On September 8, 1940, Dafoe was posted to a Military Hospital in Tidworth, Devon. Then on December 30, he went to No 1 General Hospital in Plymouth. On January 10, 1941, he moved to a military hospital in Edinburgh; on January 31, to the 70th (Young Soldiers) Battalion, the Border Regiment, in Dalkeith, Scotland. On February 14, 1941 — a year to the day after receiving his commission — he was promoted to captain. His last posting in Britain was to No 28 General Hospital in Leeds, on April 28, 1941.
    Just before his thirty-second birthday — on November 9, 1941 — Captain C S Dafoe embarked for Singapore. En route, the troopship put in at Cape Town, for supplies and refuelling. The men were royally entertained on shore. Dafoe took a number of snapshots for the photographic album he was compiling, and somehow arranged a flight to Johannesburg, more than 1,200 kilometres away. Ever resourceful, he got back before the troopship sailed.
    On January 17, 1942, Dafoe disembarked in Iraq. He did some sightseeing and was next heard of in Bombay on February 15 when Singapore fell to the Japanese. After this calamity, the troopship returned to Iraq, and the men were given new assignments. Dafoe worked for a brief time in a sanitorium there.
    For the next two years, Dafoe criss-crossed North Africa with a succession of field units and hospitals under the general command of the British 8th Army. This was his real baptism in surgery — and the Second Act in his strange and restless life.
    He could not have landed in a more momentous theatre in which to mature. The year he arrived, 1942, had started with the rival armies of North Africa glaring at each other on the western border of Cyrenaica — now Eastern Libya. In late January, Rommel executed a brilliant counterstroke that swept the British back some four hundred kilometres towards the Egyptian frontier before they were able to rally. The front then hardened on the Gazala Line.
    At the end of May 1942, the "Desert Fox" struck again, chasing the British back to the Alamein Line, gateway to the Nile Delta. On June 21, the garrison at Tobruk was captured, along with 35,000 men and an enormous quantity of materiel. According to British historian Guy Liddell-Hart, "It was the worst British disaster of the war except for the fall of Singapore." Dafoe had been spared from suffering through the tragedy in the Far East, only to find himself perilously close to being taken prisoner in North Africa.
    He managed to escape behind El Alamein with a Royal Army Medical Corps (RAMC) sergeant named Bill Gillanders, veteran of Dunkirk and several desert campaigns. Meanwhile, Major Lindsay Rogers — a feisty, barrel-chested bulldog of a character from New Zealand, who would figure prominently in Dafoe's life — swam out to the last destroyer leaving Tobruk just as the garrison was captured.
    Rommel and the Afrika Korps reached El Alamein on June 30. The British, reinforced and under the combined leadership of generals Harold Alexander and Bernard Montgomery, resumed the offensive. Thirteen days of bloody fighting ensued, until the British defeated Rommel. But the pendulum swung again, sweeping the British back farther still.
    Dafoe and his friend Major Rogers were reunited in the desert where they worked at an outpost held by the Free French. But in the melee after El Alamein (October 23-November 4, 1942) it, too, was overrun by the Afrika Korps — who, according to Bill Gillanders, "just dumped their wounded and went on, business-as-usual."
    Conditions in the desert were anything but ideal for surgery. "Hygiene left a lot to be desired," Gillanders recalled. The surgeons seldom wore gloves when they operated. "Even a scratch in the desert often became septic. There were no antibiotics and usually only pentathol and ether for use as anaesthetics. It was a tough life and not for the squeamish. Surgery was performed in primitive conditions — usually a truck with a tarpaulin slung over the back."
    Gillanders described Dafoe and Lindsay Rogers working together prior to the British counter-offensive in October-November 1942: "They worked as a team, exceedingly hard, sometimes operating on as many as fifty to eighty patients in twenty-four hours." During the retreat from Tobruk, Gillanders had observed just how tenuous survival was in this harsh environment.
    "One thing that came out of this episode was the realization that if you did not move anyone who had been operated on for a stomach wound for a week and gave them no food or drink, except intravenously, their chances of survival rose dramatically. Prior to this," he recalled, "I am sure 80 per cent of those casualties with stomach wounds died. But when the rest period was put into use, approximately 70 per cent survived."
