Education in the desert.

But it is unwise to disbelieve anything you hear in the desert until you have disproved it. Soldiers have a bush telegraph system of their own. The wildest furphies travel over it, but sometimes it carries the truth. It carried the truth that day, that cold, sunny mid-December day of 1940 when I met 16th Brigade A.I.F. moving through the Western Desert towards the battle which was being fought somewhere over the frontier of Libya.

The great cloud of dust rolled on to meet us and presently we saw the vanguard of the trucks. Then behind them, huddling through the dun fog churned and lifted by their own wheels, we saw more trucks stretching away mile on mile. I looked at the men who sat behind the driving-wheels of trucks and the men who ed along under the canopies behind, cuddling their rifles. Their faces coated with dust, looked like the faces of film actors made up to go before the camera. The smart ones had masked their noses and mouths against the dust with handkerchiefs knotted behind their necks, but many of them had learned that trick then.

You could not read in those dust-smeared faces what they were thinking, were hoping, what they were fearing. Many of them had been unborn when World War 1 ended. To most of the others, World War 1 was a dream dreamed in childhood. These men had been born and raised in a country whose soil war had never touched. The clouds that had darkened over Europe in the 1930s had held no menace for them ten thousand miles away on the other side of the world. The rising mutter of the drums had crashed out the death-roll of civilisation in September, 1939, had reached their ears, but not with any tone of deep menace. These were unblooded men. They were going to something unknown.

They had spent more than a year preparing for the time when they would go into battle, but they knew nothing of what awaited them. Anyway, no more than a handful knew what awaited them. Their tough, short, massive brigadier knew. He was a veteran of World War I., a fighting soldier to the fingertips. He had greeted the Armistice in 1918 as a battalion commander at the ripe age of twenty-three years. And some of his officers knew, because they had tasted battle, too, in 1914-18. But even to most of the 16th Brigade's officers battle was mostly theory - something practised on manoeuvres, figured out on sand-maps, studied in printed pages.

I had seen these men in Australia, footslogging along the roads and across the open country, meeting imaginary enemies in imaginary battles, learning the art and craft of fighting without bloodshed. I had seen them in Palestine labouring still at the theory of battle, cursing the monotony of tactical exercises, making believe that lengths of wood were Bren guns (because they had no Bren guns), making believe that a group of trucks was a group of tanks (because there were no tanks), making believe that the empty air they fed into the breeches of their guns was 25-pounder shells (because there were no 25-pounder shells). I had seen them in Egypt practising manoeuvres in the sand, learning to swallow and hate and curse the dust, wondering if the effort  were all a waste of time and muscle-power, wondering if they would ever action, if they would ever see any enemy more real than some other Australian battalion pitted against them on manoeuvres.

They had watched from afar the progress of the war in Europe. They had lived through the period of the "phoney war." They had read of fall of France and the retirement from Dunkirk as men might read of a of events on another planet which have no concern for them. They known that the Italian Army was in Egypt, that it had crossed the frontier and marched as far as Sidi Barrani, with bands playing and banners flying and there halted. Mussolini's Invincible Roman Legions had (with the aid of the Regia Aeronautica's bombs and poison gas) overwhelmed the defenceless Ethiopians, and now they were inside Egypt, poised to strike, but month followed month and they did not strike and somehow the Australians forgot the Italians were there and said, "Why the hell don't they take us somewhere where there's a war going on?"

These things had not meant much to them, they were episodes in a unreal story. The real things were answering reveille, training, keeping your rifle oiled, the mail from home, the price of beer in the canteen.

The moment of going into battle had seemed remote. Now it was very near.

The ground they were on now as the sun rode down the sky on the evening of that mid-December day of 1940 had been a battlefield a few days earlier; or, if not a battlefield, at least the route along which the Army of the Nile had pursued the fleeing Italians into Libya. It had been a rout, but not a bloodless rout for the British. Here and there, every few miles, you would come upon a little patch edged around with stones, and there in the sand you would see crude crosses standing, and you knew that this was holy ground. 

There were not many crosses, seven here, eleven there, sometimes one all alone among the drifting desert sands, perhaps with a punctured steel helmet propped against it. These were the graves of British soldiers who had died in bursting the myth created by Mussolini that the magic of Fascism had contrived to put iron into the Italian soul. Back here, over a hundred miles from the battle line, there were few other traces of the bitter side of war.

The sun set and darkness closed over the desert, hiding even these sacred symbols from the eyes of the untried men who had never yet smelt the black perfume of the only flowers that bloom in battle.

They moved on the next day and the next day and the next day after though the wilderness of sand and camel-thorn. And now the flotsam of war drifted thicker about their path.

Beyond Buq Buq they came to a narrow coastal plain bordered on each side by ridges of white sand. It was wrapped in the profound hush of death. The only sound was the whimper of the cold wind blowing in from the Mediterranean. Here they saw a saltpan where one of the fiercest actions of had been fought. A dozen British tanks were bogged down in the muddy surface of the saltpan. Each of them was shattered and charred, a broken courageous thing, like a soldier who had died at his post.

The tanks had been trapped on the saltpan by a battery of Italian guns hidden among the sand hills on the ridge overlooking the battlefield. Caught tracks bitten deep into the clogging, treacherous surface, they shot it out with Italian gunners firing on them from concealment over a point-blank range. It had been a battle to the death.

I walked with two Australians up the ridge among the Italian guns. Boxes of shells lay behind the guns, just as they had been left by the gunners. One crew lay dead  behind its gun-three green-uniformed Italians in the grotesque postures of death. A young second-lieutenant lay behind another

gun. His hand still rested on the breech in the gesture which death had arrested.

