N.Z. TROOPS IN EGYPT

Grey River Argus, 13 December 1940, Page 5

N.Z. TROOPS IN EGYPT

(Official War Correspondent with N.Z.E.F.). EGYPT, November 15. Twenty-four hours of dust storms so heavy that men worked in the open with their faces completely covered, and vehicular traffic moved as if in a black-out, were experienced recently by the New Zealanders in the Western Desert. High winds spread a blanket of line dust over miles of desert, and the conditions were the worst of their kind ever experienced by the New Zealanders. Dust entered the securst of tents and lay thickly oh beds and equipment! Even in the middle of the day a deep gloom covered the countryside. “It was impossible to see almost anything further away than the end of your nose while the storm was at its height,” a North Auckland sergeant declared. “When we worked in the open we haci to wear goggles continuously and swathe our faces in cloth. Once we began to perspire we looked as if we had just come out ot a mud bath.” It was not unusual at the height of the storm to see a truck moving slowly through the murk with a soldier perched on the bonnet directing the driver and keeping him to the road. A: full week passed before the winds subsided, and clear, mild weather returned. ’

To troops new to the country the woelt of dust would have been a tevere test, but nine months in Egypt have inured our men to the whims of the desert. It would convince nobody to say they accepted the storm philosophically; dust that can be smelt and tasted, that blows unceasingly into one’s eyes and throat and ears, and leaves a film of silt at the bottom of one’s mug of tea,

is something to be roundly berated. They did berate it —thoroughly and unprintably—but they came through it and forgot about it. To-day there seems to be little about the desert which they do not know. It is their home, and they have made the most of it. It can be a good friend, too when they seek its shelter as an enemy bomber drones above them,