    Innovation was ongoing among the medical officers in North Africa. The situation demanded it. Lindsay Rogers even revived the use of a Thomas splint for injuries to the femur. The device had its origins in the First World War, but both Rogers and Dafoe adopted it for transporting leg injuries of all kinds, since the shock of bumping over the rough desert terrain in an ambulance could kill patients. The procedure they used involved putting traction on the wounded leg, and then inserting a pin — usually a four-inch nail — through the heel. The leg was then plastered and hung in the Thomas splint. "The results, as I remember, were very good," said Gillanders. "We often received reports from base surgeons who commented on the excellent condition in which these leg injuries arrived."
    But not all of Dafoe's time in the desert was spent in surgery. His mile-wide rebel streak was observed more than once in the corridors of command in Cairo and Alexandria. Dafoe was once arrested for not saluting a British officer and was paraded into summary trial. He always had difficulty with authority figures — or anyone, for that matter, who took himself too seriously. Fittingly, his defence presumed a British ignorance of colonial affairs, inasmuch as he resorted to his favourite story that he was a North American Indian and so, he explained, he was unaccustomed to the ritual of saluting! He was released.
    For his part, Gillanders recalled that his excursions into Cairo night-life with the unpredictable Canadian were seldom temperate. As a sergeant, Gillanders was barred from the best nightclubs — "officers only, you know." But Dafoe usually gave him one of his captain's tunics, and the two men partied wherever they pleased.
    "Colin didn't give a damn about military protocol," Gillanders added. His fondness and admiration for Dafoe lasted a lifetime. "I never called him anything but 'Colin' and he always called me 'Bill'," he recalled. "Lindsay Rogers was a different kettle of fish. He was a bit of a snob, as he always called me 'Bill' and I called him 'Lindsay', except when other ranks or officers were around and I had to call him 'Sir'."
    Major Lindsay Rogers was indeed "a different kettle of fish", but for that he won Colin Dafoe's unending respect. The spirited New Zealander was older than Dafoe by several years and a more experienced surgeon, but the two men got on famously. Dafoe called his friend "Rog", and was himself affectionately known as "Daffy" or simply "Daff."
    Born in Otago, New Zealand, Rogers had qualified in medicine at Otago University, then spent five years in London hospitals before returning home to practise as a surgeon in the town of Te Awamutu on the North Island. Like Dafoe, he had found himself in England at the outbreak of war and entered the RAMC in London some time in 1940. The details of Rogers' military service prior to North Africa remain sketchy, but it is certain that he was with the 15th Casualty Clearing Station (CCS) after the fall of Tobruk.
    Dafoe was posted to the 15th CCS on July 6, 1942 — a few weeks after Tobruk — and, until September, was attached to the 4th New Zealand Field Ambulance. Here, he must have met Lindsay Rogers, another rebel and adventurer at heart.
    In his memoirs, Rogers described a day's outing in Tunisia, most likely in the spring of 1943, when he and Dafoe were with the 15th CCS after recent action at Gabes.
    Early one morning "the Old Man" — the 15th CCS's commanding officer — had asked Rogers if he would enjoy a free day. Rogers accepted with alacrity. Later he wrote: "Colin, a tough Canadian, decided to come along too. Within an hour, with our packs on our backs, and a couple of tins of bully rattling beside two canisters of beer, we were walking along the track to the main road for Tunis."
    Shortly after setting out, Rogers and Dafoe hitched a ride with a garrulous Cockney driving a three-tonner to Medinine. There they jumped out and almost landed on a military policeman, neither man carrying identity cards or a movement order. Fortunately for them, a jeep careened around a nearby traffic island at that moment, and Rogers hailed the driver.
    "Can you give us a lift?" he asked.
    "We're off to site a Regimental Aid Post," Dafoe added quickly.
    The officer at the wheel looked up at the badges on their caps and decided their story made sense. He nodded perfunctorily. Rogers and Dafoe climbed aboard as the jeep sped away again.
