John Shield*
‘Alamein to Zem Zem: a soldier-poet in the Western Desert in World War II’, Honest History, 31 January 2025
The back cover of my copy of Alamein to Zem Zem (Penguin Modern Classics 1969, book originally published 1946) describes Keith Douglas as ‘possibly the best soldier poet of the war’, meaning World War II. Yet Douglas rarely gets a guernsey these days. He left us a book of poems – there’s a selection here and another one here – but also this memoir of his time as a tank commander in the North African desert in 1942.
The story begins inauspiciously, with Douglas miles behind the frontline working in a camouflage unit. (Surely that’s a metaphor?) Somewhat quixotically, with the great battle imminent, he steals a truck and drives for two days to reach his regiment, which has been involved at the frontline.
Douglas presents himself to his colonel – Piccadilly Jim, complete with pipe, suede boots with symmetrically-placed reef knot laces – who seems perplexed by Douglas’s sudden appearance at the end of the first day’s battle. When Douglas offers his services, the colonel, in a moment that is half RC Sherriff and half Monty Python, notes that four out of five of his junior officers were casualties that day, so Douglas is in.
From that moment, we are ‘embedded’ with Douglas’s unit as it traverses the North African desert. Douglas veers perilously close to irony, yet somehow maintains his naivety, threatened by the reality he encounters. Like any good memoir, the beauty is in the detail. Like most soldiers, he is obsessed with food, shelter, and sleep, despite the occasional interruption of battle.
Douglas, is of course, a product of class, and much of the memoir is pervaded by his discomfort in sharing a very small tank with three other men, all of whom treat him with some caution, if not contempt. Mudie the driver is monosyllabic and Douglas spends much time attempting to woo him with bully beef, a porridge made of biscuit crumbs and water, and ‘silt filtered coffee’, which he brews by the side of the tank.
The crew sleep beside or under the tank. Douglas, however, attempts to sleep inside the turret, complete with layers of clothing, cocoa, and, of course, a copy of the Penguin Shakespeare Sonnets in the ready ammunition rack.
It is ‘de rigeur’ for a soldier’s memoir to include a moment of bathos, tinged with humour to highlight the ‘horror’ of war. Douglas does this in spades. Two examples are worth quoting. On the eve of battle, in a parody of Henry V on St Crispin’s Eve, Piccadilly Jim treats his officers to a wineglass of rum. You wait for a Douglas moment, which is spoilt by the gathering being shelled by friendly fire: ‘The first shells made a hole in the adjutant’s head, and blinded a corporal in B Squadron’.
Ha Ha.
The most grotesque moment is when Douglas is forced to replace his tank for mechanical reasons. The Ordnance Officer offers him a new one, noting that the ‘turret is in a bit of a mess’ and the driver’s ‘a bit shaken up’. Douglas goes to inspect his new chariot. ‘The inside of the turret confirmed his story. The breech of the six pounder, the wireless, the machine gun and the shells in the rack were splashed thickly with blood…’. ‘Bit mucky in the turret’, said the driver’.
Ha Ha.
Military historians love the phrase ‘the fog of war’, the idea that a participant in a battle, due to the chaos surrounding him cannot possibly understand what is taking place. Douglas is a fully paid up member of the fog of war club. The battle scenes are probably the weakest part of the book: Douglas simply drives his tank up and down creating great storms of dust, oblivious to the ‘strategic’ scene.
The tone is not helped by the fact that his call sign is ‘Nuts 3’. Hence, we have moments such as, ‘Piccadilly Jim screamed at me – “Nuts 3! You’re going the wrong way!” ’
In fact, the battle scenes are reminiscent of watching two-year-old boys playing with Tonka trucks in a sandpit. No comprehension of space, lots of movement and noise, with resultant crashes and tears.
Then it is over. Douglas reaches Zem Zem, by which stage most of his fellow tankers, including Piccadilly Jim, are dead. And when you get to Z, what is next?
It is perhaps ironic that some of the most powerful moments of the memoir are Douglas’s line drawings of the scenes he passes. (There are lots here.) The composition is always the same: in the foreground a corpse, in the background an abandoned or destroyed machine – or, in his words, a ‘derelict’. There is no poetry here.
Douglas was killed in Normandy on 9 June 1944 – D-Day+3. He was twenty-four years old. He might not be Brooke, or Owen, or Sassoon, but his memoir is as honest a voice as theirs.
One of the author’s illustrations (More here)
Aristocrats
How can I live among this gentle
Obsolescent breed of heroes, and not weep?
Unicorns, almost, for they are falling into
two legends in which their stupidity and chivalry
are celebrated. Each, fool and hero, will be an immortal.
The plains were their cricket pitch
and in the mountains the tremendous drop fences
brought down some of the runners. Here then
under the stones and earth they dispose themselves,
I think with their famous unconcern.
It is not gunfire I hear but a hunting horn.
*John Shield is a recently retired schoolteacher whose writing has appeared in Honest History previously (use our Search engine). Alamein to Zem Zem featured in John Carey’s Pure Pleasure: a Guide to the 50 most Enjoyable Reads of the Twentieth Century (2005). Pdf of the whole of Douglas’s book.
