"TRAINING MARCH"

Auckland Star, Volume LXXIII, Issue 106, 7 May 1942, Page 5

"TRAINING MARCH"

N.Z. TROOPS IN SYRIA

STRENUOUS SIX DAYS' TREK

(N.Z.E.P. Official War Correspondent)

CAIRO, May 5

Troops of the South Island Rifle Battalion have just completed a "training march" through Northern and Central Syria. They covered hundreds of miles in six d?.ys.

One sUnny morning the battalion started its trek with the platoons singing in their trucks. Across the hills and dales of Northern Syria, through native villages with their mud huts like giant beehives, along the banks of the Euphrates we wound for miles. We travelled across a clay rpad that caused vehicles to be lost in dense clouds of dust. It reminded us of the trip to Capuzzo in Libya, along which hundreds of vehicles of the New Zealand Division raced back and forth in those tense, fierce and desperate days of the battle of Sidi Rezegh.

When they recognised the New Zealand trucks with their black ferns painted on the mudguards and saw the New Zealand hat badges, the Arabs gave us the V sign as we rumbled along the roads. While the sun set in a blaze of glorious hues, the convoy dispersed to either side of the road and the drivers automatically concealed their vehicles in gullies and the folds of the rolling landscape.

There were hours of activity while the company cooks produced a hot evening meal, while the soldiers shaved so that they could steal an extra few minutes between the blankets in the morning, and while single-man bivouacs were pitched. It is on these occasions that the ingenuity and imagination of the New Zealand soldier strikingly reveals itself. No matter how difficult or trying the conditions, the New Zealander is a master at improvisation. He is never one to ignore his own comfort, and, even if it takes him hours, he sees that his bedroll is laid out with meticulous attention and that he has all the available comfort.

Under twinkling stars and a clear Syrian sky, we lingered the first night alongside the blue Euphrates.

There was green grass on which to lie—green grass, no desert, and no dust to which we were so long accustomed.

Over the toughest cobblestone road you can imagine, over green hills and along the flats of the Euphrates Valley, we bounced and bumped for the greater part of the second day. By mid-afternoon we had reached our objective—a village on the edge of the Syrian Desert. It swarmed with flies. Its saving grace was the fact that the Euphrates flowed lazily by with the result that the surrounding country was a rich green and fertile. Meal times in the camping area, just outside the village, proved a real test of speed and skill—man versus fly. It needed a good deal of native cunning to get a fork full of food from one's plate to his mouth before a dozen flies swooped on it. In most cases the flies won.

In the course of the next two days we made a drab and colourless journey across the desert, but a day later we were among green fields and grapevines. Twelve hours later, grimy, road-weary, dirt-covered and sweaty, the battalion joined the rest of the brigade, and all they asked was a shower.