    Ahead was a low range of hills that swept towards the coast. Behind them, to the south, several heavy shells fell. "I could see Colin's interest quicken at each new burst," Rogers recalled. "Then we swerved round a corner and over a small saddle to see, just ahead, a couple of ammunition trucks going hell for leather. 'Bad spot that,' said the officer, and hardly had he opened his mouth when we heard the whine of shells; then a terrific explosion, a burst of flame, and the trucks had gone up in smoke."
    The instant the trucks were hit, the officer ran the jeep under the protection of a nearby wadi. The three men approached the trucks, which were still exploding fitfully, but any hope of finding survivors in the wreckage was quickly dashed. Rogers recalled: "Nothing tangible remained. Colin picked up a man's forage cap, and a portion of an arm, but it was wise not to linger."
    They quickly set off again, but the growing barrage and the incident with the trucks had rattled the driver. He politely dropped off his passengers, spun the jeep on its wheels, and was gone. When the cloud of dust and sand had passed, Dafoe looked at Rogers.
    "We must be near the line," he offered, adjusting the pack on his shoulders as he spoke. The two men sat themselves down in a bed of desert irises and pulled a canister of beer from one of the haversacks. Rogers laughed as he watched Dafoe trying to open it without losing the froth. Every drop counted, the heat around them like a blast furnace.
    "Colin tried to tell me it could be as hot as that in Canada, somewhere on some mythical peninsula he knew, where they grew grapes and tobacco in the open. But I had heard all this Canadian stuff before," Rogers remembered.
    The beer gone, they were soon on the road again and approaching a low saddle that divided two hills. Rogers suggested they proceed with caution. Dafoe laughed, urging his friend along. They agreed to climb the steep slope ahead in order to view the surrounding landscape, and the exertion required left both men winded and saturated with sweat. But as Rogers noted, they were amply rewarded: "The purple scars on the distant mountains to the south were flaming at noon; and beneath, on both sides, stretched undulating country slashed with scarlet watercourses, and pimpled by grey-green heaps of scrub and desert grass. To the north shone the sea, a streak of turquoise against white clouds now forming and dropping heavily to the horizon."
    Rogers next suggested they open the other can of beer, but as he reached for the haversack, a shell screamed over their heads. It was followed by several more in quick order. The two surgeons swung about to watch the shells plummet into the British lines behind them. Soon they were in the middle of an artillery duel.
     When the shelling abated momentarily, Rogers suggested they descend. But Dafoe scotched the idea instantly — and with marvellous aplomb.
    "We ve come to see a barrage from a grandstand seat and why leave it? We're safe enough," he declared.
    But soon even Dafoe was convinced of the wisdom in finding some cover. As the artillery duel resumed and then became more fearsome, they slid down to a spot between two crags — "and there, sheltered for an hour, like umpires at the tennis net, we watched shells volleying over. It was interesting at first and then not so interesting, for we spotted a German observer on the hill opposite doing the same thing. I recalled the Old Man's instructions, 'You won t get into trouble, Rogers!', and at that moment a shell landed almost at our feet. Stones and muck everywhere; and then another and another. We slid down the hill like lizards, and luckily found a small cave and crept inside."
    It was dusk when Rogers and Dafoe left the cave and started walking slowly along the road to Medinine again. Their conversation focused on the future, as both men feared they might end up with the 8th Army in Italy, lost among hundreds of American and British surgeons — "a tame affair," Rogers predicted. He then recalled how the notion of the next adventure first arose.
    "Colin, taking his pipe from his mouth,...turned to me and said, 'Rog, I hear there are some British officers working in Greece with the guerrillas in the mountains.'
    "'Where the hell did you hear that?' I asked.
    "'I heard it from a chap in Gabes. He s O.K., Rog. It s the goods; couldn't we get a job there?'
    "'Perhaps we could, I replied.'"
    It was as good as decided.

The months passed and saw Dafoe and Rogers operating day and night as the 15th CCS advanced up the front line to Mareth and then Tunis. The Battle of Mareth was fought from March 20-26, 1943; the decisive Battle of Tunis — which ended with the final defeat of German and Italian forces in North Africa — from May 3-13. Rogers spoke acidly of the events that followed: "We trekked down to Egypt for the last time. The battle for the North African coast had been won, and before we went to 'rest and refit' at Sidi Bish, the grateful army authorities sent us to Amaria Transit Camp, a ghastly place a few miles along the coast from Alexandria. There we applied without success for a 'dangerous mission' to the Balkans."
