Alamein to Zem Zem is a shortish memoir of the Second World War, covering three months at the end of 1942 and start of 1943 which Keith Douglas spent as a tank captain in a tank regiment engaged in North Africa as part of the Eighth Army fighting against the Germans and some Italians.
Its clarity, honesty and sometimes brutal descriptions have made Alamein to Zem Zem a classic text from the Second World War, but Douglas is just as well known as a war poet as a writer of prose. Many critics consider him the finest English poet of the Second World War. Although he wrote over 100 poems only a handful really rise to the top rank, but those 3 or 4 are breath-taking.
Douglas’s motivation
But to focus on this memoir, let Keith explain (with typical forthrightness) his motivation:
I had to wait until 1942 to go into action. I enlisted in September 1939, and during two years or so of hanging about I never lost the certainty that the experience of battle was something I must have. Whatever changes in the nature of warfare, the battlefield is the simple, central stage of the war: it is there that the interesting things happen. We talk in the evening, after fighting, about the great and rich men who cause and conduct wars. They have so many reasons of their own that they can afford to lend us some of them. There is nothing odd about their attitude. They are out for something they want, or their Governments want, and they are using us to get it for them. Anyone can understand that: there is nothing unusual or humanly exciting at that end of the war. I mean there may be things to excite financiers and parliamentarians — but not to excite a poet or a painter or a doctor.
But it is exciting and amazing to see thousands of men, very few of whom have much idea why they are fighting, all enduring hardships, living in an unnatural, dangerous, but not wholly terrible world, having to kill and to be killed, and yet at intervals moved by a feeling of comradeship with the men who kill them and whom they kill, because they are enduring and experiencing the same things. It is tremendously illogical — to read about it cannot convey the impression of having walked through the looking-glass which touches a man entering a battle.
‘Exciting and amazing’. If anyone ever asks why there are wars and why men fight, there’s one of your answers: because it’s an exciting and amazing experience. A little later he describes how happy he and members of his squadron when they capture an Italian hospital packed with goodies.
Tom was in high spirits; he and Ken Tinker had found an Italian hospital, and their tanks were loaded inside and out with crates of cherries, Macedonian cigarettes, cigars and wine; some straw-jacketed Italian Chianti issue, some champagne, and a bottle or two of brandy, even some Liebfraumilch. We shared out the plunder with the immemorial glee of conquerors, and beneath the old star-eaten blanket of the sky lay down to dream of victory…
And there you have another reason: ‘the immemorial glee of conquerors’. As Elizabethan playwright Christopher Marlowe puts it in Tamburlaine:
Is it not passing brave to be a king,
And ride in triumph through Persepolis?
And loot. Whenever they take enemy territory, come across enemy tanks or other vehicles or bases or hospitals the first thing on the minds of Douglas and his colleagues is ransacking them for a) classy food and drink to augment boring army rations b) more enduring souvenirs, the favourite of which is guns because they are stylish and, by design, portable. Thus Douglas at various points finds a German Luger and an Italian Beretta, the latter of which he sells on in a town for money to buy luxury foods.
- excitement and amazement
- the glee of conquerors
- loot
That’s before you get to what you might call the ‘higher’ motivations. Lots of war memoirs all too vividly describe the author was lost in life, directionless, unsure what to do next – and a just war 4) gave them an immense purpose which stifled all their anxieties and doubts. Then, of course, the socially acceptable indeed praiseworthy motives, in their various forms, of 5) honour and patriotism. For religious believers 6) God is on your side and your religious training teaches you that this is a Holy War. For the religious or non-religious there’s patriotism and a sense of duty that you must 7) defend your country and those you love against an aggressor. And more broadly, 8) defending the wider world against demonstrable evil (in this case, the Nazis). Lastly, for quite a few men, whether poor working class and illiterate or upper class and well educated, 9) the army offers a career, job security, a regular salary, training, respect, and a pension. For many the army is a career like the civil service or medicine.
So next time you read or hear someone asking why there are wars and why men fight, here’s at least nine explanations to be going on with.
Potted biography
Douglas came from a middle-class family in Tunbridge Wells, which fell on hard times, his dad’s business went bust, his mother became seriously ill, the pair divorced and Douglas spent most of his boyhood and teens at boarding schools. He was a loner, an outsider who got into trouble with the authorities for his stroppy attitude. He was nearly expelled from Christ’s Church school for ‘purloining’ a rifle.
