The Syrian–Lebanese campaign is presented as a small, soon-forgotten war within the Second World War, experienced by Dorrigo Evans as a passage through uncertain orders, shifting fronts and repeated evidence of the cost of fighting. His journey with a mule train begins amid a tactical retreat that becomes a strategic advance, and ends at a village under bombardment. Along the way, he encounters Darky Gardiner and learns that, in circumstances where maps and plans fail, keeping people moving may be the only available form of command.

Background and Orders

Dorrigo is serving near the front as second-in-charge of the Australian Imperial Force’s 2/7th Casualty Clearing Station when orders arrive to pack up the field hospital. The retreat is confused: the rest of the station evacuates in trucks, while Dorrigo stays behind with supplies, waiting for the final vehicle. Instead, a twenty-strong mule train arrives, accompanied by three Cypriot handlers, with new orders for him to advance to a village at the new front.

The destination is difficult to locate even on paper. The village is twenty miles south according to the muleteers’ map and twenty-six miles west according to Dorrigo’s. Neither map agrees on substantial details. When one handler asks which way they are going, Dorrigo has no firm answer, but understands that he must say something to keep the group together. He gives a compass reading that matches neither map and relies on instinct. The decision is less a claim to certainty than a choice to keep moving: Dorrigo has learned that movement itself can matter more than a reliable account of where the group is headed.

The campaign is framed as one of many Allied actions whose significance will later be obscured by the far larger war around it. Dorrigo and the muleteers are part of a varied Allied force fighting Vichy French forces in Syria, but the operation’s shifting purpose makes even its immediate direction hard to grasp. What should have been a two-day journey takes most of a week.

The Journey and Darky Gardiner

On the second day, on a steep mountain track, Dorrigo’s party comes upon seven Tasmanian machine-gunners whose truck has broken down. Their young sergeant, Darky Gardiner, is leading them toward the same destination. The men transfer their Vickers guns, tripods and ammunition boxes onto spare mules, and the two groups continue together. Darky sometimes sings softly as they travel through mountain passes, damaged villages and areas where fighting has left destruction behind.

Their shared route establishes the beginning of Dorrigo’s wartime association with Darky. The meeting is practical rather than ceremonial: a broken-down truck has separated the machine-gunners from their transport, while Dorrigo has the animals and supplies needed to continue. The groups combine what they have and proceed toward the same uncertain objective. Darky’s occasional singing accompanies a journey that offers no clear respite from the evidence of conflict around them.

As Dorrigo later remembers the passage, the landscape is marked by abandoned equipment, damaged buildings and the dead. The group smokes, jokes and eats as ways of keeping their attention from being consumed by what they pass. Darky, meanwhile, runs a book on whether he himself will be killed, convinced that his chances are improving. His wager turns the danger into grim company banter without making it less real; the men are still required to continue through it.

Villages, Bombardment and Reversal

At midnight, while crossing maize fields, the group reaches a village lit by green flares. The French have inexplicably abandoned it after taking it from the Australians in a fierce fight. The attack has left the Australian defenders dead, and Dorrigo’s recollection fixes on the faces of the fallen, which become associated in his mind with the exposed teeth of smiles. The memory shows how the campaign enters his later perception: a detail encountered amid battle persists beyond the immediate scene and alters the way he sees ordinary expressions.

The village named in Dorrigo’s orders is not, however, an empty destination waiting to be occupied. When he and the others finally arrive, it is still held by the French and under heavy bombardment from the Royal Navy. From a safe distance, Dorrigo, the muleteers and the machine-gunners watch the shelling reduce the town to rubble and dust. The objective that had guided their difficult journey remains in enemy hands even as it is being destroyed.

At noon, the French unexpectedly withdraw. The Australians then advance across ground damaged by the bombardment, passing ruined walls, broken buildings, artillery pieces and the dead. The immediate change in control does not bring relief or triumph: Dorrigo’s party feels hunger and exhaustion. A wounded goat makes its way ahead of them, and the men shoot it. In this compressed reversal—from a village still occupied, to its bombardment, to the French departure—the campaign offers no stable line between advance and retreat, victory and devastation.

Memory and Significance

Dorrigo’s account of the campaign is shaped by what he can and cannot retain. He remembers the faded red-and-white floral pattern on a dead woman’s small bundle of possessions, and feels oddly ashamed that this is what remains vivid when so much else has faded. The contrast makes memory selective without making it reassuring: a particular pattern survives where the wider scene has become difficult to recall in detail.

The episode also anticipates Dorrigo’s later habit of trying to impose order on conditions that resist it. On the march, the maps disagree, the orders lead to a village still occupied by the enemy, and bombardment changes the situation again before the Australians advance. His compass reading does not resolve the uncertainty; it gives the group a direction and preserves its movement. In this campaign, command is less the exercise of control than the obligation to keep others together when certainty is unavailable.

By presenting Syria as a small war that few will later remember, the narrative places Dorrigo’s journey between the vastness of the global conflict and the particular lives caught within it. The mule train, the stranded machine-gunners and the damaged villages make that history immediate without turning the operation into a simple tale of progress. Dorrigo’s meeting with Darky becomes one durable human connection formed within a campaign whose larger course is marked by disorientation, loss and reversal.