    The next day — May 25 — Dafoe was transferred to the 64th General Hospital, in the Canal Zone near Kibrit, to undergo his grading as a surgeon. No doubt this rankled somewhat, given the vast experience he had already, but it was was unavoidable. Captain medical officers could qualify as surgeons only if they were members of a Royal College such as that of London, Edinburgh, or Sydney or by operating under the supervision of a senior surgeon until such time as they made the grade. To obtain a surgeon's grading with the rank of major, Dafoe had to operate in a general hospital for six weeks while it was decided whether or not he was capable of working on his own. He qualified easily and was made an acting major pending conferring of full and official status.
    From mid-July until the end of 1943, little is known of his whereabouts and activities beyond the scant information recorded in his service file. He was posted to No 10 Casualty Clearing Station on August 27; to No 9 General Hospital on October 7; to No 13 General Hospital on October 26; and finally, to No 12 Field Hospital on December 27, 1943. He claimed long after the war that he had spent Christmas Day in Tobruk and had considered deserting when he saw the fortress-city so cratered and pockmared by shells, so utterly disheartening in its desolation.
    But as he moved from unit to unit according to the whim of unseen authorities, Dafoe's thoughts remained fixed on the idea of "a dangerous mission to the Balkans."
    In the end, it would be Rogers who went first and then, on the strength of his connections, managed to secure a similar mission for Dafoe. And the circumstances in which both men found themselves in Yugoslavia — and not Greece, as they had originally imagined — were, perhaps, just as fateful.
    Shortly after Dafoe was transferred to the 64th General Hospital, Rogers had gone to Cairo, ostensibly for medical supplies. Immediately upon his arrival, however, he went to see a friend at the 15th Scottish Hospital. There he was privy to a letter concerning a British plan to parachute medical equipment into Yugoslavia. Rogers concluded that if supplies were needed, surgeons would be next. He raised the matter with his friend, a Colonel Buttle, and was politely rebuffed. Rogers went away frustrated, but undeterred.
    "I left the 15th Scottish Hospital determined to go to Yugoslavia," he said, "but where was Colin? Where could I find out about the job?"
    Rogers eventually found Grey Pillars — the general HQ in the Middle East — in the Sharia Kasr-el-Nil district of Cairo, and asked for the Yugoslav section. A messenger escorted him to Rustem Buildings, an imposing block of flats on the same street, GHQ for a little-known but vital special unit. Rogers rang the doorbell and went in to "a great rigmarole, and more showing of identity cards." He was taken upstairs.
    The office he entered featured an impressive map of Yugoslavia on one wall and an unidentified, kilted major who sat behind an enormous desk while idly playing with a pen and "flicking the flies from his baldish head." The officer denied any knowledge of plans to send either medical aid or surgeons into Yugoslavia. Rogers was enraged by the man's absurd obstinacy.
    "I trundled down the stairs, signed the exit book, and went out into Cairo's hot, stinking streets. I would go to the New Zealand Club, have a few beers, and work it off somehow, I thought."
    He had gone several hundred metres along the road and was still fuming when he swung around and saw "a dripping orderly panting along" behind him.
    "He caught up and called, 'Sir. Will you come back with me, sir?' And that was how I joined the Staff of M.0.4," Rogers recalled.
    What he entered was a clandestine organization known by a great many misleading names, but most commonly referred to as "the Firm."
    As a new agent, Rogers underwent special training in photography, methods of escape, and even a sabotage school, where he was shown how to destroy trucks, telegraph lines, railways, "and everything else of use to man," he noted wryly. He was later detailed to a commando school and given instructions in self-defence and silent killing.
    "I didn't mind the first part of it," Rogers admitted, "but over the second I pointed out that after all I was a doctor."
    Finally, as he was slated to operate in Yugoslavia, Rogers was tutored in Serbo-Croat and briefed on Balkan history.
