CAN THIS BE EGYPT?

New Zealand Listener, Volume 2, Issue 45, 3 May 1940, Page 4

CAN THIS BE EGYPT?

(By

Troy

McCormick

in "The Daily Telegraph," London)

: | Te New Zealanders, as everybody has heard, are in Egypt. Somewhere in Egypt. The radio ) won't tell, the newspapers don’t say. Of course, we can see their tents, _but we don’t know where they are. The camp spreads out over the desert. There are seven miles of roads with /names newly painted on signposts. Work | is in progress, stones are being delivered for those roads, wooden huts are being | built, one large stone building is almost finished. It looks as if we were preparing for another Hundred Years War. Shaftos Camp Cinema, admission 3, 5 and 8 piastres, is already completed. There are rows and rows of tents. Here ‘are lorries from New Zealand, camouflaged in green, looking like emerald oases in the desert. The sturdy young soldiers are drilling, marching, doing physical jerks. No one is standing idle, no one is leaning against anything upright; no one is sitting on anything horizontal; no one lying asleep in the sun. Can this really be Egypt? They have’ been here for over a month. We do not need to look for the hat now; we begin to recognise the New Zealand face. It is intensely serious. These boys can be seen in the streets of Cairo, still marching, sternly bent on pleasure. When we talk to them we learn that New Zealand is the finest country in the world, that the Maoris are a very fine people, that they like Egypt and the Egyptians, that they do not mind the bitterly cold nights in the desert, or the sand in their tea-and that they are afraid the Australians are still very bad boys. The Australians, of course, have been diverted to Palestine. We wanted them here again. We have longed for the Australians ever since September. The reputation they made in the last war lives after them. Their wild exploits grow wilder in the telling. If we see iron bars on third-story windows, we say at once, "Because of the Australians." We cannot believe these stories about the Australians, but we do not hesitate to repeat them. We should like to see them rattling up Kasr El Aini in an Egyptian tram, crying their native war-cries, perhaps hurling their boomerangs. The New Zealanders are not dazzled by our big city. Modestly confident, they walk into cafes. They cross the dance floor to talk to comrades. English soldiers, seeing this happy family, forget that they have not been introduced and go up to shake hands with New Zealanders. They even introduce the New Zealanders to the girls they know, and considering the rarity of English girls in Egypt, we must count this the greatest magnanimity. We like these boys from the Antipodes. We like to see them springing up to hold doors open for women and children, feeding hungry cats that prowl about under the tables. We like them so much that we even give up our tables in a crowded restaurant to lost boys from " down under," "Thank you," they say politely. : : :

There can be no doubt about their origin; only British can be so unmoved by the new and strange. If they want to stand and stare in the streets of Cairo they do so, though beset by street vendors, trying to sell them lottery tickets, hair nets, ripe tomatoes, miraculous pictures of four pigs which can be folded to produce a picture of Hitler ("the biggest of them all"). Boot blacks plead with them. An Arab offers them bunches of lettuce (very clean, freshly washed in the Nile). The New Zealanders stand like Gibraltar, until street vendors-who have broken down the sales resistance of tourists from all the world, even Americans — withdraw in awe. To "Make tigers tame and huge leviathans Forsake unsounded deeps to dance on sands would be child’s play compared with quenching an Egyptian hawker. If these young New Zealanders can do this so easily, what effect will they have on the enemy when they are really trying?