N.Z. TROOPS IN EGYPT

Camp News (Northern Command), Volume 1, Issue 28, 8 November 1940, Page 6

N.Z. TROOPS IN EGYPT

Long Period Of Watching , And Waiting SPECIAL DUTY SECTIONS (N.Z.E.F. Official News Service.) EGYPT, October 4. Traditions are already in the making in the everyday lives of the New Zealand troops who are stationed in this vast potential field of battle. With the First Contingent almost wholly “in the field,” more and more New Zealanders have teen brought a long step closer to the realities —and the unrealities —of a war which rests in a phase not unlike that of the early days of watching and wailing on France’s Western Front. . As in France then, so here today, in the heat and dust of the desert and along the vivid blue and white, Mediterranean coast, “watching and waiting” becomes, the broad, theme of the daily round of the New Zealanders and their fellow-Britishers in arms. Yet routine loses much of its weariness in the wishful thought that tomorrow something big may happen. Nor is it the lot‘of every part, of the contingent passively , to watch and wait ; for sections engaged on special duties, helping to keep a .vast military machine smoothly idling, the 24 hours of each day are crowded with purposeful activity. , ■> Far more easily than in the ordered surroundings of . a- training ..camp, . a regiment oil unit takes on individuality

and character when it enters.active service. Incidents that seem small in themselves— each a bare “something to write home about” from a battlefield in which all but a chosen few must play a role of patience—records of jobs well done, anecdotes and personal experience, blend into a colourful whole, and become the start of tradition. - Typical of such incidents and ex1/eriences are those which have been met during many weeks in the field by a New Zealand detachment occupying the desert camp from which this message is written. Its living quarters, in a hollow alongside the-sea, have all the characteristics of a comfortablysettled community. In any one of the cluster of sand-bagged tents one may find beds fashioned from scrim or canvas stretched over wooden frames, tables and shelves built of odds and ends of . timber, and the floor swept clean and hardened with water. Often there is a larder well stocked, on the basis of share and share alike, with the contents of parcels from home. The domestic picture was made perfect one day recently by the spectacle of a soldier who stood outside his tent and bewailed the damage done to his promising garden patch of watermelon?, onions and potatoes by a neighbouring Bedouin’s donkey. House names, too, help to create the domestic scene. Almost every tent has been humorously christened. The men take their meals not merely at the cookhouse, but at “Joe’s Joint” Joe being one of the cooks. Vehicles are often named after anything from First Contingent troopships to distant sweethearts. Captured Italian Pilot. While the war remains a comparatively distant affair, these men have gained in varying degrees a first-hand conception of aerial bombing raids. Two of them, accompanying a senior officer, enjoyed one day the adventure of handing over to the authorities an Italian pilot captured by English troops in a forward area. . The party, on a tour of inspection at the time, arrived on the scene just after the phot had brought his machine to earth near another which bad been shot down. He gave himself up ton band of soldiers. “His supply of ammunition and hand grenades seemed intact,” one of the New Zealanders recalls, “but he put up no resistance. He was so peaceful that lie disappointed us a little.” They remember him vividly for his “perfect Balbo beard.” He accepted cigarettes and chocolate which they offered him. on the journey to an encampment.

Arduous work that by now seems second nature to them is carried out by drivers and motor-cyclists in the desert. The vehicles have covered thousands of miles on • tar-sealed highways and confused desert tracks. If a dispatch rider has nothing more to guide him than a line of telegraph poles or a heavily rutted strip of soft dust across the stony desert,' he considers the job hardly worthy of mention. Night riding, necessary in urgent cases, would be inconceivably difficult to the inexperienced ; without a moon, there is no illumination beyond the dull glow of the stars, and vehicle lights are rarely permissible. Yet somehow, with the aid of a combination of instinct, powers of observation, and perhaps a little luck, the destination is always reached. Motor-cyclists, in truth, seem conscious only of the humour of their difficulties. One was heard to explain, “Following a bitumen road at night, the idea is to keep one foot dragging on the ground. If you bring it up and find it covered with dust, that’s the time to begin to wonder which side of what border you are on.” These men, most of whom are extremely young, will have a voluminous history of their own by the time the war is over. A story typical of them is told of a rider whose machine broke down on a night run. He borrowed a “push-bike’’' and completed his journey through three air-raid alarms! Another in similar vein is that of a motor-cyclist who roared through a coastal town at the very hour of a bombing attack. Asked later what the raid had been like, he answered with a surprised query: ‘‘What air raid?” Such is the stuff of which the traditions of the new N.Z.E.F. are being made.