The Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders (Princess Louise's)

Last Train to the Desert © Tom Barker

"Now silent, drowned in beds so deep,
Lie men of war, their souls asleep."
H Marshall

Some of the more religious of us thought we were being punished for having such a good time whilst in Cairo or Alexandria. But on reflection, if that were true, then why weren’t those whom we had had so much fun with not so long ago, still reclining under a cool fan and sipping cold sherbet while having fun poked at them again and again and yet again? And it is still casually warbled about, “That the Lord sure does work in mysterious ways!”

Out in the Desert one’s mind tends to dwell on ice cold drinks, and all other rancid thoughts take a back seat. With a K.D. shirt black with perspiration in the middle of the back and under the armpits, and a pair of shorts that are wet and have collected sand and due to the constant marching have ground down one’s family jewels to what now resemble two overripe red currants and a badly burnt string bean.

A halt was called, for the ten minute rest in the hour, but it is on the cards that some pillock driving a Bren gun carrier flashes past us flat out with his tracks throwing up sand, grit, and dust into the breeze so it permeates the air like a thick yellow London fog.

“Jings, ah wish ah wuz in Alex en the Fleet Club en at”, groaned one bloke and his eyes had a faraway look in them.

“Jist imagine aw the tears streamin’ doon the outside o’ a dirty great pint o’ wallup!”, and he continued to dream.

As he opened his mouth to offer another pearl of memory, another voice suddenly cut in and grated, “ Och awa an’ bile yer f****n’ heed, yu w****r”

As a titter of mirth rippled over the ranks, the Sgt grinned and the Officer turned his face so that most of us could not see he was also grinning and his sides were heaving. He then got up and with a straight face cried, “Right lads let's get on with it!” and we marched on to Mersa Matruh. (*)

There we got settled in by digging holes into the sand and spreading our groundsheets over them inside out because the insides of our ground sheets were almost the same color as the sand. Some blokes who did not wake up to that ploy sprinkled their ground sheets with a little water by filling their mouth then spraying it by blowing, then sprinkled them with fine sand that stuck as the sun dried up the moisture.

Now the Italian search planes could not see them unless they flew lower but most Italian pilots learned to their discomfort that some of the Tommies were good at bringing down low flying ice cream wallas, only to be disappointed on discovering having stopped one, the bloke was not carrying ice cream, only a camera.

Having moved to Egypt and then into the Western Desert where 30.000 British troops, among them The 1st Bn Argyll and Sutherland Highlander Regulars, stuck the heid in at Sidi Barrani and duffed up and captured some 200,000 of Mussolini’s Blackshirts even though most of the Argylls' rifles were clogged with sand.

During the action, as the sand storm petered out, the Argylls fixed bayonets and walked half a mile into the Italian lines, winkled out the Italians and sent them back to get some of the Eg ypt off of their faces and into internment camps for the remainder of the War.

We were then detailed to watch the jetty at Sollum because it was stacked high with tins of petrol and other goodies. The Italians never bombed it because they hoped to get their hands on the petrol. They did however drop mines into the sea at night, but it was a tragic mistake because when a tug came from Alexandria to take about three hundred Italian PoW at a time, towing the three barges to Cairo and the POW pens, one of the barges struck an Italian mine and sank. It, in turn, dragged the other two barges and the tug to the bottom of the sea.

Over three hundred Italian PoW's, their guards and the tug crew, died that day. We had the unpleasant job of dragging the bodies from the sea as the tide nudged them up onto the mud. After documenting and collecting Identity Disks we were soon relieved by another mob and we moved from Sollum to Alexandria to be put on supply ships bound for Crete. The ships were H.M.S.S. Glen Roy and Glencoe.

(*) Major David H.A. Kemble, M.C., 1st Battalion Scots Guards, composed the 2/4 pipe march, "The White Sands of Mersa Matruh" to commemorate the Scots Guards being stationed there.