yards behind me, the steep stone tiers rising and curving around in front of me. Test the acoustics with a few lines from Julius Caesar, not long dead when this was built, but am booed off by the crew.

  As the road winds up the hill behind Apollonia, it passes a complex of ancient tombs and catacombs extending right across the hillside, most of them fallen into a romantic state of disrepair. Those classical carvings, vaults, decorated lintels and bits of sarcophagi that haven’t already been looted lie around in staggering profusion, visited mainly by flocks of sheep and herds of goats picking away at the scrubby grass that covers them.

  The extent of this burial ground gives some idea of the importance of the city of Cyrene, much of which still stands, built into the folds of the hills. Two mighty propylaea, a colonnade and several headless deities with exquisitely sculpted robes adorn the old Greek settlement, erected in the seventh century BC. A cluster of elegant baths and fountains show the preoccupations of the Romans, who grafted their own architecture onto the Greek original. I’m poking around them when I find a goat in the hypocaust. Quite a shock, but a good name for a volume of archaeological memoirs. A Goat in the Hypocaust.

  Following the railway tracks laid by the Italians in the 1920s to help them excavate and restore the site I come across the eye-catching Fountain of The Nymph Cyrene. With its carved statue of a young girl gracefully ripping open a lion’s mouth, it’s an ingenious way of telling a story and creating a water outlet at the same time. In Greek mythology, Cyrene so attracted Apollo with her animal wrestling skills that he sent a chariot to pick her up and take her across the water to the fertile highlands of northern Libya, in which green and pleasant land they consummated their relationship and she bore him a son.

  The land that Apollo chose for his tryst with Cyrene is known nowadays as Jebel Akhdar, the Green Mountain, and it is quite an extensive upland area, its scenery not a lot different from Provence or even at times, where the roads narrow and the limestone walls crowd in, from Dorset. Annual rainfall up here is about the same as London’s and wide and fertile cornfields stretch away on either side of the road. It was grain that brought the Romans to Africa, and vast quantities were shipped across the Mediterranean, earning Libya the title of ‘the breadbasket of Rome’.

  Cyrene was continuously occupied for over 1200 years, until the Arab invaders of the seventh century, not much interested in classical cities, let it fall back gradually into oblivion.

  The Italians returned to the province of Cyrenaica in the 1920s but met spirited resistance to their colonising from a local leader called Umar al-Mukhtar. In 1930 General Graziani was sent out from Rome to deal with the opposition. Al-Mukhtar was captured and hanged, and those who resisted Graziani’s policies were rounded up into concentration camps.

  So hated did the Italians make themselves in this short period that there is now almost no indication they were ever here on the Green Mountain. Al-Mukhtar, on the other hand, is still remembered as a hero and received the ultimate accolade of being portrayed on screen by Anthony Quinn.

  As we descend from the plateau towards Benghazi, the olive groves, junipers and stands of cypress and Aleppo pine grow fewer and the number of roadblocks increases.

  Like Tobruk, Benghazi is a city of infrastructure, girdled by a network of underpasses, ring roads and flyovers, all largely free of traffic, and as the road signs are only in Arabic it’s impossible to tell where they’re going. The woods and fields of Jebel Akhdar seem like a dream as we cruise slowly through a bare and featureless cityscape, coming eventually to rest before the concrete and glass ter
races of the Hotel Tibesti. I would have said at the doors of the Hotel Tibesti, or even at the portals of the Hotel Tibesti, but the architects of this magnificent late 1970s pile miscalculated the height of the concrete roof above the entrance and all tourist buses have to park and unload in a nearby road, making it a good walk to the hotel lobby through a taxi rank, a small garden, past ornamental fountains and up a substantial flight of steps.

  Day Eighty-Two

  BENGHAZI

  In the lobby of the Hotel Tibesti hang neat placards with quotes from Colonel Gaddafi’s Green Book. To us sophisticated Westerners, for whom talking about political theory is about as uncomfortable as talking about piles, it seems pretty odd to have ‘Committees Everywhere’ hanging up in a place of hospitality and entertainment, not to mention the even less catchy ‘The Social i.e. National Factor is the Driving Force Of Human History’. But that’s how it is here in the Jamahiriya, the ‘state of the masses’, where Muammar Gaddafi has run the show for the last thirty-one years. After he and fellow army officers got rid of a monarchy backed by America and Britain, Gaddafi made sweeping changes. Private enterprise was banned, foreign influence discouraged and the country reorganised around people’s committees and congresses. Alcohol was banned.

  Bankrolling the revolution was not a problem, Libya being in the enviable position of having the world’s third largest oil earnings and a population less than that of Greater London.

  Gaddafi’s survival owes much to his ability to reinvent himself. He’s been at various times scourge of the West and leader of the Arab world; currently he is the great Pan-African. The change can be charted on the billboards.