DESERT TRAVEL

Wairarapa Times-Age, 6 November 1941, Page 7

DESERT TRAVEL

OVER FLAT AND STONY WASTES BILLOWING DUST STORMS. | DAY & NIGHT SCENES &* SOUNDS. (Official War Correspondent, N.Z.E.F.) WESTERN DESERT, October 17. Swing your legs over the tailboard of this stubby little Canadian-built truck and come with us on a journey across country where roads, fences, bridges, fords and townships don’t exist, and in any case don’t greatly matter. We have plenty of good company, and you can see it behind you and in front —some hundreds of vehicles, from big troop carriers to diminutive motor-cycles, stretched out in a column that reaches from horizon to horizon and beyond. Make yourself reasonably comfortable among the kit-bags, bed rolls, cases and tins in the back, for one of the things we want to introduce you to in these Western Desert exercises is Western Desert dust, and the back of a truck is the place to meet it. The worst of it is man-made, only found where wheels have churned the earthy sand into soft powder as much as a foot deep. Here it come now, pouring in on you like a cloud of dirty, yellow-grey smoke. Shut your eyes, hold your breath, then look at your clothes and your bare knees. Your face. ’if you could only see it, is really funny—a deathy pallor over everything but your eyes, and your hair a greyish colour that ages you ten years. You look like something rescued from a neglected museum storehouse. TRUCKS SEEM .TO BE AFIRE. The trucks behind us seem to be aflire, with this dust-smoke streaming from their wheels. Listen to the soft, frothy sound it makes, for it is so light that you can pick up a handful and blow it into the air like talc. You see no rolling sand dunes, because ' such picture-postcard desert is far away in the south. The land about you is the flattest you have ever seen, cloaked with dark green, wiry scrub growing on little hummocks. After five or six miles of this we rise on to stony and gently undulating country, with stretches where the unenvied motor-cyclists pick their way gingerly among rough flints, and stretches where the going is as smooth as art average rural road. We halt on this stony waste, where the column breaks formation and spreads itself over an unlimited parking area, the vehicles well scattered to minimise their value as enemy bombing targets. Since we are to wait here seme hours, you cannot do better than dig yourself a hole big enough to lie in with your body below ground level. The chance of an air attack is remote,, but digging-in is an excellent habit to form. WHERE WATER lIS .PRECIOUS. And now for lunch—the bully and biscuits you carry yourself, and almost certainly a cup of tea. Nearly every truck has a tuckerbox, kept stocked with spare rations, tinned food from gift parcels, tea, sugar and a primus stove. If you think you can spare the water, half a mugful will wash some of the dust from your face. Tonight we are moving on towards the “enemy” across unfamiliar country. Daylight moves over trackless desert are comparatively simple, for although the land seems almost featureless there are old cisterns, mounds and Bedouin graves which, with the aid of maps and compasses, can be turned into most informative signposts. But at night, when you cannot even see the signposts, you must rely throughout on frequently checked compass bearings, or better still, as we are doing this afternoon, send a reconnaissance party forward to mark the route, leaving provofet men at regular intervals. Then as night closes swiftly in and our wheels begin to roll, your mind flashes to photographs you have seen of convoys of ships at sea. Here on land, our modern ships of the desert are travelling in almost exactly the same way. • The long single file of vehicles which brought us in from the main road no longer exists, but in its place are lanes of cars and trucks, still well separated but now moving perhaps ten abreast. Armour vehicles and mobile anti-aircraft guns scattered through the formation are the equivalent of the cruisers and destroyers in an ocean convoy.

Before the column reaches its next halt and we stretch out under our blankets beside the dispersed trucks,, let us hrury forward to discover one of its most awe-inspiring characteristics. We travel a few miles ahead, then stop and listen. Out of the darkness back there come a deep and eerie rumble, growing as long minutes go by into a roar and clatter like the noise of scores of fast-moving tanks. How would it feel to be an Italian soldier, startled from his sleep by a sound like that?