The Years Between (1939-44)

by Cecil Beaton

  THE DESERT

  Derek Adkins is to be my conducting officer while I am with the RAF in the desert. This is a godsend, for Derek has toted me around so many air stations in England and he knows my interests and how to intervene as soon as I am getting out of my depth. Today Derek and I went shopping for necessities and commodities for the desert trip. There is so much to buy that it seems like marriage, getting a trousseau, and setting up house. Pots and pans and special clothes are needed. Goggles, towels, desert boots, a mirror, soap, toilet paper, hook to hang clothes on, wash-basin — all these you must provide apart from the bed equipment of Lilo mattress, blankets and rubber groundsheet.

  This evening the sun lowered itself on the windscreen of our lorry, and when the ball of light sank behind the horizon we were treated to a show of great beauty. The landscape in the sky was more varied than any terrestrial paysage, more fluid than any architecture. Islands of gold and silver, peninsulas of black and rose, floated against a background of many shades of turquoise and azure. The activity of the sky changing so quickly, yet apparently motionless, made the earth below look even more barren and forlorn. Only the straight ribbon of road in front of us became reflected pink. The wisps of gold islands in the sky dispersed; the moon came up in exchange. At twilight, or by moonlight, the desert becomes beautiful: tonight the undulating landscape and white hillocks sprinkled with clusters of thick black bushes, solid and squat, and clumps of feathery palm trees, reminded me of the Patinir landscape in the National Gallery.

  Once you have shown your passes and are admitted into the fraternity inside the barriers of the desert — yes, there is a barbed wire entrance to the desert — the newcomer, no matter to what Service or Allied nation he belongs, will be received, without question, not only as an honoured guest, but as a long-lost friend. No matter to what strain the cookhouse has already been put by the difficulties of communications, invitations to share what rations remain will always be pressed, even if an acceptance means your host ‘tightening his belt’ or ‘going dry’.

  Mess secretaries, like housewives out on shopping expeditions, are always on the look-out for the means of ‘coming by’ fresh additions to their stores. They will swap sugar and tea for small eggs from the Senussi tribes. Some of them keep a dozen hens, and they travel with them in the back of their trucks when they move their camping sites. Although under battle conditions the hens may not produce sufficient eggs for breakfast, they supply enough for an occasional omelette.

  Some of the dining tables in the mess tent are adorned with wild flowers picked from the desert scrub. A certain rivalry stimulates the various messes. I heard one squadron leader, after seeing the glass display at the mess at which he had just lunched, telephone back 200 miles to his orderly, telling him that last night’s Chianti bottle must be saved and used in future on the table as a water jug.

  In the motor transport, piled like a pack mule, with every cubic inch of space taken up with our camp-bedding, wash basins, beer bottles, tinned fruit juices, bully beef and other provisions, Derek and I started our trek forward into the desert. Rattling over a rough road running parallel to the sea, we passed a featureless, forlorn desolation, a world seemingly without end, its emptiness broken occasionally by some scraggy fig-trees that never grow tall or bear fruit. This scrubland is without interest, a drab mottled procession of dim colour stretching in all directions like an emptied sea. This desert of slag is a very different desert from the Sahara where beautiful dunes, elaborately combed and dappled by the zephyrs, are composed of a soft canary-coloured powder. This is desolation. It is as impure and drab as a dump heap. The plains are of small useless stones, grit and rock splinters, and the vegetation is dry and unsympathetic. One wonders that even a camel can digest the patches of prickly veitch.

  To find oneself at the Army and RAF Public Relations camp at Bagush was like arriving at the Ritz. The tent in which I slept was large and spacious, equipped with an electric light bulb, garden furniture and telephones. In the mess before dinner, an officer was instructing two orderlies to swot an uninvited moth. What would they say at home, with their diet of Woolton vegetable pie, spam and nettle soup, if I wrote to tell them of our dinner tonight? Eggs, tinned salmon, steak and a chocolate pudding, all served with a formality that might have irritated me if it had not seemed so humorously incongruous. The mess quartermaster, in an intimate, confiding manner to the orderlies, kept up, like a nervous hostess, a running whispering campaign during the dinner. Out of the corner of his mouth he would make an aside to a corporal, ‘Clear away the salad plates.’ ‘Crockery away again’ — ‘butter away’ — and, a little later, ‘Tell that orderly to pull up his sock.’