"Dead men look queer, don't they?" one of the Australians said. "They don't seem real."

The other nodded. He touched one of the dead men with the toe of his boot and puckered up his face in a puzzled frown.

"Kind of . . . not what I expected," he said. He groped for a simile, something to express his surprise at the discovery that dead men bear little likeness to men who are living. "They're like in a waxworks. You don't feel sorry for them."

The convoy rolled on. The retreat had been an ugly thing here. Every few hundred yards there were clusters of Italian motor trucks which had been knocked out by British fire. Here and there, a dead man lay in battle stained, bloodied uniform, staring at the sky with eyes that looked beyond its blue depths and saw the unseeable. Unexploded Italian hand grenades red-painted, toy like things-were strewn over almost every foot of the road. Abandoned rifles, belts with pouches crammed with ammunition, lay every few yards where they had been dropped by Italians when they surrendered. There were places where the ground over areas of two or three thousand yards was flecked with jettisoned letters, fluttering and scampering in the wind, emptied out of tens of thousands of Italian pockets and knapsacks in the mad moments of panic that soldiers know only in abrupt and total defeat.

Far ahead, we saw the blue of the sea and, glinting in the sunlight, the huddled white buildings that were Sollum and, back of the town, curving away into the desert, the sheer brown face of the escarpment. Libya lay beyond the escarpment and in Libya there waited the armies of Fascist Italy, drawing breath at last after their flight out of Egypt in the face of a handful of gimcrack British tanks-the Western Desert's Fighting Sardine Tins, powered by the skill and courage of their crews and not much else - and a few battalions of British troops, too meagre in numbers to follow them up and chase them farther.

The Australians climbed the escarpment, some of them up Halfya Pass, some through Sollum and up the twisting road that clung like a tortured serpent to the face of the escarpment at its seaward end. They looked at Sollum's shattered buildings. Shells and air bombs had unroofed every house like the irreverent hand of a tornado, they had rent stone walls as a blade rips a sheet of paper and pitted them as smallpox pits the face of a man. Many of the walls that still stood bore inscriptions in crude whitewashed letters, painted there by il Duce's soldiers when they were marching into is Egypt still intoxicated with the belief that their conquests in Ethiopia had given them in their own invincibility.

• Viva il Duce. Viva d'Italia. 
  • (Long Live the Duce. Long Live Italy.)
• Avanti, il Duce. Avanti, Fascismo. 
  • (Onward, the Duce. Onward, Fascism.)
• A Noi, la Vittoria! 
  • (To us, the Victory)

The Australians did not bother to erase the inscriptions. Some of them, in obedience to the Australian's custom of recording his presence whenever possible in a palace or a privy, pencilled their names and army numbers beneath the flamboyant Italian declarations. One private, discovering an abandoned pot of whitewash, traced out a sign:

• It's a bloody long way to Griffiths Brothers for Tea, Coffee and Cocoa.

But that was the closest any of the Australians approached to emulation of the Italians' sign-writing feats. Perhaps even then these unblooded men knew that martial quality is proclaimed with bullets and blood, not whitewash.

They climbed the escarpment and rolled on across the flat, stony Libyan Desert. They passed the ruins of Fort Capuzzo and its battered monument of an eagle with spread wings, which symbolised Fascist Italy's military might. They wrapped their greatcoats round themselves against the cold and masked 
their mouths and noses against the dust.

And so the 16th Brigade reached its positions outside Bardia, Mussolini's last stronghold inside the Libyan frontier, and presently 17th Brigade and 19th Brigade and the guns and 6th Division Headquarters moved up into positions beside them, and the A.I.F. began to strip for action.

Conditions were rigorous enough to satisfy the most hard-bitten taste. Officers and men lived in holes shovelled out of the sand. Only the lucky ones lived in great underground cisterns which the ancient Romans used as storehouses for grain when the desert was the world's greatest granary. These old cisterns were brightly lit by electric bulbs. The light on walls and ceilings formed of stone slabs hewn by the hands of dead two thousand years or more. The walls of some of the cisterns bore traces of visitors more recent than the Romans. On many an ancient could read the name, scratched with the point of an army jack-knife, an  Imperial Camel Corps man who had fought over this desert in World War 1.

Ancient hieroglyphics, apparently chiselled by the hands of peaceful workers twenty centuries before, were cut deeply into the walls, and beside them the names of Italian soldiers who had used the cisterns as shelter before the Army of the Nile advanced and, at length, the Australians moved up for their initiation in battle.

He knelt on the wadi's edge, unruffled and steady, for half an hour, ranging the mortar's fire back and forth along the line of the enemy gun positions.

The Italians dropped shells and mortar bombs round him, their machine gunners tried to pick him off - He was often within inches of death, but he continued to kneel in his perilous observation post. The fire from the Italian position waned. Then it ceased. The attack which had been blocked was resumed, and the infantry gained their objective and captured five thousand prisoners who had been strongly entrenched in an area a few hundred yards square.

When the gun positions which the sergeant's mortar had silenced were examined, four field guns, three mortars and seven machine guns were found there. They had all been knocked out of action by the Australian mortar bombs. Their crews lay dead or helplessly wounded about them.

It was the Italian guns that gave the Australians most trouble that day. The Australians learned in the attack on Bardia that the Italian gunner is a dangerous antagonist. They went on confirming the lesson right through Libya. The Italian understands his guns, and his shooting is very accurate. While he is fighting at long range he is a tough foeman, but, like the Italian infantryman, his stomach turns to water when the attackers close in on him with bayonets and hand grenades.

