ABSTRACT
During the Second World War the cry 'Where are the War Poets?' was raised at intervals in Britain. It was made with the First World War in mind, and usually came from those who would have regarded Rupert Brooke rather than
Wilfred Owen as the archetypal war poet. C. Day Lewis wrote a short and bitter
poem with that phrase as its title, rejecting the call from those whose policy had
brought ruin 'to speak up in freedom's cause'; the concluding quatrain summed
up a mood of the time:
There were war poets, of course, and the best place to have found them would
have been in North Africa, on the battlefields of Egypt and Libya, or behind the lines in Cairo. The British Army was continually in action between June 1940
and April 1943, fighting first the Italians, and then the German troops of
General Rommel's Afrika Korps. It was a war of rapid movement across empty spaces, fought in tanks and trucks. The battle swung back and forth over the
desert, as each side advanced and occupied substantial territory, then was
forced to retire by a counter-attack, until the pattern was finally broken by the massive British attack at El Alamein in October 1942. The Germans made a slow fighting retreat, to Tripoli, and finally to Tunis and out of Africa.
