Syria is the setting for one of Dorrigo Evans’s early wartime experiences: a hazardous advance with medical supplies through a disordered campaign against Vichy French forces. The country appears not as a stable map of front lines but as a landscape of conflicting directions, broken villages, and scattered dead, where movement itself can matter more than certainty.

Campaign and Changing Front

Dorrigo Evans is second-in-charge of the Australian Imperial Force’s 2/7th Casualty Clearing Station, positioned near the front line, when orders arrive to pack up the field hospital during a tactical retreat. The next day, that retreat becomes a strategic advance. While the rest of the station evacuates by truck, Dorrigo stays behind with the remaining supplies, expecting the final truck; instead, a twenty-mule train arrives with three Cypriot handlers and orders for him to advance to a village at the new front.

The instructions offer no dependable geography. The destination is twenty miles south on the muleteers’ map and twenty-six miles west on Dorrigo’s. When one handler asks which direction they are heading, Dorrigo has no sure answer. The maps disagree on substantial details, so he gives a compass reading that matches neither. His choice reflects the campaign’s unstable conditions: instinct may be wrong, but it can at least keep the group moving.

Routes Through a Devastated Landscape

The journey takes nearly a week instead of the expected two days. Dorrigo and the muleteers cross rocky ground littered with rocks, dried goat droppings, and olive leaves, passing the bloated body of a Senegalese soldier. In the distance, battles and skirmishes sound across a landscape where the dead and their weapons seem almost as commonplace as the stones.

On the second day, along a steep mountain track, the party encounters seven Tasmanian machine-gunners whose truck has broken down. Led by the young sergeant Darky Gardiner, they are bound for the same destination. The soldiers transfer their Vickers guns, tripods, and ammunition boxes to spare mules, and the two groups continue together over rocky slopes and scree, through mountain passes and broken villages. Shells continue to pound both ahead of and behind them.

Their route descends into lowlands marked by the consequences of bombardment. Dry-stone walls have failed to protect men lying among broken equipment and French helmets. The group passes bodies in makeshift stone defences and in a durra field turned to bog by water from a shell-damaged irrigation channel. In one village of seven houses, fifteen people are dead; elsewhere, a dead woman lies near a broken minaret, her possessions scattered in the dust. The landscape records civilian as well as military loss.

A Small War Within a Larger One

The Syrian campaign gathers soldiers and handlers from different parts of the Allied forces into what the narrative presents as a crowded, improvised military world. Dorrigo’s party depends on mule transport, uncertain maps, and decisions made without reliable knowledge of the route or the battle’s larger direction. His reading of the compass does not resolve the confusion; it enables the group to proceed through it.

The campaign is described as a small war within a much larger one, and one that is later remembered by almost no one. Syria’s narrative significance lies in this contrast between immediate physical devastation and subsequent historical obscurity. The dead encountered along the road are specific and numerous, yet the campaign itself recedes from collective memory, foreshadowing the novel’s wider attention to the lives and losses that official histories leave at the margins.