Two books Keith Douglas carried with him during the desert campaign, as recounted in his prose memoir Alamein to Zem Zem, were Alice in Wonderland and 'a short Survey of Surrealism'. Both are 'easily relatable', bearing an obvious relation to his experiences as Crusader tank commander in the Eighth Army. The men Douglas meets in his regiment and in the desert are odd in a manner clearly referencing both Robert Graves's Goodbye to All That and Waugh's satires, but indebted too to Alice's encounters with the strange beasts in her dream world. The brutal comedy of the war from Egypt to Tunisia is stylised according to the economy of Carroll's nonsense - this is a war replete with farce and nightmare jokes and booby traps, run by half-crazy, obsolete military, fought caged in fantastic machineries of death, rolling over an unreal landscape, fighting an enemy not hated but admired as reflections of the desert rats themselves. The comedy has Carrollian pathos too, sentimentality being generated by the very illogicality of this strange world: