It is foolish to romanticise any aspect of the war, given the universal reality that almost every participant would have preferred to be in his own home; that to die trapped in a blazing tank was no less terrible at Sollum or Benghazi than at Stalingrad. But the emptiness of desert battlefields, where there was neither much slaughter of innocents nor destruction of civilian property, alleviated some of the horrors imposed by collateral damage in populated regions. While campaigning in the desert was never comfortable, in the protracted intervals between battles it was preferable to winter
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