Born in January 1920, Douglas was 19 when war was declared on 3 September 1939 and immediately reported to an army recruiting centre. However, like many he had to wait, in his case until July 1940 that he started his training. After attending Sandhurst he was commissioned in February 1941 into the 2nd Derbyshire Yeomanry and posted to the Middle East in July 1941 where he was transferred to the Nottinghamshire (Sherwood Rangers) Yeomanry.
Posted to Cairo then Palestine, Douglas found himself stuck at headquarters working as a ‘camouflage officer’ as the Second Battle of El Alamein (23 October to 11 November 1942) began. His regiment had been ordered to advance and taken casualties in the opening days of the battle while Douglas chafed back in the rear.
On 27 October, with typical insubordination (or bravado, depending on point of view), against explicit orders, Douglas commandeered a truck and drove to the Regimental HQ in the field. This is the point at which the text of Alamein to Zem Zem opens.
The battle of Alamein began on the 23rd of October, 1942. Six days afterwards I set out in direct disobedience of orders to rejoin my regiment. My batman was delighted with this manoeuvre. ‘I like you, sir,’ he said. ‘You’re shit or bust, you are.’ This praise gratified me a lot.
Douglas and batman reported to his Commanding Officer in the field, Colonel E. O. Kellett (nicknamed ‘Piccadilly Jim’ in the text), lying that he had been instructed to go to the front. Short of officers, the CO accepted his arrival and posted him to A Squadron, and gave him the wonderful opportunity of taking part as a fighting tanker in the Eighth Army’s victorious sweep through North Africa. The text of Alamein to Zem Zem is a detailed and precise description of what he saw and felt over the next three months.
Zem Zem is the name of the wadi in Tunisia where Douglas was wounded in early 1943.
Plot summary
- Douglas deserts his Cairo post to join his regiment in the field
- quick introduction to key personnel in the regiment
- a series of small scale engagements which bring out the confusion of battle, before his section is withdrawn for rest
- lengthy profiles of key figures in his part of the regiment, from the colonel downwards, giving a sense of the importance of personality and temperament to a fighting unit
- second and more intense description of combat over a number of days, bringing out the confusion of war: Douglas’s tank gets lost in the maze of canyons around Zem Zem and takes a direct hit; he stumbles out of it and discovers quite a few wounded colleagues in the vicinity, carries a badly wounded man on his back as far as the nearest first aid post, promising to return and collect colleagues in a jeep, but just he is just trying to convey to the medics that there are badly wounded men further forward, he snags a tripwire setting off a mine, receives multiple fragment wounds and collapses
- there follows a lengthy description of the long complex journey by ambulance, plane and train back to Cairo a thousand miles away, with detailed descriptions of the medical care and personnel who administer it, of other injured soldiers he travels with all the way back to an officers’ ward in Cairo, complete with pretty nurses and his first full English breakfast in months, and it is here that the main narrative ends
- a coda, a completely separate section, which skips Douglas’s treatment and recuperation and finds him back, reunited his regiment right at the end of the North Africa campaign; now there is no fighting and he is tasked with collecting supplies and spare parts from liberated towns in Tunisia, which mainly involves getting very drunk with the French forces and French inhabitants of the region
Highlights
Douglas’s writing is so straightforward, clear, honest and vivid that summarising it seems counter-productive. Big quotes best give you a sense of the man and his approach.
Being in a tank
The view from a moving tank is like that in a camera obscura or a silent film — in that since the engine drowns all other noises except explosions, the whole world moves silently. Men shout, vehicles move, aeroplanes fly over, and all soundlessly: the noise of the tank being continuous, perhaps for hours on end, the effect is of silence. It is the same in an aircraft, but unless you are flying low, distance does away with the effect of a soundless pageant. I think it may have been the fact that for so much of the time I saw it without hearing it, which led me to feel that country into which we were now moving was an inimitably strange land, quite unrelated to real life, like the scenes in ‘The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari’. Silence is a strange thing to us who live: we desire it, we fear it, we worship it, we hate it. There is a divinity about cats, as long as they are silent: the silence of swans gives them an air of legend. The most impressive thing about the dead is their triumphant silence, proof against anything in the world.
