World War: Turtle in the Desert

No wanton wench was Cleopatra but a politician whose love of Egypt was greater than the love she bartered with lonely Roman warriors. How long she and Mark Antony lingered in Paraetonium (now Mersa Matruh) history has forgotten. The city crackled in the sun, crumbled into decay, remained virtually forgotten some 2,000 years until last week another Roman warrior sought to enter its now squalid streets. He was Marshal Rodolfo Graziani.

Graziani, by week's end, had pushed the vanguard of his 260,000 desert troops 50 miles along the coast of northwestern Egypt to Sidi...