  The bedouins, in the wadis near the shore, watching the battle wage backwards and forwards along the tableland, consider the protagonists mad. They see first one army and then another retiring in haste, leaving behind a wonderful amount of loot. The bedouins steal forward and sell their spoils to the conquering army. A few months later the victors are vanquished; again the Arabs find great booty. They are the only people, so far, to win on this hazardous chessboard, where invariably the winner loses with his long lines of communication. Only the Arabs understand how to live here in the desert. They have learnt little else. After the battle, in which tanks are set on fire and their occupants fried alive, the fluid field of battle moves on, and the Arabs arrive to pick up, among the useless relics and impediments of destruction, the gold rings, wristwatches, cameras and souvenirs from the stiffened bodies lying in the sun. They will sell the silver strap of a wristwatch that is worth fifteen guineas for a few pounds of sugar. Occasionally they are punished with the loss of an eye, hand or arm; for the Germans sometimes leave behind them fountain pens and thermoses which, when opened, ignite the secret fuse — then bang!

  I came to the desert thinking I was nearer to war; yet even here war seems distant.

  Where then is war? In Whitehall, where the planning is done, thousands of miles from the sound of the guns, it necessarily seems remote. Here I see how much spade work goes on continuously behind the lines, the running of maintenance units, of repairs to telephones and cars, the arranging of the never-ending difficulties of transport. I see how many hours of dreary waiting and inconvenience must be endured each day, or how much time can be spent repairing an accumulator or a lorry, bringing in trays of tea, or doing chores that make life here similar to what it might be back home. I see that human existence in the desert has not the proportion of the surroundings. Yet I realize that all these aspects are as real a part of war as another.

  ‘I’ve never had so much fun as now,’ said a friend of mine while firing at the Germans, but he was carried away by his enjoyment and was soon taken prisoner. Can he be considered a more intrinsic part of war than the orderly lighting the Primus stove? The chores are as actual a part of war as the excitement.

  Lunched with an all-Greek squadron in a tent decorated stylishly with large squares of blue paper, the colour of the Greek flag. This in contrast to English tents, whose tatty decorations are more artlessly improvised. The Greek lunch of macaroni and meat stew was well cooked and savoury, the ingredients being the identical rations so unappetizingly served in many of the English messes. The Greeks, like the Free French, are flying Hurricanes, and while we were with them two of their aircraft took off in answer to a report that a possible enemy bandit had been sighted. We watched in the operations room while the course of the stranger was plotted. The Greek controller gave his advice to the pilots. An Adonis with classical profile and dark ringlets, he issued his instructions in clipped English on the RT, and the hoarse replies from the pursuing aircraft were also heard in English, but, when they became most excited and eager to make themselves more clearly understood, they would gabble a translation, as an aside, in Greek. The others watched the plot and listened to the latest instructions with growing enthusiasm as the ‘would-be’ bandit flew down to the coast from the north-west towards their zone. But what a disappointment!
The message came through: ‘Aircraft presumed friendly.’

  Mersa Matruh

  On the way to Mersa Matruh, a patch of fig trees in a dip of the road gives the impression, after the miles of unending desolation, of an oasis; but the surprise of coming over a hill top, to find Mersa lying as a panorama below is so delightful that one imagines a town with clumps of dark trees, of domed buildings with minarets, startlingly white against the blue and emerald sea. But, on arrival, one discovers that this is an abandoned, shell-torn seaside town. The white façades still bear the Egyptian signs of the old shops, the baker, the laundry and the hairdresser, but they are empty shells. The few people hanging about seem lost and pointless. At the Toc H Headquarters a few soldiers appear quite bland, despite the sinister dreamlike atmosphere of emptiness and decay.

  An eighteen-year-old negro soldier, born near Freetown, staggered into the barracks to put himself at the mercy of the English. He was frantic to join the English army, having fled from his French commander twenty-five miles away. ‘What is your story?’ The boy gulped in an effort to keep back the tears. He did not like his commandant; he had never done anything wrong to him; but he would never go back to him. If he were made to do so, he would kill himself. ‘But just what is the matter?’ The dark young boy cried he had refused to sign a chit, saying he did not expect pay of two shillings a day and would be satisfied with eightpence. For his insubordination he had been thrust for three days into a hole in the ground (this, it appears, is how he refers to the Congo form of solitary confinement). He escaped while the guard was asleep in the middle of the night. He walked and slept and had nothing to eat, but, much worse, he had no papers: the commandant had taken possession of them. The English officer was sympathetic. He said to the boy, ‘Go and get something to eat over there, by the cook-house.’ But to me he said, ‘As the commander has his papers, there is nothing for it but to report him to the police, who will turn him back again where he belongs.’ The small boy, who had slept in the desert and had not eaten for days, walked with distinction and elegance, and though his face was black he looked cleaner, smarter than most of the English soldiers who had come out of their quarters to listen to his tale. I watched the boy squatting by the brazier, eating carefully and fastidiously. He looked around him with a trusting expression that all would help him. But a feeling of helplessness, the undercurrent of tragedy that is so often near the surface in this war, had a disturbing effect upon me.