Four Italian field guns, hidden in a wadi, were shelling Australians and holding them up in the middle of the afternoon.

A subaltern jumped into a Bren-gun carrier and told the driver to rush the guns. It meant a dash across six or seven hundred yards of coverless, steel-raked sand plain, but the driver opened up his engine and the carrier went bouncing and lunging towards the guns at 45 miles an hour. It rolled un-hit through the shells the guns flung at i t, reached the wadi and slithered down the bank on top of the gunners.

They threw up their hands in surrender. They might have hesitated had they known that the carrier's light automatic machine gun was disabled and could not have fired a single shot. The subaltern and the driver knew it, but they were both poker players and they understood that bluff sometimes wins. It won that time.

It was a wild, confused battle that was fought round Bardia on that Friday, January 3, and Saturday, January 4, and the fighting taught the green Australians things that can be learned only under fire. Small parties of men charging along wadis and failing to mop up as they went sometimes found themselves shot in the back by concealed enemies, or surrounded and made prisoners. It was a hard way to learn one of the elementary principles of infantry fighting, but it was a lesson those who made the error and survived would not forget.

The Italians lost no time in showing their fondness for flag-waving; white-flag waving. More than once a group of two or three thousand Italians surrendered to a dozen or fewer Australians who, unable to handle them in the midst of a battle pointed them back in the general direction of Divisional Headquarters and watched them tramp meekly off without a single guard to keep them company. Towards evening, an Italian divisional commander sent an emissary to an Australian brigadier offering to capitulate with seven thousand troops.

"I'm too busy now," said the brigadier, who was busy fighting the battle. "Tell 'em to come back in the morning."

The Italians obligingly came back in the morning.

A twenty-year-old Australian, taken prisoner when he wandered away from his section, was dragged before two Italian intelligence officers.

"How many troops are attacking Bardia?" one of them asked him.

"A hundred and twenty thousand," he replied.

It said something for the ferocity of the assault launched by fifteen thousand Australians that his interrogators should have glanced at each other, shrugged hopelessly and rewarded him with a glass of Chianti and a cigarette.

It was hard to see any reason why Bardia should have fallen at all; certainly why it should have fallen so easily. The Italian garrison knew an attack was imminent. They were poised and ready for it. They numbered 45,000, their attackers fewer than 20,000. On December 22, 1940, Mussolini sent a message to General Bergonzoli, General Officer Commanding Bardia:

I have given you a difficult task, but one suited to your courage and experience as an old and intrepid soldier: The task of defending the of Bardia to the last. I am certain that "Electric Beard" and his brave soldiers will stand, at whatever cost, faithful to the last.

Bergonzoli, the famous "Electric Beard," who flew ignominiously across Libya before the British advance and was eventually taken prisoner near Benghazi, replied:

I am aware of the honour, and I have to-day repeated to my troops your message-simple and unequivocal. In Bardia we are, and in Bardia we stay.

The sentiment was admirable, but that was all. The Australians were inside Bardia town by the night of January 4, celebrating the victory they had won in their first battle of World War II.

A few snipers were still holding out in caves and strong points scattered among the cliffs round the town, and every once in a while the snap of a rifle and the whine of a bullet would interject like a still small voice raising, its protest against the storming of Mussolini's first citadel inside Libya. Nobody took much notice. Most of the Australians were too busy examining the quarters in which Italian officers had lived, dazedly fingering the scent sprays and cans of delicate talcum powder and bottles of perfumed hair oil the Italians had left behind when they surrendered or fled. But such cosmetic niceties ceased to interest the invaders after the first few minutes. 

They went off in search of more palatable souvenirs. They found them; cask upon cask and bottle upon bottle of Chianti hidden away in cellars and storehouses. To men who had been fighting for more than thirty-six hours the sight of such ample supplies of wine was an irresistible temptation. They broached casks and bottles and drank to the Victory of Bardia and to Mussolini, their involuntary host. Somebody discovered eleven or twelve horses mournfully chewing their fodder in a stable in the town. The horses were led forth and, in the light of the stars, Australians mounted them and, riding bareback, raced them back and forward over Bardia's cobbled main street, shouting like rough-riders of the far prairies.

In Bardia that night I saw more intoxicated Australians than I had ever seen before. They were intoxicated not with Chianti but with the strong brew of victory in battle, which is the headiest wine man knows.

Men who had doubted the strength of their own hearts had discovered that, in battle, they could find courage. Men who had felt themselves, as many men do when they go into action, predestined to die, had walked among shell bursts and bullets and yet lived. Men who, since childhood, had read and heard of the exploits in battle of the First A.I.F., who had enlisted and trained under the shadow of their fathers' reputation as soldiers, had come through their ordeal by fire and built a reputation of their own.

More than one man came to me that night in Bardia and said:

"Correspondent, eh? Well, when you write to the papers tell them we're as good as the First A.I.F."

We Australians have a deep strain of arrogance, at times almost a small boy's capacity for exhibitionism, but this was not arrogance or exhibitionism. It was the expression of a desire to let the people back home know that they carried the torch in strong hands.

Night settled over Bardia, and the flames of burning buildings sank lower, and  peace came again to the shattered town as battle-weary men lay down to rest. The Australians had tasted battle and they liked its harsh flavour, had learned the first lesson in their education as soldiers.

