‘In Tobruk water was a scarce commodity at half a gallon per man per day, and that was for drinking straight, as tea, for all ablutions and for washing clothes, etc. One got used to it, but when someone came up from Alexandria with a bottle of real water and a bottle of whisky the recipients drank the water neat and left the whisky!’24
This Second World War anecdote was an echo of a truth discovered by a First World War veteran, who wrote that, ‘Water is the staff of life in the desert, and its quality varies so much that half a pint of good water there is a gift of more value than a half dozen quarts of the best champagne in Europe.’25
Of course, these harsh climatic conditions had been present for centuries and the Bedouin tribespeople who inhabited the desert were inured to these difficulties. British troops also managed to adapt to the conditions. In fact, most soldiers adapted well to the desert conditions so that they could stand the heat of the day and the chill of the night, navigate themselves through the featureless terrain and cope with the strict rationing of water.
However, there were still some discomforts that most soldiers never really learned to live with effectively. The armies fighting in the desert found that no matter how carefully they disposed of the rubbish, detritus and waste that they inevitably produced, their rubbish dumps and latrines formed perfect breeding grounds for hordes of flies that followed the army wherever it went. This meant that the men could never be free from the attentions of these persistent insects. A First World War veteran explained that:
‘… there were millions of flies, literally millions. They were in everything and on everything. They were in our food, they were in our clothing, they were in our ears, wherever we turned there were millions of flies. If you put a piece of paper down it would be black with flies in a few moments. We were living in bivouacs at the time and I had a little pet chameleon who seemed to appreciate the unlimited rations, but he made no difference whatsoever to the population of flies. They were simply intolerable.’26
Soldiers in the Second World War also kept chameleons as pets, but also realised the futility of trying to kill the flies:
‘We did everything we could to reduce their population by trying to swat them, which was ridiculous, because it was hopeless. One thing we used to do was to burn up the guy ropes of the tents. They would congregate there after sundown and you could literally burn them, but it wouldn’t make the slightest difference to the irritation of them next day. For every one you killed there seemed to be ten to take its place.’27
Flies, then, were a constant, ever-present and maddening discomfort. One common desert complaint that was exacerbated by the flies was the ‘desert sore’, which could develop from even a small scratch. The wound would not heal and could spread across the skin:
‘Some people just developed these wretched sores and in the heat of the day they would be little rings of flies feeding, it was perfectly revolting, if you continually have to brush them away from the sore because it was difficult to cover, difficult to cover the sore itself.’28
While desert sores were an unpleasant, if relatively minor, complaint, one constant problem was dysentery, which could decimate an army faster than enemy action. The flies, feeding on refuse and the latrines, carried disease and dysentery to the men. One man remembered that, ‘The heat, coupled with the flies, coupled with the effect of the flies on the health and the problems of dysentery and general sort of stomach upsets… they pole-axed you, there was nothing you could do about it.’29 Life in the desert, let alone combat, brought its own series of hazards.
Just as the terrain and climate conditions exerted their grip on the conduct of all of the campaigns, so did the iron laws of logistics. The desert could supply nothing of value to support an army, which meant that all of the armies sent to the Middle East experienced great difficulties in bringing up sufficient quantities of supplies for their needs. Ammunition came second only to the need for water, and this meant that the soldiers’ rations took a fairly poor third. In the First World War fresh food was virtually unobtainable and soldiers had to subsist on biscuit and bully beef for days on end:
At times we frequently had to go without decent food at all, the only thing we relied on were biscuits, and occasionally bully beef. We ate bully beef cold, we ate it stewed. The army biscuits were almost like chewing dog biscuits. After some weeks we heard that bread was coming up the line… when the bread came up it looked just like gorgonzola cheese. To me it was uneatable.’30
Soldiers in the Second World War fared much better due to the motorisation of the logistic chain, although bully beef and biscuit still formed the bulk of their diet. Some troops even found themselves linked physically with the previous conflict – soldiers eating bully beef in 1942 found the date 1918 stamped on the tins! Soldiers still suffered from the unremitting diet, but their German opponents, subsisting on black bread and Italian tinned meat, known as ‘Alter Man’, fared worse. Even Rommel suffered badly from jaundice caused by the poor diet.31
While the relative scarcity of petrol – or any other flammable substance – meant that tea-drinking before or after action was rare during Allenby’s campaign, the troops in the Second World War had the relative luxury of the regular desert ‘brew-up’. A crew or section could boil water for tea with the aid of half a petrol tin filled with sand and petrol, and this became one of the rituals of the Eighth Army in the desert.
Another experience integral to soldiering in the desert was the sense of the unending monotony of life. An Australian Light Horseman who served in Sinai and Palestine remembered that, ‘Life on the desert consisted of riding maybe on a patrol; you’d go out all day [and] come back at night to camp.’ This same routine day after day led to monotony: ‘It wasn’t the fighting in the desert that worried the soldier, it was the monotony.’32 Given this endless routine it was easy to lose track of time in the desert. One soldier recalled that:
‘It was not until one of our platoon asked what day it was, that we realised no mention, record or check of days or dates had been kept by any ORs [Other Ranks]. It was yesterday, today and tomorrow, and that was sufficient when in uninhabited regions.’33
Losing track of the passage of time, and the seemingly unending time spent in the desert, could lead to psychological disorders, quite separate from reactions to battle. One man felt that:
‘There’s a sort of psychological complaint some chaps get after long exposure on the Blue called “desert weariness”… for months now we’ve been cut off from nearly every aspect of civilised life, and every day has been cast in the same monotonous mould. The desert, omnipresent, so saturates consciousness that it makes the mind as sterile as itself… For weeks more, probably months, we shall have to go on bearing an unbroken succession of empty, ugly, insipid days.’34
The psychological roots of ‘desert weariness’ were not unique to the desert. Doctors had first diagnosed soldiers with the complaint of ‘nostalgia’ in 167835, as a reaction to the boredom of garrison duty and separation from home. This separation anxiety could affect men in every theatre of war, but soldiers do seem to have been more prone to the condition in the desert due to the barren and bleak nature of the terrain, and the complete isolation from civilisation.36
Yet soldiers this century could occasionally feel that they were in touch with home in a way impossible for soldiers in previous centuries. One signaller serving in Palestine in 1917 remembered that, by squeezing the best performance out of his wireless set:
‘It was possible to get news even from England. One of the reasons why we were so welcome to the other personnel, particularly in the artillery, was that we could pick up news even from our