  Halfaya Pass

  Now to the forward areas. The packing up was like moving house. Bags, folding beds, Primus stoves, provisions, water cans. Derek and I took crates of drink. We bumped and banged, ricocheted from rocks into pot holes. The hideous roads seemed endless, with many miles of scrub and muck extending as far as the eye could see.

  Quite unexpectedly, and within a few minutes, I was given my baptism of sand. Hot winds blew particles into every crevice of the sealed car, into one’s throat, eyes, nose. The wheels of the car added their individual dust storms and the sand poured over the mudguards like clouds of sulphurous smoke. Sometimes it was impossible to see even a few yards ahead, but occasionally patches of road were clear. When the storm was at its worst, the smell was, according to Derek, like new linen.

  The sandstorm had abated when we got to Sollum, a badly bashed fishing village. The waves were washing through the skeleton of a wrecked ship by the shore. The houses were pockmarked with shell wounds, and not a roof remained. We drove by hairpin turns up Sollum Pass, past long-haired, immaculate, turbaned Indians, running glibly over Halfaya Pass in pistachio-green tanks. The relics of the battle of Halfaya are now half-buried in sand. A clothing stores must have been blown up; hundreds of shirts, neatly folded, were strewn on the sand; some tanks were blown up, so that a rhythm of circular discs stood in diminishing recession. The ground was littered with ammunition, gas masks, water-bottles, old boots and letters. The surrealist painters have anticipated this battleground with its eternal incongruities: the carcasses of burnt-out aeroplanes lying in the middle of a vast panorama; overturned trucks; cars that have been buckled by machine-gun fire, with their under parts pouring out in grotesque, tortured shapes: some unaccountable clothing blown into the telephone wires, or drapery in a tree seen against sunsets of bright, unforgettable colours.

  A north country soldier was wandering casually among the graves of the German soldiers, their topis, rotting in the sun, thrown over the crosses that bear the beastly swastika. A beer bottle, with a piece of paper inside, up-turned with its neck dug into the sand, was all there was to identify the young man who had died in obedience to the Fuehrer — ‘Adolf Gross, born 14.11.19, died June 1941’. The north country soldier put back the bottle. ‘It makes you think,’ was what he said.

  One of the worst aspects of desert life is the men’s lack of reading matter. However conscientious they are about their duties, much of their time necessarily must be spent ‘hanging about being bored’. In the whole of the Middle East there is a shortage of books (such a thing as a Baedeker is nowhere available). The paper shortage is worse than it is in England, and transport cannot be spared for the printed word. Randolph Churchill has worked wonders by not only inaugurating, within a week, and editing a Desert Press Review, but by devious means, seeing that it has reached even the most remote outposts.

  Coningham[25] welcomed us in his immaculate trailer. Of its interior he is justifiably proud: no grain of sand had penetrated past the meat-safe mesh of the entrance. In leather frames were photographs of his good-looking wife, like Norma Shearer, and family. The atmosphere was peaceful, as if he had everything in control, a most encouraging feeling. Huge, good-looking, strong, sunburnt like an apricot, with a wide column of neck and massive chest. When he talks he shows his lower teeth — there is a gap between the two front teeth. When he laughs, the upper row appears small and in bad condition. In every other way Coningham gives the impression of perfect health. His bright clear eyes turn up slightly at the outer corners. He sits, a colossus at his desk, and waves his arms in broad masculine gestures.