The excitement of the Victory of Bardia soon passed. Bardia was a step, but it was only the first step, into Libya. Three hundred miles of country still lay between the Australians and Benghazi. There was every indication of hard fighting ahead, notably at Tobruk, the next Italian stronghold, about 65 miles to the west. But now the Australians were blooded, they felt ready for anything, they were ripe for another fight. They wanted to push on and assault Tobruk at once. The ordinary soldier did not bother about the port problems and the supply difficulties that confronted his commanders.

The ordinary soldier doesn't have to bother about these problems, because it is not his business to see much beyond the end of his rifle.

The Australians moved on to Tobruk and sat themselves down in the sand. They chafed about it. They didn't like this sitting down in the sand. They wanted action. The preliminaries to battle were boring. Not the night patrols, of course. The moon had risen and was coming to the full and the nights in the desert were almost as clear as day. Patrols had to move stealthily, like shadows, when they were near the Italian outer defences, in the moonlight they were good targets for snipers or for machine in the advanced strong posts. But the days were long and wearisome, with the kham-sin blowing, as regularly as a train runs, in the morning and afternoon, covering everything with grit, laying its harsh fingers on men's souls.

Commanders rustled up transport when they could and loaded the trucks up with troops and drove them down to the Mediterranean. The sea lay calm in the thin winter sunlight, but swimming in it broke the monotony of existence for bored soldiers. Troops went fishing, too, when the chance offered.

They did not fish with hand lines and hooks; that method was too laborious. They explored the seafront until they found a likely pool, dropped a couple of Italian hand grenades into it - tens of thousands had been captured in the assault on Bardia - and waited for

the stunned fish to rise to the surface. Mediterranean fish proved a good alternative to bully beef and army biscuit.

Inside Tobruk, the Italians were not worried. They should have been worried, because they had seen Bardia fall in quick time. Old "Electric Beard" Bergonzoli and a few thousands of his officers and men had escaped to the west carrying stories of the paralysing attack by British tanks and Australian infantry. But one night in the middle of January General Patasso Manella, Mussolini's commander in Tobruk, clipped the end from a cigar, drank his after-dinner brandy and told his senior officers:

Gentlemen, have no apprehensions. The Australians will attack us no doubt, but my artillery is sufficient to break up any attack."

In passing, it might be mentioned that General Patasso Manella was aged seventy-two.

Outside, the Australians watched the blows that were being aimed at Tobruk to prepare it for the infantry's assault. They itched to get at Tobruk and make it theirs.

They did not dream then that not three months later a division of their own countrymen would retreat into Tobruk before an Axis counter-advance led by one Rommel, the future Big Bad Wolf of the desert, and thank whatever gods watch over soldiers for the strength of the defences which now sheltered Italians from the besieging force that hemmed them in on every landward side. But now the Australians were outside Tobruk looking in, and it was British and Australian guns and British planes that were bombarding Tobruk. The thought that to-morrow, as time is measured in modern wars, Australians would be inside Tobruk looking out and Axis guns and planes would be bombarding it never crossed the minds of those men of the 6th Division A.I.F.

One was killed outright, but the other was only wounded. He was able to tell his mates that he had picked up a thermos bottle, lying half-buried in the sand, and that it had exploded in his hands. Sappers went out to search, and before nightfall they had found scores of similar thermos bottles, which were not bottles at all but booby-traps made in the likeness of thermos bottles and loaded with chemical high explosive. You could blow yourself to bits merely by turning one over with your foot.

The Australians were cautious after that. They gave thermos bottles a wide berth. And they grew a little mad about it, too. They knew that all's fair in war, but they felt there was something underhand, something ,dirty about fighting your enemy with deceitful little devices of this kind. They determined that the Italians should pay for this trick.

The Italians inside Tobruk paid for it on January 21 and 22. The perimeter defences of Tobruk were similar to those of Bardia - an anti-tank ditch, barbed wire, then strong posts. They were breached by methods identical with those that had succeeded at Bardia. The morning after the attack the commander of the forward Australian brigade, with Australian Bren carriers and a few cars and trucks, was waiting on the road about a mile from Tobruk town, ready to enter it.

The vivid orange light of great fires had stained the sky above Tobruk the night before. Flames were leaping inside the town, and four or five times in the night the ground under our feet trembled with the force of an explosion as an ammunition dump, fired by the enemy to prevent it from falling into our hands, blew up. The Italians had not resisted as strongly even as their comrades at Bardia. They must have been overawed by the fighting reputation the Australians had already acquired. 

Perhaps their hearts faltered, too, 72-year-old General Petasso Manella's belief that his artillery was sufficient to break up any attack was falsified. Anyway, they did not distinguish themselves by their resoluteness. One Australian infantry company, after capturing an artillery position in a wadi, decided that the Italians were pretty spineless and that there was no reason why they should expend the energy required to climb the rugged ridge separating them from the adjoining wadi. where another battery was operating.

"Here, George," the company commander told an Italian officer who spoke some English. "Telephone your cobbers in the next wadi and tell 'em, it'll be better for them if they sling the towel in now and don't make us come and get them."

The Italian officer was puzzled by this strange direction at first, but he smiled, nodded and obeyed when the Australian translated it out of the vernacular into orthodox English. A few minutes later the gun crews from the adjoining wadi came scrambling dutifully over the ridge, waving white flags. They seemed to think the idea was a good one, too.

But it was not all as easy as that. In fact, it was in the fighting at Tobruk that one of those incidents of majestic selflessness occurred which men remember when the terror and filth of battle are forgotten. An Australian was dying of bullet wounds. His mates were in a hot spot. They were pinned down by fire from an enemy machine gun post commanding the shallow ridge that sheltered them. It was imperative that the post should be knocked out, but there was no cover the Australians could take to enable them to bring their Bren gun to bear on it. They would have been shot to pieces the moment they lifted their heads.