Observations
Douglas not only wrote poems but made sketches of life in a tank regiment, a lot of which are so-so, but some of which are vivid and inspired. This eye for detail informs his prose.
One gun which appeared to be firing more or less directly overhead sent a shell which whistled. Possibly at some part of the night there was some German counter-battery fire, or some heavier guns of our own joined in. At all events, there was every variety of noise in the sky, a whistling and chattering and rumbling like trains, like someone whispering into a microphone, or like the tearing of cloth.
A moment before the tank struck him I realized he was already dead; the first dead man I had ever seen. Looking back, I saw he was a Negro. ‘Libyan troops,’ said Evan. He was pointing. There were several of them scattered about, their clothes soaked with dew; some lacking limbs, although no flesh of these was visible, the clothes seeming to have wrapped themselves round the places where arms, legs, or even heads should have been, as though with an instinct for decency. I have noticed this before in photographs of people killed by explosive.
Presently an infantry patrol, moving like guilty characters in a melodrama, came slinking and crouching up to my tank.
Only human
On the occasions when Douglas comes across ‘the enemy’ he is struck by how pathetic and human they are and forgoes several opportunities to shoot them. The reverse:
In the evening I was sent down the road to Brigade in a Marmon Harrington Armoured Car which had been found at Galal. On the way down the dark road we came upon six Germans plodding along by themselves. I sat them on the outside of the car and very reluctantly got out and sat outside with them in the rain. They were dejected and said they had had nothing to eat for two days. I gave them some tins of bully which I had put in my pocket from my tank’s ration box, and some sodden pieces of biscuit. We plunged off the road according to our directions, to find Brigade, but were pixy-led by a number of distracting lights and would have spent the night in a weapon pit into which we fell and got stuck, but for the opportune appearance of a stray tank, which obligingly pulled us out. The jerk of being hauled clear threw all the prisoners on the ground, and one of them lost his kitbag, to which he had been clinging as something saved from the wreck. He asked permission to look for it, in a hopeless tone of voice; the tank crew were indignant when I helped him find it and roared off into the murk again. It was difficult to get rid of the prisoners, but I was determined to find them some food and blankets, because the few people in the regiment who had been taken prisoner and recaptured during the first days at Alamein had been well treated by the Germans. Eventually I dumped them on a guard in the Brigade area whose sergeant had been a prisoner of the Germans for two months and was also well disposed to them.
Only people like us. The whole thing ridiculous.
The new type of pistol had jammed; the moving parts had somehow seized up, and we could not make out how to strip it, so I called to four German soldiers who were walking past. They all lifted their heads in apprehension to endure something more. A corporal walked across to them holding the revolver; he could not make them understand what he wanted. When I crossed over and spoke to them in halting German they smiled in huge relief. Only to tell us how to strip the pistol; they had it in bits in a moment, but advised us to prefer the old type of Luger, which was much more reliable. I asked their spokesman, a corporal with two medal ribbons, if they had had anything to eat. He said yes, they had chocolate, and offered us some; they all had ten or more of the round packets of plain chocolate whose empty cartons we had seen so often. We exchanged some tins of bully for some of the chocolate, and stood about munching chocolate while the Germans opened the bully and passed it round. A general conversation began. The corporal pointed to the Crusader and enquired: ‘Der Panzer ist kaput?’ We explained vaguely what was wrong with it; we argued over the relative merits of some Spitfires which roared low over us, and the 110. Photographs were produced. The Corporal had been in France: in Paris — postcards from Paris; in Greece — pictures of the Parthenon. In Russia? No. And how long in Afrika? Vier Monate.
The fighting
The main thing about the ‘fighting’ is how bewilderingly confusing it is, with Douglas losing track of his regiment, of nearby tanks, blundering into a forward position, mistakenly thinking the enemy are in flight, mistakenly lining his tank up to shoot a German tank side on before realising it was a gun emplacement, and then taking his Crusader tank behind a smoking Grant tank where it promptly took a direct hit from a shell.
He finds other comrades from the regiment in various states of injury, like Robin with his mangled foot. He vows to return with help but blunders into a minefield and snags a tripwire. He’s not killed or badly wounded but receives shrapnel in both legs, calves, thigh, lower back, the hair of half his face singed off.