  He considers Cairo a bad place for a headquarters. English people cannot fight against the climate and sooner or later become static. Yet, on account of communications it seems impossible to transfer to Heliopolis or Alexandria. He described the desert, without trees or water, as an ideal battle ground. He quoted the German General Von Ravenstein who, when taken prisoner, called it ‘the tactician’s paradise and the quartermaster’s nightmare’. Not more than one man out of every 500 is ill, that is 0.2 per cent. Of the difficulties he encountered in the desert one of the most frequent was the wish of the men to ‘build themselves in’. Whenever he found someone had made himself a cement floor to his tent, Coningham would move the camp a mile farther on. The men should be mobile at a few hours’ notice and feel that they are nowhere permanently. For the Germans, with their Teutonic orderliness, it was even more difficult. Each time they move camp they start lining little pathways with stones, so soon (we hope) to be abandoned. To keep them in good mental health, Coningham insists that his men work every hour of daylight so that they are pleased to go to bed: with nothing to do but try to look for ticks and scorpions they would become so apathetic that they would not even walk the necessary mile to their mess for a hot meal, but would prefer to open, on the spot, a tin of bully beef for their lunch. Fortunately we had troops here before the war who have the instinct of the desert by now.

  But the desert absorbs so much it alone is the victor. To fight here is like trying to fill a bath without a plug, where everything gets washed down the pipe. Two hundred thousand gallons of petrol are devoured each week, 80,000 vehicles are maintained in the knowledge that each can survive only about six months’ duration. The waste was terrible; especially on aeroplane machines, which had continuously to be overhauled. A man returned from a raid on Benghazi with, it was discovered, eighty pounds of dust in the wings of his aircraft. He said he thought it felt rather ‘soggy’.

  The lack of privacy of th
e desert latrines is something that gives the novice a bit of a shock. The more private of these toilets are encased by a transparent flapping sacking which reaches as high as a man’s waist, through which the occupants can be only too clearly seen silhouetted, sitting like Buddhas, oblivious of the world around them. At first I did not know if one saluted or looked the other way when, among a row of men squatting on a wooden ‘throne’, one recognized an awe-inspiring acquaintance. Out of shyness I was loth to visit such excessively public conveniences. I hoped for an opportunity when I could find somewhere to retire more discreetly. As a result, I suffered from headaches due to constipation, and felt a kindred sympathy for the Edwardian Baroness Burdett-Coutts who, I believe, died as a result of not being able to face the lavatory on a continental train.

  Tobruk

  In Tobruk Derek was fortunate in getting three fresh loaves at the bakery where all the bread is made for the front lines, and the areas reaching back almost as far as the base. These bakers work at astonishing, almost paralytic, speed and the 300,500 loaves that they produce each day use up 250 tons of flour a week. Pommelling and kneading, they develop tremendous stomach muscles. A machine is too delicate an instrument to stand up to desert conditions, and out of necessity we have been brought back to this simplicity of hand-kneaded bread. Nothing tastes better. The master baker with his badge on his sleeve and his rank of staff sergeant-major fully realised his monarchical powers ruling over this unique white kingdom.

  HOSPITAL CASES AT TOBRUK

  The General Hospital at Tobruk has suffered remarkably little from the bombing. At this time one of the senior surgeons, named Simpson Smith, with the rank of colonel, a fair goodlooking sportsman, was bemoaning the fact that most of his cases were accidental. ‘It worries me so much that there’s this terrible continual waste. The other day we had seventy-four cases all in at once: burns — very bad. But out of 220, only three have died. That’s because we have this new method of dealing with them. We re-burn them with this silver nitrate. It used to be said that if one-third of a patient’s body was burnt he couldn’t survive the shock, but now with the present-day processes a man can recover even if five-eighths of his body is burnt. The nitrate forms a skin, a coating that protects the nerves and, at the same time, prevents the life juices from flowing out. Now let me show you this.’ The doctor bends over a shrouded figure. ‘Now let’s have a look at you today.’ He uncovers a body. The doctor has tremendous enthusiasm, vitality and charm. If some of his remarks shock me, it is because I am squeamish. ‘Yes, you’ve got it badly, old son. Of course that man represents a good deal of work. He’s been a grand patient, taken it very well too. Four pints of plasma were pumped into him. The trouble is he need never have been burned; if only he hadn’t thrown down his lighted cigarette next to that petrol can.’ The doctor passes down the ward, pauses at another bed and explains: ‘This man stepped on a mine, both arms and eyes were blown away, also a large lump out of each thigh — yet he manages to live.’ However, another patient was not progressing at all well. ‘I got very cross with him,’ says the doctor. ‘We don’t want to have another death and send up our averages.’ His earnest, unflinching, matter-of-fact quality was inherent in this remarkable personality. In the way that friendships spring up in the desert, Simpson Smith and I became friends.