Turtle in the Desert

No wanton wench was Cleopatra but a politician whose love of Egypt was greater than the love she bartered with lonely Roman warriors. How long she and Mark Antony lingered in Paraetonium (now Mersa Matruh) history has forgotten. The city crackled in the sun, crumbled into decay, remained virtually forgotten some 2,000 years until last week another Roman warrior sought to enter its now squalid streets. He was Marshal Rodolfo Graziani.

Graziani, by week's end, had pushed the vanguard of his 260,000 desert troops 50 miles along the coast of northwestern Egypt to Sidi Barrani. There he stopped, or was stopped. Ahead of him, along a salt-scarred road--a three-hour run in a fast tank--lay Mersa Matruh, first major objective in Italy's drive to conquer Egypt, a prize the Fascist press at home could shout through the streets as noisily as the populace once roared at slaves in clanking chains. But Graziani waited.

Well he knew that the British had prepared a reception for his troops as hot as the man-killing sun which danced off his pith helmet. Not without a fight would the British relinquish their airport, their desert training post and railhead of their vital line curling back 165 miles along the coast of Africa's eastern horn to Alexandria. Middle East Commander Lieut. General Sir Archibald Percival Wavell was handicapped by having far fewer troops than Graziani. Even so, they were not spear-hurling Ethiopians nor rock-rolling Albanians but a hotchpotch of crack British units, Punjabis and South African volunteers, tough New Zealanders and wild Australians. Against them Graziani appeared to be committed to a frontal assault, while exposing his lengthening columns to attack from desert tanks on his right flank, the guns of the British Mediterranean Fleet on the left, mine traps below ground, planes overhead. "The tortoise has stuck his head out of the shell at last," gleefully confided one British officer. But not yet was desert-wise Graziani a tortoise floundering in the shifting sands. He waited, strengthened his strung-out garrisons, brought up more water, dug new wells to replace those salted by the British in retiring. His object was to prepare Sidi Barrani as a base for his next thrust forward. As he did so, the British cracked at his vulnerable line of communication.

At the Libyan naval base of Tobruch, where Graziani's main supplies were concentrated, the British claimed their bombers smashed barracks, wharves and massed trucks. British planes cracked at Salum, others attacked Sidi Barrani. On the alert for planes, forced to keep up a desert "guerrilla-artillery" battle, Sidi Barrani also awoke last week to find the British Fleet off shore. As the sun nosed over the desert mesas, warships nosed out of a shroud of morning haze. A moment later their guns belched salvos pointblank into the heart of the city. Observers in the warships' fire-control towers said flames leaped up, were still visible at sea two hours later. For the third time in a week the British Fleet had pounded troop concentrations along the coast. Further Italian advances along the coastal defile between the sea and the Libyan plateau would have to be carried on under the muzzles of the British Fleet unless the numerically and mechanically superior Italian Air Force, including Squadron Leaders Bruno and Vittorio Mussolini, could drive the Fleet to cover.

In the desert, British and Italian tanks and armored cars scuttled in and out of the oases, "islands of the blessed," in the modern version of Lawrence of Arabia's strike-and-run stratagem with camel raiders. The British kept a lookout for an overland thrust southeast across the ancient caravan trails to Cairo or Khartoum. Having once accomplished the impossible, in forced marches and road building in Ethiopia, it was not inconceivable that Italy might pit her legions against both nature and the British, in a gamble to sever the British Empire's jugular.

Reports that British planes were bombing and ranging wide over such scattered points as Hargeisa and Berbera in Italian-held British Somaliland, Agordat and Gura south of Asmara in Eritrea, and, more particularly, over the oasis of Siwa deep in the desert near the Libyan frontier, and at Metemmeh in Ethiopia near the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan border, indicated the British were keeping their air eyes open for signs of any new thrust toward the heart of the Nile Valley.

Italians retaliated by bombing British defenses in the Sudan, flew over Cairo for the nuisance value of air-raid alarms. Bombs splattered on Buna, south of Moyale in Kenya. From the Dodecanese Islands they bombed Haifa and Tel Aviv in Palestine. The debacle of Dakar did not help the British cause in the Near East. Nightly the Italian short-wave station at Bari urged the Moslem world and particularly Egyptians to "throw off the yoke" of British Imperialism.

Youthful, chubby King Farouk of Egypt nervously gulped down his daily five-pound box of bonbons while his Premier Hassan Sabry Pasha upped the next meeting of Parliament from Nov. 7 to Oct. 5 to discuss diplomatic pussyfooting with Italy. Members of the traditionally anti-British Wafd Party actually became eager for a formal declaration of war against Italy. But there were "appeasement" groups in Egypt and certainly a fifth column. There were, in fact, so many Italian nationals (60,000) that the British announced they would have to be deported to India in batches of 250. As the week's international shocker arrived with announcement of the new tri-power Axis military pact, control of Egypt, the 100 miles of the Suez Canal and its outlets became increasingly important. In Axis hands, the Canal could allow Italian and Japanese Fleets to join in the Indian Ocean and the South Pacific.

No great boon to the British at this point was well-meaning but jinx-bearing Major Kermit Roosevelt, who bobbed up in Cairo. The 26th U. S. President's second son joined the British Army in October 1939. The following February he resigned to lead "a modern crusade" to Finland, but the Finnish War ended too soon. Back with the British Army again last spring, promoted from second lieutenant to major, he went to Narvik, was there long enough to be driven out. He planned to go to France, but France collapsed before he got there. Arriving in Egypt by way of Cape Town, he contracted malaria. Last week he alternated between a sweat and a fret in a military hospital.

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