LAND OF FLOWERS

Wairarapa Times-Age, 27 April 1943, Page 3

LAND OF FLOWERS

TUNISIA IN SPRINGTIME GAILY DECKED BATTLE AREAS. TRAVERSED BY NEW ZEALAND

TROOPS. (Official War Correspondent, N.Z.E F.) TUNISIA, April 20. This springtime in Tunisia is bringing out upland and lowland in a magnificent array of wild flowers. Not till we passed throungh the Tegaga gap and entered the rolling plains round Gabes did we have our first experience of Tunisia’s wild garden. When the dusty columns rolled through the grim hills round the Wadi Akarit and drove north toward Sfax and Sousse the great sweeps of vivid oolour decking the hillsides and lanes, among the groves of olives, on the bottoms of wadis, and even in stony gashes among the hillsides made the gieatest impression. Between Sfax and Sousse the carpet of green and flowers became almost unbroken. A splendid bitumen road runs parallel to the coast between the two towns, and as the unending line of vehicles roared over at a pace which made the desert a receding nightmare the rolling country resembled the hills between Auckland

and Hamilton, but no part of New Zealand can show the kaleidoscope of colour which the spring flowers bring to Tunisia. • In some of the 'stonier areas the scent of wild sage, as it grows in similar parts of Otago, was wafted with the breezes which stirred miles of poppies, daisies, stock and gentians. This was almost as great a tonic as victory to men who had spent months among the dusty drabness of the deserts farther east —men whose life for so long had altered between swaying, jolting, creaking trucks and the dusty sides of slit trenches and gunpits. As the convoys paused, as convoys must from time to time, the men lay in the sun literally among beds of/ colour. Many plucked scarlet poppies to make cockades for their caps, and the travelstained. battered armoured cars and lorries carried great bunches of flowers bedecking their bonnets. Here and there- flowers had been used by ingenious, if unaccustomed, hands to fashion the victory sign on a radiator or the pattern of a flag. All the men knew that they were part of a victorious tide, and the knowledge gave them an air of festivity which the flowers expressed. Wherever we rested groups of natives made an appearance to trade welcome eggs for tea and sugar. In the remoter areas the convoys passed many Bedouin encampments where the familiar low, black tents ringed with camelthorn rested in inconspicuous valleys and hollows. Nearer the coast, where the natives live mainly among the olive orchards, the black tents of the nomads are replaced by mud and brick dwellings. Today, with Ben Gardane, Medeine, Gabes. El Hamma, Sfax and Sousse behind them as milestones, the New Zealanders are seeing parts of Tunisia in a guise which does something to redeem the grimness of warmaking.