TOUGH LIFE

Wairarapa Times-Age, 12 March 1941, Page 2

TOUGH LIFE

EXCURSIONS OF LONG RANGE DESERT GROUP EVENTFUL TRIPS INTO LIBYA. GREAT RECEPTION FROM FRENCH IN CHAD. CAIR’O. February 13. The unobtrusive arrival in Cairo from time to time in the past half-year of dusty trucks bearing Maori names and carrying crews of bearded, grimy men has marked the return of patrols of the Long Range Desert Group from eventful expeditions into Italian Libya. New Zealanders in the patrols have become accustomed to vanishing “into the blue” for anything from three to seven weeks, looking upon a thorough .vash as a rarity and a shave as a luxury. “The life is tough, but it’s the life for me,” a cavalryman declared. He and his fellow New Zealanders have learned how it feels to begin a week with a vain attempt to shut out raw, biting winds from their bodies with jerseys, greatcoats and sheepskins, and to end the week bared to the waist under a blanket of stifling heat. They know now why the Arabs wear long, flowing head-dress: whistling cross winds flinging a hail of sand into their faces taught them that. Yet their everyday lives have often been filled with pleasant surprises. They recall how they celebrated New Year a good deal earlier than midnight on December 31 with a sing-song around a camp fire somewhere in the wilderness of the Great Sand Sea — “the first time anyone has spent New Year’s Eve there,” said one of them, “and the first time I haven’t seen the New Year in since I was about seven” —and how next day they dined on rissoles, fruit salad, iced Christmas cake and mandarines. They will long remember the warmth with which they were received in the Free French province of Chad, across the southern border of Libya. There they were greeted by a guard of honour, wined and dined and entertained by native women dancers. “But I’ll never forget the bath we had at a well in the middle of a beautiful vegetable garden,” declared a trooper. “Natives drew the water for us, and after changing it three times we began to look our normal selves again. Then they gave us a shower with a watering can, and insisted on washing our clothes. “Next they killed a bullock for us and brought along what they had said would be mutton. It turned out to be a flock of goats. They killed 14 before we could stop them. We actually made a goat stew—but don’t ask me how it tasted.

“We drew other rations from the French, and what a cooking problem! They gave us things like olive oil, vinegar, rum, red wine, dried bananas, untoasted coffee beans, sugar, pressed meat, flour and rice. After making the mistake of trying to brew coffee from green beans and to fry dough in olive oil we' got along all right, however.”

Stew with gazelle meat mixed into it, incidentally, was another delicacy tried by the New Zealanders. The fleet gazelle is found in large numbers in many parts of the desert, and members of the patrols caught a few by chasing them in their trucks. Even in the Libyan interior they were able to listen to the news from Daventry each evening. More than once their mail was carried out to them by aircraft which at times cooperated in their work.