Meet The Padre, Beirut Bazaar & Photo Album

It was probably the year's worst dust storm. Through most of the day, visibility outside was no more than io yards. Into our clammy garage a whispering filter came defying our efforts to block ,he doorway. We stayed in our blankets till sunset, arising at intervals to eat bully and sand by the light of the car lamps. Outside, nothing moved save wind and dust clouds in the miserable ruins of Matruh.

This was the padre's first sight and taste of a desert, and he charmed away our experienced grumbling with his talk. 

Like caricatures of Roman generals who once took their ease in cool, clean villas at Matruh, with army blankets instead of togas on our shoulders and sand instead of vine leaves in our hair, we gave the town such a session of light and edifying conversation as it had not known since Anthony passed the time of day with Cleopatra.  The padre spoke of books and sport, of army "shop" and roguery on the Seven Seas and in the Three Services, of his parish at home, of the music of Schubert and Wagner, the perfect Victory Dinner to order at Shepheard's, the art treasures of Europe, picnic race meetings, and the politics of country towns.

That stay in Matruh, I think, was the one full day in bed I had in twenty Middle East months. I class it as my most restful day of the war.

We moved on together, south and over the Libyan border. The padre came under gunfire for the first time-and failed to notice it because the moment coincided with a call for his ministration to a dying
Wop. Anti-tank bullets had got the man in a patrol clash. The result, in a vivid sprawl in the sunlight, was not easy to look at. An R.A.P. chap did what he could about it. Below the ridge on the horizon, the artillery quietened to an occasional "Saturday afternoon" rumble.

Some gunners came over the skyline, crawled beneath a truck and went to sleep in the patch of shade. The padre, white of face, knelt out on the rocky sand beside a pitiful body that took a long time to die in that glaring afternoon.

There was a cricket match before sunset. Tobruk and Benghazi saw many a scratch game in their time, but no eleven, I venture, had quite so fantastic a setting as that which played amid the sand dunes of the escarpment north of Giarabub. In a hollow surrounded by an immense horizon of nothingness, half-naked figures with a make- shift bat, a tennis ball and a petrol tin wicket seemed to give a netherworld parody of t all earthly pleasures.  But, squatting in the outfield in a battle-dress already stained and torn, the padre gave to the scene the benison of a civilized enthusiasm.

In the next picture my memory holds of him, he was ploughing his way up the side of a shallow ridge to flop down breathlessly under the rock shelter of the crest. Iti positions faced the other side of that ridge. The padre had come in with the advance guard of 18th Australian Infantry Brigade detachments who had worked round through the sand bogs in preparation for the storming of Giarabub. A few light artillery samples and a bit of heavy machine-gun fire were being skimmed erratically over the ridge top by the enemy. 

The padre's car had run the gauntlet of an area open to this fire. He was laughing when he tumbled out at the foot of the ridge and scrambled tip to shelter. The dash across had been as exciting to him as a close finish at the races. But his eyes grew serious, and his lips moved in prayer as he watched other vehicles skid and lurch across the open with spouting sand from the shell bursts in their wake.

He rested that night (if you could call it rest) with an occasional shell or flick of tracer rustling on its way 20 feet above his head, and with a Sydney ex-bookie on one side of him and a turbaned Indian M.T. driver on the other.  On the morning when the Giarabub sideshow had its brief but hectic climax he was, I think, the only man on either side who found time to shave.  But he contrived to be in the village on the heels of the mopping-up parties. He cheered tired men, gave a hand with the wounded, saw to arrangements for the decent burial of the dead. The one thing he overlooked, for 27 hours, was to eat. Except for that incongruously shaven chin, he looked as disreputable as any one when the show was over. A senior British medical officer strode past him to a waiting battle buggy.

"What the devil do you mean," barked the medical man to his driver, "leaving the car unattended with all these - Australians around?"

The padre, who was the nearest of the adjectival Australians, still talks appreciatively of that comment. I suspect he feels that he shared a subtle compliment.

He took a short cut back from Giarabub to the advanced base at Melfa-driving innocently over a mined track where, by some freak, nothing exploded. He got lost that night in darkest Libya. The cook's truck of a Tommy A.S.C. outfit found him at last. The cook and his offsiders, in respectful motherliness, served a dust-engrimed cleric who ate tinned bacon with a clasp knife, drank seven pannikins of stewed and tepid tea and dropped peacefully asleep.

Those Middle East days are not so far behind that my imagination turns interludes to mere romantic fiction. I still see them as composed mostly of discomfort, petty anger over petty muddles, sore-throated thirst, sharp, mean twinges of fright, and boredom; above all, perhaps, of boredom.

But odd hours with the padre on the way to the desert form a picture that is different. He could bring grace to a bleak wadi when he celebrated Mass at dawn with a solitary trooper attending, or to a hut full of rowdy men when he sat talking among them. He gave a pattern to the untidy trivialities that are war, and to have glimpsed a pattern in those wastes is to have brought something of value from the desert.

"VX12841"

See among the swirling crowds the haggling housewives; the veiled women; Arab merchants puffing their hookahs; the native dandy in a silken robe; sauntering gendarmes; urchins and dogs of peculiar origin scampering in and out among the passers-by. 

You'll hear the most characteristic sound in the whole of the Middle East-that made by the lemonade seller who deftly holds two brass bowls in his hand and clashes them together with a ringing sound as he shouts his wares. 

Among the many unknown fruits and vegetables on the booths you'll recognize thumb-shaped dates, not unlike a dark chilli, with long orange stalks. The natives, with an inborn sense of colour contrast, will decorate the riper chocolate brown dates with creamy carnations. See here tawny sunburnt grapes from the Lebanon; glossy purple breadfruit; the gleam of white onions; scarlet tomatoes; red-brown pomegranates; sombre olives and pickled cucumbers; almonds and chestnuts roasting on a barrow from the ramshackle chimney of which spirals of blue smoke rise into the near dusk; salted beans with hard husks; whiffs of garlic, arak, coffee, and a peculiar smell which we are told is that of hashish; urchins selling matches, begging baksheesh, or asking for Australian stamps; swarthy men selling tuber roses or garlands of sweetly intoxicating jasmine. But your intoxication will soon vanish when a creature, scarcely human, drags itself among the feet of the crowd and exposes a withered limb in order to stir the fonts of your charity.

Beirut bazaar! And you wanted atmosphere-well, there it is!

"NX5428"

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