Blue Thirst by Lawrence Durrell

office chair. They realized that the only man crazy enough to accept such an appointment was Durrell. Why not give Durrell to the Germans? He was not much use to us and could do us little harm if they took him away. But I was so fed up with Cairo that I thought I would take a chance. So I drew a revolver which I only knew how to fire very vaguely, and climbed into the night train for the coast. It was all blacked out, very sinister; and from time to time there were halts, mysterious unexplained halts, in the desert; everything went dead silent. Only giant mosquitoes filled the carriages, biting us to death. When I arrived in my post Rommel was still 40 kilometres away; his troops had got bogged down in a bottleneck of sand dunes and lakes called the Qattara Depression. I couldn’t believe my luck.
    In Alexandria everything was shut up. When there’s an element of panic in the air the first sign you notice is all the cafés close and all the delicatessens and everything like that, and they roll down those iron shutters; and the more intelligent had actually put up signs saying “Welcome to Rommel” in German. Well, I went around and made a complete list of these people. It took me about three hours and then I went to the British H.Q. and said, “If Rommel doesn’t arrive tonight, these people are going to be out of bounds to British troops, I assure you.” And the Army agreed and they stayed out of bounds for four months. Finally, I had delegations of these people coming to my office and pleading to be put back on the visitor’s list because after Rommel was repulsed and the British got back into Alexandria these people found the British soldiers couldn’t drink in these places. It was out of bounds for them. So this was the only practical thing I could do in the way of propaganda. I made a lot of friends this way.
    But the first night was a frightfully exciting night because in Cairo I went down to Operations in a great big gloomy hall with a giant board which marked all the positions.
    The scale was so great that you could almost see individual units, and I went down with a friend of mine who ran one of the Four Hurricanes out of Crete, Dudley Honor. He said, “Come out and have a look and let’s see because I think tonight’s the night.” And the trains were taking everybody away, sending off all the women and children. A delicious thing to experience actually. Pure vertigo of panic in the streets. And on this operations board in this absolutely silent room, the tapes were marking this thing, the Qattara Depression; the chips were down, Rommel was closing in, and we knew there was just one tarmac road and no further to go. Nothing to stop him except sand dunes. And all of a sudden about 2:00 in the morning the chap takes his earphones off and says, “We’ve advanced a bit,” then marked up three positions in the neck of the depression which were considered really unassailable by us. Of course Rommel had a lack of equipment and he also had the long lines of communications. We took an enormous deep breath and went out and had a drink and I wrote up the names of all these dogs who had said “Welcome Rommel,” and for about two months British soldiers really didn’t drink there and they sobbed their little hearts out until I asked the Army to relent.
    And then technology also has its problems. In fact it creates more than it solves. One of the great things that bugged me as a press attaché always when I had to try to control newspapers was misprints. The Arabs just loved them. The English-speaking paper in Cairo, the Egyptian Mail, was manned by an Arab staff. The three proofreaders were absolutely grey, they were little grey old men. They’d got grey trying to correct misprints. And the Arabs were an anarchic lot who didn’t understand what they were setting up. The linotypist seemed to be playing the organ the whole time. And as fast as