The last 20 pages or so are a precise, detailed description of the very long, complex journey he and other wounded took by lorry, plane, train and more lorries via umpteen transit hospitals, eventually back to a luxurious officers’ ward in Cairo. And it is here, pleasantly sedated, with his wounds being addressed, with some pretty nurses to cheer him up and savouring his first full English breakfast in months, that the ‘Alamein’ part of the narrative concludes.
The dead
A standout feature is the number of dead people he observes and the repeated oddity of their postures, appearance and, above all, their eerie silence, which really obsesses him.
About two hundred yards from the German derelicts, which were now furiously belching inky smoke, I looked down into the face of a man lying hunched up in a pit. His expression of agony seemed so acute and urgent, his stare so wild and despairing, that for a moment I thought him alive. He was like a cleverly posed waxwork, for his position suggested a paroxysm, an orgasm of pain. He seemed to move and writhe. But he was stiff. The dust which powdered his face like an actor’s lay on his wide open eyes, whose stare held my gaze like the Ancient Mariner’s. He had tried to cover his wounds with towels against the flies. His haversack lay open, from which he had taken towels and dressings. His waterbottle lay tilted with the cork out. Towels and haversack were dark with dried blood, darker still with a great concourse of flies…
The bodies of some Italian infantrymen still lay in their weapon pits, surrounded by pitiable rubbish, picture postcards of Milan, Rome, Venice, snapshots of their families, chocolate wrappings, and hundreds of cheap cardboard cigarette packets. Amongst this litter, more suggestive of holiday-makers than soldiers, there were here and there bayonets and the little tin ‘red devil’ grenades, bombastic little crackers that will blow a man’s hand off and make a noise like the crack of doom. But even these, associated with the rest of the rubbish, only looked like cutlery and cruets. The Italians lay about like trippers taken ill…
The petrol lorries had arrived beside a derelict fifteen-hundredweight truck, the driver of which lay half in, half out of it, with one leg almost entirely torn off. The battledress serge had peeled away, showing a wreckage of flesh and the ends of bones.
Understatement
The presence of so much death triggerlly English understatement:
That night we were issued with about a couple of wineglasses full of rum to each man, the effect of which was a little spoiled by one of our twenty-five-pounders, which was off calibration, and dropped shells in the middle of our area at regular intervals of seconds for about an hour. The first shells made a hole in the adjutant’s head, and blinded a corporal in B Squadron. I spent an uncomfortable night curled up on a bed of tacky blood on the turret floor.
Arguably, this ‘top hole, chaps’ attitude was created at Victorian and Edwardian public schools expressly designed to turn out unquestioningly loyal and patriotic chaps who could administer the largest empire the world has ever seen and engage in battles large and small without losing their stiff upper lips.
We came up to the line of the high ground without further excitement, though we put a six-pounder shell across the bows of one of the 11th Hussars’ armoured cars, which had moved out well ahead of us, and was under suspicion of being an enemy vehicle. We had aimed well ahead of it, and the effect was immediate. It came tearing towards us like a scalded cat and drew up alongside. Its commander, a sergeant, leaned out and said ‘Was that you firing at us?’ We admitted it, and apologised. ‘With that?’ pointing to the long snout of our six-pounder. ‘Well, yes,’ we admitted. ‘Phew!’ he said. ‘Don’t do it again, please.’ He moved out ahead of us again.
‘Would you be so frightfully kind as not to kill us, please. Thanks awfully.’ Douglas is well aware of the comedy and enjoys satirising and caricaturing many of the jolly chaps he meets around the regiment, for example in the extended portrait of the regiment’s second in command, ‘Guy’:
He was fantastically rich and handsome, and appeared, as indeed he was, a figure straight out of the nineteenth century. He was charming and entirely obsolete. His ideas were feudal in the best sense — he regarded everyone in the regiment as his tenants, sub-tenants, serfs, etc., and felt his responsibilities to them as a landlord. Everyone loved him and I believe pitied him a little. His slim, beautifully clad figure remained among our dirty greasy uniforms as a symbol of the regiment’s former glory. He seldom, if ever, wore a beret — on this particular occasion I remember he had a flannel shirt and brown stock pinned with a gold pin, a waistcoat of some sort of yellow suede lined with sheep’s wool, beautifully cut narrow trousers of fawn cavalry twill, without turn-ups, and brown suede boots. On his head was a peaked cap with a chinstrap like glass, perched at a jaunty angle. His moustache was an exact replica of those worn by heroes of the Boer war, his blue eye had a courageous twinkle, and he had the slim strong hands of a mannered horseman.
