NEW ZEALANDERS IN EGYPT

Greymouth Evening Star, 7 May 1940, Page 9

NEW ZEALANDERS IN EGYPT

EARLY-WON POPULARITY. The 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 w r e don’t know where they are (writes Troy McCormick, from Cairo, in the London “Daily Telegraph”). The camp spreads out. over the desert. There ai’e seven miles of roads with names newly-painted on signposts. Work is in progress, stones were being delivered for these 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 sitting on anything horizontal, no one lying asleep in the .su,n: can this really be Egypt? They have been here for over a month. We do n'ot need to look for a hat now; we begin to recognise the New Zealand fetce. 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 have longed for the Australians since September. The reputation they made in the last war lives after them. Their wild exploit grows wilder in the telling. 'lf we see iron bars on thirdstorey windows, we say at once, “Because of the Australians..” We cannot believe- these stories about the Australians, but we do not hesitate to re,peat them. We .should like to see them rattling up Kasr Ey Aim in an Egyptian tram, crying tfheir native war-cries, perhaps hurling their boomerangs.

NOT DAZZLED. The New Zealanders are not dazzled by our big city. Modestly confident, they walk into cafes. They cross the dance floor to talk with comrades. English soldiers, seeing this happy family, forget 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 in cafes, springing up to hold doors open for women and children, feeding the hungry cats that prowl about under the tables. We like them so much that we even give up our table in a crowded restaurant to lost boys from down-und’er. “Thank you,’ they say politely. There can be no doubt of 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?