Sidi Barrani is the Egyptian battlefield where Dan Gregory and Fred Jones were killed in December 1940, during the British offensive against Italian forces. The place links Gregory and Jones’s decision to join Mussolini’s Italy to their deaths, and later enters Rabo Karabekian’s imagined account of what he could tell Marilee Kemp about the war before they meet again in Florence.

Setting and Battle

Rabo dates the deaths of Gregory and Jones to around December 7, 1940, nearly a year before the United States entered the war. He frames the battle through the striking imbalance he found in an encyclopedia: thirty thousand British troops overwhelmed eighty thousand Italians, capturing forty thousand men and four hundred guns. He clarifies that these were large artillery pieces, not rifles or pistols, bringing the scale of the defeat into focus.

The battle’s weapons also matter to Rabo’s account because Gregory and Jones were devoted to military arms. He names Matilda tanks, Sten and Bren guns, and Enfield rifles with fixed bayonets as the equipment that killed them. The detail makes their end part of the very military world that had fascinated them, rather than an incidental death offstage.

Gregory, Jones, and Marilee in Italy

Before the battle, Gregory’s New York mansion had been divided back into three brownstones after he, Marilee, and Jones left for Italy to take part in Mussolini’s social experiment. Although Gregory and Jones were already in their fifties, they obtained Mussolini’s permission to wear Italian infantry officers’ uniforms without rank or unit insignia and to paint the Italian Army in action. Their participation joined their artistic work to the military project they had chosen to enter.

Rabo explains Marilee’s presence in Italy through the love between her and Gregory. The bluntness of that explanation contrasts with the scale of the events around them: a relationship carried the three from Gregory’s household into wartime Italy, and the battle at Sidi Barrani ended the lives of Gregory and Jones while Marilee survived to continue her wartime story.

Retrospective Significance

Sidi Barrani appears in a layered chronology. Rabo first recounts the battle while beginning again in his autobiography, then later imagines returning by time machine to speak to Marilee before their postwar reunion in Florence. In that imagined address, he tells her that she and the two men will go to Italy and that Gregory and Jones will die at Sidi Barrani. The forward-looking passage turns a known historical outcome into a personal warning that Rabo cannot actually deliver.

The battle therefore marks both a historical defeat and a private rupture. Its numbers and named weapons convey the military scale of the encounter; its place in Rabo’s recollections establishes the deaths that precede his reunion with Marilee and the next stage of her life.