Previous chapter: The Battle of El Alamein
November 1942
The air of course was full of smoke from burning vehicles drifting in from all directions. The wind whipping up the sand. The air was a kind of yellowy colour, full of dust blowing from all directions. Apart from the sky being yellow, practically all of us were yellow too because most of us had contracted yellow jaundice, a kind of hepatitis which was rife in the army. I think there were far more people that had it than were free of it. It was a rather miserable thing that made you feel quite ill but not ill enough to say you were sick.
We also suffered from diarrhoea, I think it was a form of dysentery; it was so violent in its effects. I began to pick this up a few days after the incident with the mine. I didn’t want to go sick because the battle was still under way. I certainly wasn’t going to claim I was sick in the middle of a battle. It wouldn’t look very good at all so we carried on; I wasn’t the only one. There was any amount of us like it. In our emergency pack, was a box marked “chalk and opium pills” which were intended to deal with diarrhoea and I ate the whole of those bit by bit. They certainly slowed things down but they didn’t cure the problem. When the pills were all gone it started up again as before.
In the end the battle being over or at least the breakthrough was successful and the Jerry was on the run as far as we could tell, being pursued by forward elements of the army which were mostly armoured cars followed by some tanks. It seemed a very good moment to admit that I wasn’t up to things and to report sick. Which I did and I got carted off to a place a few miles away called a CCS, a Casualty Clearing Station, which was just a collection of tents joined together end to end to make a very long narrow ward with a row of stretchers down each side and a walkway up the middle. As the floor of the hospital was exactly the same as the desert outside, just loose dirt and sand, and we were being put on stretchers on the floor, about three inches off the ground with one army blanket thrown over us, you can imagine that we were picking up a fair amount of this dust to add to our feelings and nearly everybody in there was suffering from this dysentery thing. The ward was designated for people suffering from that complaint rather than anything else, even though lots of them had other things as well. At the end of the ward was a long row of what we called thunder boxes. Wooden boxes with a hole cut in the top, put over a deep trench, which were used as a latrine, screened off with some sacking on poles and lapping in the wind.
Everybody was in this ward, from our own chaps, the Australians, the Greek soldiers, Polish soldiers and one or two New Zealanders. The rest were a German prisoner and loads of Italian prisoners and all reduced to the same state so there wasn’t much to choose between us except the Italians being, I should imagine, country boys, had never seen a toilet that wasn’t just a hole in the ground. They insisted on trying to climb on these boxes and squat on the top of them which caused great annoyance to anyone sitting on the next box. One Australian was quite irate and knocked one chap flying off the top of it and he, poor fellow, wondered what he had done wrong but he got the drift eventually.
The German was the only German I had seen who behaved exactly the way that Nazis were caricatured in our papers and magazines as being arrogant. This fellow hated being there but couldn’t do anything about it of course. Every time anyone asked him a question he would sit up straight, stick his arm up in the Nazi salute and say “Heil Hitler” and then sink back again and that was all that anybody could get out of him. They couldn’t ask him his symptoms. He was a source of great amusement which infuriated him all the more, with this Heil Hitler act which looked like a music hall turn to us but it was dead serious to him obviously.
Well the days went by and just as I thought I was going to be let out, they were going to take everybody back to the general hospital in Alexandria as their condition improved. There were ambulances going every day back down there. I wasn’t very keen on going back to the base depot because I knew that would mean being very likely posted to a different unit altogether, not even in the same theatre, perhaps in Abyssinia or up in Syria or somewhere like that, so I wanted to stay close to our own unit which I knew was up the desert somewhere now in front of me. Luckily, I suppose luckily, I picked up a severe dose of tonsillitis, which prevented me being taken with the other batch, and eventually I was the only one left of our outfit in the ward and sort of a free agent, with nothing wrong with me other than a sore throat. I was wandering around giving a bit of a hand to various orderlies.