Tobruk

Tobruk is a war. That is how the city exists in the world’s imagination and the reality on the ground does not entirely contradict it. The port town in northeastern Libya was the site of one of the Second World War’s most brutal and prolonged sieges — first the Axis, then the Allies, then the Axis again, the front moving back and forth across the same churned desert for eighteen months while the men inside Tobruk’s perimeter rationed water and buried their dead and held on. I came here specifically for the cemeteries, which made me feel slightly odd until I realized everyone who comes to Tobruk is doing the same thing.

The Tobruk War Cemetery — Commonwealth — is the largest, a long terraced field of white Portland stone headstones on a red earth slope above the Mediterranean. The headstones are placed close together and the names run Australian, Indian, British, South African, New Zealander. Some stones carry regimental badges in relief — a rising sun, a springbok, a maple leaf. Many carry the standard Commonwealth inscription for unknown soldiers: Known unto God. That phrase at volume, repeated across thousands of stones, carries a weight that the individual words do not prepare you for. I walked the rows for a long time without stopping, reading names and numbers — nineteen years old, twenty-two, twenty-four, the same arithmetic of loss that all military cemeteries perform — and the sound of the sea was constant below.

The German cemetery is smaller and darker — black basalt crosses rather than white stone, placed in pairs rather than rows, the entire cemetery enclosed by a low wall so that it is almost invisible from the road until you are inside it. The change in aesthetic is startling: you cross a threshold and the mood shifts entirely. The basalt is the color of dried blood and the paired crosses have a weight that the white Commonwealth stones, for all their number, do not quite match. I sat on a low bench inside for a while and tried to think about what it meant that three different armies chose three different visual languages for the same grief, and arrived at no conclusion except that the differences matter even if you cannot say precisely how.

The Italians have a large memorial at the southern edge of the battlefield, less a cemetery than a monument, with a chapel and marble walls inscribed with names in columns. It is more triumphal in its architecture than the other two sites and less successful for it — there is a scale mismatch between the grandeur of the monument and the scale of what was lost here. But I walked the inscribed walls and found the names and thought about the fact that each one was a person who arrived on a ship from somewhere on the Italian peninsula and died in North African desert sand and that the monument, whatever its architectural shortcomings, at least maintains the names.

The town itself is working-class and tired and the harbor is still active with fishing boats. A man who ran a tea stall near the harbor told me his grandfather had survived the siege on the Allied side. “They were soldiers too,” he said of the German cemetery. “But.” He shrugged, and I understood the shrug. It was not a shrug of indifference. It was a shrug that had been carrying something heavy for a long time.

When to go: October through April. The cemeteries are open and moving in any weather. March and April bring wildflowers across the former battlefields, which adds a strange and inadvertent beauty to the landscape. Avoid summer entirely — the heat is extreme and the exposed terrain offers no relief.