"Listen," the dying man said, "I'm rooted. I'm going to crawl up on to the ridge and let you coves lay the Bren over me."

He still had strength enough to pull free of his mates when they tried to restrain him and he crawled up on to the ridge and lay there shielding the others with his body from the enemy fire while they swung the Bren into action.

• And so an Australian soldier died in action - but the enemy post was taken and the advance continued.

The attack began at dawn and two hours later I saw the first batch of Italian prisoners being marched back to the compounds-about three thousand of them, looking very hangdog and un-soldierly. One prisoner had his arm in a sling, another was limping along with the aid of a comrade's shoulder. They were the only wounded men I saw in all that crowd. And two Australians were keeping them on the move.

Yet the Battle of Tobruk was no different from any other battle in one respect: The men who fought it were bone-weary by the time it was well under way. Weariness is the soldier's most deadly enemy. H,~ customarily goes into battle after a night of pent excitement, a night of nervous tension in which he has not slept better than fitfully, if at all. Reaction all but overwhelms him within a few hours. It does overwhelm him unless he is of

soldierly material, trained to endure to the limit of human capacity. I once asked an Australian who fought in France in 1914-18, what was his most -enduring memory of World War 1.

"Being tired," he said. "All the time I was in the line I was too tired to care about anything except when I would sleep next. Sleep mattered more than food or one's personal safety or mail from home."

The desert war was not comparable for body-wearing misery with the trench warfare of World War I., but men who fought in the desert suffered the same horrors of physical exhaustion. A subaltern of a battalion which met an Italian counter-attack on the first day of the Tobruk operation heard machine gun bullets flipping about him. He could see no real cover, nothing but a bush which offered concealment but no protection from the bullets. He dived behind the bush and lay flat. The bullets were chipping the branches of the bush. He closed his eyes, and when he opened them again the machine gunning had ceased. He realised that he had been asleep, probably for no more than a few minutes, but in obedience to a physical demand which he could not have resisted even if surrender to it had meant his death.

As night fell, the Australians were closing in around the town. When dawn broke, they were in position to deal the final blows to force a surrender if surrender should be withheld. It was not withheld. Eight Australian Bren gun carriers entered the town first. Snipers in surrounding buildings fired a few shots at them. They replied with bursts from a Vickers gun and the snipers waved their little white flags and walked out with their hands raised. The brigadier and his party were on the heels of the carriers, and they drove into the shattered town while the vanguard of the supporting infantry was still a mile distant.

The blue surface of the harbour was broken by the protruding snouts and sterns of five or six small ships. Shells and bombs had sunk them at their moorings in the weeks of preparation for the attack by land. Here and -there was another sunken ship of deeper draught which had settled on the bottom, leaving its decks and superstructure above the tide. Farther down -the harbor lay the Italian cruiser San Giorgio, sunk months earlier by British bombs. A column of smoke curled up from its hull. It had been fired by its gun crews when Tobruk's fall became inevitable. 

Its decks were still high above water, and the guns mounted on it had helped to pound Tobruk's attackers on the first day of the assault. Two fuel oil storage tanks were ablaze beside the town. Occasionally a great sheet of flame billowed up from one of them, heavy black smoke from the burning oil drifted across the -town and lay stretched over the sky like a vast funeral pall. It was under this canopy, which must have seemed like a symbol of defeat to the Italians, that the Australians entered the town.

The brigadier's car drew up outside a building which the Italian Navy had used as headquarters. It stood on the harbor's edge, and beneath it were hundreds of yards of deep, tunnelled shelters with concrete walls. Hundreds of Italians were found skulking in these shelters, lurking like rats, when the Australians had time to search the building.

An Italian rear-admiral and other naval and military dignitaries nervously greeted the brigadier.

"I want you to show me all the mines and danger spots," the brigadier told them through an interpreter. "If one of my men is killed, I shall shoot one of you."

The Italians looked even more nervous. The red-haired brigadier did not seem like a man given to idle chatter.

They hastily assured him that no booby-traps or mines were laid in the town, that there could be no danger to his men except in the vicinity of the burning ammunition dumps. He would keep his men away from the burning ammunition dumps, wouldn't he, because things were blowing up there and 
you never knew.

"Very well," said the brigadier, who had no intention of shooting anybody, but considered that one's enemies are more helpful if they believe their own skins to be in danger. "I accept your assurance."

An hour later the first of the Australian infantry came into the town on their tired feet. They looked weary, grimy, unshaven, but they could afford to grin. They had won their second victory. They cheerfully rounded up prisoners and herded them off towards the compounds. 

They were loaded into a truck and sent on their way watched by knots of Australian troops to whom they kissed their hands and shouted "Aussies good! " The good Aussies' expressions were faintly wistful as they watched the girls disappear along the dusty highway leading to an Egyptian internment camp.

General Wavell flew into Tobruk a day later and looked over the battlefield and talked to officers and men. He halted outside the building that had been Italian Navy Headquarters, and his eyes travelled up the flagpole to the top where two days earlier the flag of Italy had flaunted in the breeze. "Now another emblem floated there - an Australian slouch hat, battered and dusty but proud as any banner that ever rode the wind".

Wavell smiled quizzically and raised his hand in salute.

On the night of the day that Derna was occupied I lay in bed in the front room of a whitewashed cottage named "Villa Marina." The green-shuttered windows opened on a cobbled street of the town. Nearing midnight I heard a scuffing of heavy boot soles on the cobbles and a murmur of voices. Two men took their stand outside the open window and began a conversation which rambled on through most of the subjects you would expect soldiers to discuss. They were two Australian privates, I gathered from their talk. It was also plain that they had been celebrating the fall of Derna in captured Chianti.

