Free The Wild Places (Penguin Original) by Robert Macfarlane Page B

North-East Africa to fight Rommel’s newly formed Afrika Korps.
    On 19 June 1941, Murray and his men were moved west to the Libyan frontier, and entered an expanse of rock and sand vaster than France and Germany combined. So empty and featureless was the terrain, wrote Murray afterwards, that maps of it resembled ‘sea charts, blank sheets apart from the coastline’. Despite the deprivations and the dangers of the situation, he found a beauty in that hard and hostile sand world. He grew to love the desert: its clarity of line, its fiery sunrises - ‘when the huge sun-disc lifted up from the horizon, the cool stillness then, the vastness of blue skies’ - and the light, which at the brightest hours gave the impression of having bleached the sand so white that it seemed as if snow had settled upon the desert.
    In 1942, on what would be his last leave before action, Murray climbed the ‘arête’ of the Great Pyramid of Giza, and then tried a bold new ascent of the Sphinx. Diplomacy overcame audacity, however. ‘The chin,’ he reported later, ‘was the main obstacle, and it seemed . . . a dubious act to use pitons on the rock of a friendly state.’
    The fun ended in August of that year. In the part of the Libyan desert known as the Cauldron, his battalion was thrown into the first of a series of infantry advances against Rommel’s Panzer divisions. The tactic was a Great War relic, and fatal in its anachronism. Murray and his men were ordered to advance on foot, over half a mile of flat ground, in daylight, against tanks.
    Murray would later recall that advance. First, the deafening silence after the supporting artillery barrage had stopped. Then the enemy guns opening upon the walking men: the whine and zip of bullets, the noises of the falling shells. A truck full of hens struck by a mortar, feathers blown skywards. Murray turning to speak to his runner, to find only a pair of legs, trunkless and smoking.
    Murray survived that day; six hundred men did not. The battalion was given little respite. On 28 June, having been restored to strength by a new draft of men from Scotland, it was ordered to dig in near El Fuka, a coastal position forty miles west of El Alamein, and there to hold its line against Rommel’s advancing 15th Panzer Division. Murray and his men excavated shallow slit trenches, and positioned their light two-pounder guns, the only ordnance they had with which to repel the oncoming Mark IV tanks. Dusk was falling, and the first glimmer of stars lit the smooth desert sky, when news arrived of the approach of Rommel’s division. They were to be expected within half an hour. Murray’s brigadier approached him in the failing light. ‘By tonight,’ he said, ‘you’ll be either dead meat or a prisoner.’
    Down in the half-light of the slit trench, Murray sorted through his pockets and destroyed anything which might be of use to the enemy: his prismatic compass, his identity cards, his cartographic notes. He found his address book and glanced through it. Most of the names were of mountaineers. At that instant, Murray later recalled, he was overwhelmed by a sudden access of memory of the mountains and moors over which he had ranged, and the people with whom he had done so. The memory came to him ‘whole, in an instant’s flash - the mountains . . . charged with a beauty not theirs pouring through them’.
    The first wave of German tanks struck an hour later. Dark bulks on the top of the escarpment, twenty of them abreast, their tracks whisking the sand into ochre clouds. The shells from the two-pounder guns glowed in the dusk, and made short red arcs through the sky. The tanks fired their machine guns, pouring white tracer into the backs of the Allied trucks, and down into the trenches and the gun emplacements. The slaughter was swift and almost total. Again, Murray escaped harm. He was taken prisoner, and flown 600 miles to Campo 21, in the province of Chieti in north Italy.
    Conditions in the Chieti