    "Equipment was the next problem," he explained. "The Medical Stores Department of the Middle East was extraordinarily obstructive and difficult in handing out any equipment at all. The colonel in charge had little time for these secret outfits, and what he called 'Side Shows.' Judging from his accent and his obstructive capacity he had spent many years in India."
    Bill Gillanders held a similar view, although he encountered much less difficulty in obtaining the items he requested:
    "The Medical Colonels at base fitted you out like a CCS and you would have needed five five-ton trucks to cart around your equipment. You also had to sign for it and on return say what had happened to it. I used to write, 'Now being used by the Hermann Goering Panzer Division Medical Units,' which didn t amuse the brass hats. Rogers used to write, 'lost in various anus operations — whereabouts unknown.'"
    His training completed, Rogers concentrated on assembling the equipment he needed and selecting his assistants. Bill Gillanders was an obvious choice — as was another Scot from Edinburgh, an RAF sergeant named Ian McGregor. Formerly a parachute instructor, McGregor had had a lot of desert experience driving in the brilliant hit-and-run missions executed deep behind enemy lines by units of the inchoate Special Air Service.
    In the fall of 1943, Rogers and his assistants were finally sent to Italy in anticipation of the Yugoslavia mission. They collected more supplies, consolidated their plans and waited. During this time, by coincidence, Lindsay Rogers met Colin Dafoe's younger brother, Roswald.
    In 1940 Roswald had arrived in England with a contingent of the Hastings and Prince Edward Regiment — the renowned "Hasty Pees." He languished in Aldershot for a while and there married Audrey Scott-Simpson, an attractive and energetic steno-typist in the Army Territorial Service's Southeastern Command HQ. Their first child, Norman Scott, was born in April 1943. Then, after almost three years of waiting, Lieutenant Dafoe was sent into the fray, landing in Sicily on D+42, "when the skirmishing was pretty well done," in command of a rear-party support unit of some 350 men. They crossed into Italy in September 1943, and later that month (or some time in early October) Roswald heard that Lindsay Rogers was in the area (Colin had mentioned the New Zealander in letters home).
    Roswald rounded up a motorcycle and drove to the 5th CCS to meet his brother's friend. There they sat in a tent and drank Marsala while swapping stories, many of which concerned Colin's and Lindsay Rogers' adventures together in the desert campaign.
    Rogers would see Roswald again in October, but in very different circumstances. On active duty again, Roswald's unit was advancing through the mountains in an attempt to flush the enemy out by engaging them. During one of these sorties, Roswald was wounded by a mortar shell which took away most of his right ankle and part of his left leg. In the field hospital, the doctor hovering over him was Lindsay Rogers — just ten days after they had first met.
    Rogers probably should have amputated Roswald's right foot, but Roswald would not allow it. "Any foot is better than nothing," he insisted. Perhaps out of friendship for Colin Dafoe, Rogers decided to avoid drastic surgery. But years later, Colin had to agree with Rogers' initial judgment. It was difficult to watch Roswald endure the pain his foot gave him from then on.
    Rogers managed to keep Roswald at the field hospital longer than was normal for his injury. Transportation of wounded by truck was rough on patients with leg injuries and he knew that Roswald would have suffered terribly. He was released eventually and sent to Bari in southern Italy, then to Catania in Sicily, followed by hospital in Algiers and finally England. Roswald fully expected to return to active duty as soon as his wounds healed, but the doctors in England told him flatly that he was finished. He was back in Canada by the end of May 1944.
    Meanwhile, Lindsay Rogers had received orders to take his mission — codenamed "Vaseline" — into Yugoslavia. In late November 1943, he and his assistants boarded a Royal Navy submarine heading into the Adriatic. From that relative sanctuary, they put to sea in a small canvas boat which they had to navigate in the thick of night to the island of Vis, "shrouded in the mist of the Dalmatian coast."
    So it was that Lindsay Rogers — the colourful and headstrong New Zealander — and later Colin Scott Dafoe — "the tough Canadian" — threw in their lots with one of the war's costliest but most effective resistance movements: the popular uprising of the People's Liberation Army of Yugoslavia, a ragtag collection of communist guerrillas led by one Josip Broz Tito.