At last their discussion drifted round to the British units who were fighting  with the Australians in the desert.

"You know, Bill," said Australian Number One, "these Tommies' a man meets out here are good blokes."

"My oath!" said Australian Number Two.

"As a matter of fact, Bill, after what I've seen of Tommies' out here, I'm -never going to sling off at a Tommy' again."

"No, Harry, neither will I".

"In fact, Bill," said Australian Number One, warming to his subject, "I'll go so far as to say this: They're as good as us."

"Cripes, Harry," said Australian Number Two' "you can't say that. But - they're bloody wonderful fellers just the same."

I doubt if anybody but an Australian could measure the depth of the -tribute contained in that conversation. Listening to those two Australians in the quiet of the Derna night, I realised that in the Battles of Bardia, of Tobruk and of Derna the A.I.F. had not only graduated as soldiers. They 'had also learned that all good soldiers are not necessarily born in Australia.

The battles ahead were not the hardest part now. The hardest part was to keep the advance rolling onward. Overstrained trucks were collapsing, supplies were not keeping pace with the forward troops. The men cannibalized their own vehicles, stripping parts from one defective engine in order to refit another defective engine for the road. They swooped on abandoned enemy trucks, worked over them until they would run and threw them into the race. They looted Italian food stores and ate spaghetti instead of bully-beef. They nosed out Italian fuel dumps and fed their engines with enemy petrol and oil. There were skirmishes to be fought now and then, but the grimness had gone out of it. The pace was exhausting, but it had a certain joyousness, like a boy's paper-chase.

Giovanni Berta was the next town westward from Derna. Two Australian brigades were racing for the honour of entering it first. The 19th Brigade was moving along the coast, the 17th Brigade through wild, almost trackless, country inland. The 17th Brigade won. Its forward troops entered Giovanni Berta in the night, while the 19th was halted outside, unaware that the town had been abandoned by the enemy.

The Italians had left without ceremony. An Australian officer noticed a telephone in an office he entered in search of lurking enemy soldiers. He idly raised the handset to his ear. There was a click, and a voice announced:

"Benghazi. Benghazi."

The telephone was still connected with the exchange at Benghazi.

"We'll be seeing you," the Australian replied, in Italian.

The line went dead.

Here, on the edge of the fertile fringe of Cyrenaica, where the desert begins to give way to good lands which Mussolini had planned to develop into a great farming colony, the Australians discovered that the settlers' chief apprehension was not of the invading British but of the native Libyans. The
Libyans had small reason to love their Italian overlords who, they recalled, had marked the coming of European civilisation to Libya by loading dissident native chiefs into military aircraft and pushing them out a few thousand feet above the earth - the severely modern version of taking a troublesome enemy for a ride. The Libyans had already been busy in Giovanni Berta when the troops arrived, removing furniture and other portable loot from the houses.

The village priest, a frail, silver-haired old Italian of Christ-like expression, was standing guard in front of the door of the Roman Catholic Church, armed with a heavy wooden club. Earlier two Libyans had broken into the church while the priest was at his devotions before the altar. He was unarmed
and they were on the point of overpowering him when the Australians entered the town. Two privates, hearing the priest's cries, burst into the church and drove the Libyans off.

"They are good men, these Australians!" the old priest said. "Rough men, but good!"

Australians came in a stream to the door of the church to ask permission see inside it. The priest unlocked the door with a heavy iron key and let hem in. Many a man, stained with desert dust, bearded and unkempt, made genuflexion to the altar and knelt in prayer before the image of the Virgin. One Australian private came along, accompanied by a mate, and asked the priest's permission to play the organ. The priest told him, apologetically that the church had no organ.

The Australian was disappointed. "I haven't played the organ since I left Palestine" he said. "Your fingers stiffen up when you don't practise."

He glanced down at his desert-roughened hands, and I asked him what his occupation had been before he enlisted to carry a rifle in the desert war.

"Oh, me?" he said. "I'm a professional organist."

Now, as the Australians moved westward, the earlier scenes were re-enacted many times. Everywhere the Italian settlers welcomed them-not because they had any surpassing love for the forces of invasion, but because these forces offered them protection against the depredations of the Libyans. The Australians had a sneaking sympathy for the Libyans. These people had been dispossessed by the Italians, they had been pushed around by arrogant Blackshirts and Italian soldiers-and probably by Italian settlers, too-and now they were taking a little vengeance. But they had to be curbed. If they had been given a free hand, a state of anarchy would have arisen.

The Italian settlers, deserted by Mussolini's inglorious armed forces, at first did not know what to expect at the hands of the Australians. Farmhouses displayed, in token of their tenants' neutrality, not just traditional white flags but bed-sheets tacked on to poles whose message could be seen a mile away. They offered the troops gifts of fruit, cheese, vegetables, eggs, bread; bread, a rare delicacy to men who had been living on army biscuits since before Christmas. Farmers every mile or so were waiting with wicker-covered bottles of wine and glasses in order to regale the conquering army. Their liberality with their wine won the troops' hearts. The settlers had their backs slapped, and they nodded, agreeable but bewildered, in reply to the troops' injunction: "Have a touch yourself, sport!"

The Libyans had already been looting in the little village of Luigi di Savoia. The settlers had barred themselves in their whitewashed stone houses and were afraid to show their noses outside until the vanguard of the Australians appeared. Then they came tumbling out, sobbing their relief. One little man, with a bald head and wearing a patched coat which seemed more patches than coat, ran up to the leading Bren carrier.