Douglas describes the dichotomy between the original members of the Yeoman regiment, nicknamed the ‘Yeo-Yeo boys’, who were wealthy landowners born and bred to ride and hunt and shoot and fish and loftily ignored the ‘riff-raff’ who had come into the regiment since it was mechanised.
At some point during yet another description of the relaxed, confident, philistine upper-class cavalry officers I realised the stereotypical form of address, ‘old boy’, was no more than the truth. They were all overgrown schoolboys.
Germans and Italians
The Germans are efficient, the Italians are a pathetic joke:
The side of the road was still littered with derelict vehicles of all kinds, interspersed with neat graves bearing crosses inscribed with the names and rank of German officers and men, and surmounted by their eagle-stamped steel helmets. More hastily dug and marked graves were those of Italians, on some of which was placed or hung the ugly green-lined Italian topee. There is something impressive in the hanging steel helmet that links those dead with knights buried under their shields and weapons. But how pathetically logical and human — one of those touches of unconscious comedy which makes it difficult to be angry with them — that the Italians should have supplemented the steel cap with a ridiculous battered cut-price topee. The steel helmet is an impressive tombstone, and is its own epitaph. But the cardboard topee seemed only to say there is some junk buried here, and we may as well leave a piece of rubbish to mark the spot.
Soldier slang
At one point he tells us every single sentence of dialogue must be understood as littered with the universal swearword used by everyone all the time in the army, by which I take him to mean the ‘f’ word.
- muckin’ and blindin’
- brew up = tank being hit and exploding or bursting into flames; because this takes place in a confined metal space it is metaphorically compared to brewing up tea in a kettle
- canned to the wide = drunk
- Monkey Orange = radio code for medical officer
The silence of the dead
Gradually the objects in the turret became visible: the crew of the tank — for, I believe, these tanks did not hold more than two — were, so to speak, distributed round the turret. At first it was difficult to work out how the limbs were arranged. They lay in a clumsy embrace, their white faces whiter, as those of dead men in the desert always were, for the light powdering of dust on them. One with a six-inch hole in his head, the whole skull smashed in behind the remains of an ear — the other covered with his own and his friend’s blood, held up by the blue steel mechanism of a machine gun, his legs twisting among the dully gleaming gear levers. About them clung that impenetrable silence I have mentioned before, by which I think the dead compel our reverence…
Douglas returned from North Africa to England in December 1943, trained for and then took part in the D-Day invasion of Normandy on 6 June 1944. On 9 June Douglas’s armoured unit was pinned down on high ground overlooking Tilly-sur-Seulles. Concerned by the lack of progress, Douglas dismounted his tank to undertake a personal reconnaissance during which he was killed by a German mortar. He had joined the silent dead.
Poems
But his words weren’t silenced. A collected poems was published and then this memoir, and his reputation has remained steady, among those interested in war memoirs and poetry, up to the present day. Talking of memory and reputation, these are the subjects of one of Douglas’s three great poems.
Remember me when I am dead
and simplify me when I’m dead.
As the processes of earth
strip off the colour of the skin:
take the brown hair and blue eye
and leave me simpler than at birth,
when hairless I came howling in
as the moon entered the cold sky.
Of my skeleton perhaps,
so stripped, a learned man will say
‘He was of such a type and intelligence,’ no more.
Thus when in a year collapse
particular memories, you may
deduce, from the long pain I bore
the opinions I held, who was my foe
and what I left, even my appearance
but incidents will be no guide.
Time’s wrong-way telescope will show
a minute man ten years hence
and by distance simplified.
Through that lens see if I seem
substance or nothing: of the world
deserving mention or charitable oblivion,
not by momentary spleen
or love into decision hurled,
leisurely arrive at an opinion.
Remember me when I am dead
and simplify me when I’m dead.