"Bad Arabs! Boom! Boom!" he said, imitating the actions of a man firing a rifle.

It seemed the Arabs had been on the warpath.

The Australians combed Luigi di Savoia and Arabs scattered away before them, some still hugging precious bits of loot. Three were lurking in the church. They tried to appear innocent, but they were betrayed by the pile of rich hangings and sacred metal ornaments they had collected in readiness for removal. An Australian officer drove them forth at the point of his pistol and his boot, and they departed, shaking their heads over the inexplicability of these Australians who had now assumed the task of protecting, the people they had been fighting.

It was in Luigi di Savoia that three hard-bitten Australians proved they could blush. A knot of women from an outlying farm came down the road to greet the troops. One grey-haired woman, her face smeared with tearstains, pounced on the Australians, crying "Bambino! Bambino!" (apparently she had feared for the settlers' children with the Libyans running wild) and covered their hands with sloppy kisses. The Australians jerked their hands away as though she had been a death adder.

"Here, missus, break It down," one of them yelped, wiping the back of his hand on his uniform jacket. "Your old man'll be crook on me."

The Bren carriers rolled on to Cirene, the ancient Mediterranean city in Which civilisation had flourished before the birth of Christ. They entered the town along an avenue of graceful trees which led to a road that curled round the hillside to the Albergo Cirene, a once-prosperous tourist hotel, but now shattered and barred and camouflaged with drab paint as a precaution against attack from the air.

The carrier crews dismounted outside the Albergo Cirene and, standing on the edge of the plateau on which the hotel perched, looked out over the countryside. Below them, at the foot of the sheer hillside, lay some of the world's most majestic ruins, among them the ruins of the Temple Of Apollo and Caesar's Temple, and vast cemeteries where long-forgotten men lay sleeping, unmindful that hard by them now new history was being made.

A force of Italians had been garrisoned in the town, but they had fled. Mussolini's only representative was a corporal of Carabinieri, mounted on a milk-white horse, who had been left behind to preserve civil order and looked as if he would have preferred to be somewhere else.

Dusk was falling as the carriers rolled back to a crossroads a mile or two from Cirene and halted while the commanding officer considered plans for the night. On one of the four corners of the crossroads stood a petrol filling station. It had been fired by the retreating Italians, and the building was more than a shell of charred ruins, but before it still stood a scorched petrol pump surmounted by a round glass globe.

A tall, lean figure rose from one of the carriers and threw a rifle to his shoulder. He drew a bead on the glass globe and pressed the trigger. The report cracked like a hammer-stroke on the quiet evening and the globe shivered and fell to the ground in tinkling fragments.

..You know," said the rifleman, smiling with an air of satisfied ambition, that's one of the things I've wanted to do all my life."

It was hard to identify him in that moment as an officer who had been inches of death at least twenty times in the earlier weeks of the campaign and had performed one act which was to be rewarded with the Military Cross for "gallant and distinguished service in action."

The Australians closed in on Barce, a pleasant white town lying in the middle of a green, fertile plain. In gathering dusk the leading vehicles ran into an enemy ambush a few miles from the outskirts of the town. The column turned back to wait for daylight, meanwhile probing the country ahead with fighting patrols. I spent the night in a battalion headquarters tucked away in the scrub beside the road. The atmosphere was taut. Men talked in whispers. Two companies were forward, stealing through the scrub, expecting at any minute to clash with the enemy. We did not know that there were not strong enemy parties on the other side of the darkness. There was a sudden swishing sound and the screen of scrub that walled us in parted. An ungainly shape loomed in the moonlight. It pushed between the Brigade Major, who was in conference with battalion officers, stepped over the recumbent form of a sleeping man and was on point of disappearing into the scrub on the other side when a sentry, recovering from his astonishment, called "Halt!"

The lumbering shape halted. It was a camel led by a tall man in Arab robes. Two donkeys led by two other Arabs marched behind.

"Are you Italians?" an officer demanded.

"Niente," the leader replied contemptuously. "Italian finish."

And he, his camel, his companions and their two donkeys lurched on without further ado and were engulfed in the scrub.

It was not until these imperturbable wanderers of the night had vanished that the tenseness of our moonlight vigil broke in gales of laughter.

Next morning Australian guns rolled up to the edge of an escarpment looking down on the plain and Barce town and sent over a dozen rounds by way of encouraging the inhabitants to surrender. The townspeople promptly ran up a white flag on a pole above Barce's highest building and the guns ceased firing. The flag fluttered gaily for a few seconds, then slid down the pole. The gunners, fearing trickery, opened fire again. The first shells were still in flight when the white flag was feverishly run up to the masthead once more. This time it stayed there. The mayor of Barce explained later that its temporary fall had been caused by accident, not design.

The campaign was looking healthy. There were no reports of substantial bodies of enemy troops, only of stragglers who had been outdistanced by the speed of the retreat (a martial accomplishment in which the Italian excels) between the Australians and Benghazi, 35 miles to the west. Nor did the weather show any sign of breaking when the Australians turned in to their blankets that night. It was a cold, clear night lighted by a brilliant moon, with no cloud in the sky. 

But in the early hours of the morning dropsical clouds piled up over the moon and stars. Thunder growled far away, then rolled nearer. Lightning ripped the darkness. Rain began to fall, pelting and drumming across the hay fields where the troops were sleeping and turning into morasses the side tracks which some of the Australian units were using in order to accelerate their advance to Benghazi.

It was important that the advance should not be slowed now, important that the forward troops should keep hurtling on so that the Italians should have no respite to gather sufficient forces to enable them to fight anything more than a fleeting rearguard action.

When they were stuck fast they were left behind to be salvaged when hours and minutes were no longer worth more than gold. 

Drivers, spattered from head to foot with clinging mud, unable to shield their eyes with goggles because the lenses filmed with mud in a few minutes, wrestled with their steering wheels and cursed their slithering, skidding tyres. 

All day leaden skies pressed down low over the sodden fields and sodden tracks. Rain pelted now and then in savage bursts like machine gun fire. It was a damp, miserable, weary procession of troops that reached Benina Aerodrome, the Regia Aeronautica's headquarters in Cyrenaica until a few days before, and huddled down to rest for the night in the bomb-shattered fire-gutted hangars and control buildings. Most of the men were too tired even to go searching for souvenirs among the hundred or so disabled aircraft, battered and ripped into uselessness by R.A.F. bombs and machine guns and lying like the skeletons of dead men about the surface of the great aerodrome.

It still remained to be seen whether the harried Italian Army would fight for Benghazi. Three Australian Bren gun carriers and a truck carrying three Australian officers and a British officer rolled out of Benina Aerodrome in the darkness of early evening and took the road to Benghazi. They saw nothing but smiling Libyans coming from and going to Benghazi. The Libyans who were coming from the city were loaded (and it they were accompanied by camels or donkeys the animals were loaded, too) with bulging sacks; the Libyans who were going to the city carried empty sacks or drove unladen animals and wore expressions of keen expectation. It was evidence enough to a discerning eye that the army had fled and that the Libyans were cashing in.

The carriers and the truck entered Benghazi. There they found they had not erred in their reading of the portents. The Italian Army had gone, leaving the overworked gendarmerie to control the civil population of Italians and Libyans.

The Australians who had fought their way across Cyrenaica entered the city next day and played their part in the final act of the Wavell Campaign the formal surrender of Benghazi, capital of Cyrenaica and largest port on the Cyrenaican coast. Most of them did not know as they entered the city past the nervous, but ingratiating, civilians who lined the streets that British armored units seventy miles beyond - the Desert Rats, the incredible men of the British 7th Armored Division - were fighting the fiercest battle of the Libyan campaign against a column, ten miles long, of Italian tanks, armored cars, guns, trucks and buses, bearing towards Tripolitania the escaping Italian Army and some thousands of civilian fugitives. An Australian battalion actually set off to assist the tanks to destroy this force, but on the way the commander of the armor signalled that the fight was over and infantry support unnecessary.

A few shops were still open in Benghazi (it would seem that the shop keeping instinct is not restricted to one nation, after all), and when the formalities of capitulation were ended the Australians spread out to see the town and buy gifts for home with lire they had gathered up in the Cyrenaica fighting, some of it given them by Italian prisoners, some of it souvenired in bulging handfuls when enemy field cash officers were overrun. 

Mine host of Benghazi's best hotel, the Albergo d'Italia, had prepared for the arrival of the Australians. He evidently believed that they would descend on his establishment like a flock of vultures and loot it from cellar to ceiling unless he made some gesture to placate them. He had had his staff pack cakes, biscuits and bottles of wine in attractive parcels, and these were displayed on a large table which half-filled his bar room. The only thing lacking was a placard, "Please Take One"-and that, I supposed, only because Mine Host did not understand enough English to write it.

He was fluttering nervously about his bar when the first slouch-hatted Australians arrived. He tried to guide them to the package-laden table, beaming on them and telling them "Mussolini no good! Mussolini bastard, yes?" Nobody went so far as to test his resolute amiability by knocking him
down, but I feel sure if anybody had he would have smiled and murmured "Grazie, Signor," as he bit the dust. The Australians evaded his guiding hand and breasted up to the bar. Mine Host looked on in nervous anguish, but when his guests not only called for drinks but threw down good Italian
lire to pay for them his nervousness began to dissolve into wonder. Still, these were only the first of the vultures. 

Perhaps the looting would begin when more of them arrived. More of them did arrive, and still there was no looting, still the lire continued to flow out of the Australians pockets and
into the Albergo, d'Italia's cash drawer. A private picked up one of the neat packages that Mine Host had had made ready for the Australians.

"How much, George?" he asked, holding out a handful of crumpled Italian paper currency.

Mine Host refused the money, but he evidently repented this extravagance of generosity and, eyeing the deepening crowd round his bar counter, summoned an underling and had the packages stealthily removed to some place behind the scenes. No use spoiling these vultures, after all!

Then he disappeared for ten minutes, and when he returned it was with an Australian flag, begged, borrowed or stolen, and somewhat moth-eaten, which was duly broken out over the facade of the Albergo d'Italia in token of Mine Host's admiration of Australia and the Australians.

There were no unseemly incidents in Benghazi that day, or on the days of the occupation that followed, unless you count the bloodied noses of two misguided Italians who shouted "Viva il Duce!" in the hearing of Australians and the Australian who passed out for forty-eight hours after he had drunk an unlabelled bottle of Napoleon Brandy in the belief that it was vin ordinaire.

The somewhat chipped, battered and battle-worn city of Benghazi was at peace--temporarily, anyway-and the Australians were showing that they could conduct themselves as gallantly in the face of a helpless, defeated civilian population as in the face of an army equipped and ready to fight them.

Their battles had taught them something more than the craft of fighting. They had taught them that the victor may behave with tolerance and gentleness without losing face.

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Australian Soldier:  a 1940/42 portrait of the Digger's in North Africa