Look, if I have to scan a QR code at a table, order my food, and then the system requests a tip before anything comes out or I’ve seen a human, the tip is going to be low. Am I the only one that feels that way, or have I just gotten old and cranky?

A battalion of riflemen, dug in at a lonely desert outpost with a handful of little anti-tank guns, found itself in the path of the massed German and Italian armor at El Alamein, and over one furious day it wrecked more than fifty tanks. When one gun's crew was shot down to two men, the battalion's colonel knelt and served as the loader himself. Lieutenant-Colonel Victor Turner won the Victoria Cross at the defense of Outpost Snipe. It was part of the great battle I told you about yesterday, Montgomery's offensive at El Alamein. On the 27th of October 1942, Turner's battalion of the Rifle Brigade, with its six-pounder anti-tank guns, had pushed forward in the dark to seize a desert position codenamed Snipe, a shallow depression out ahead of the British lines, in the area of the fighting around the Kidney feature. When dawn came they found themselves horribly exposed, isolated out in front, and right in the path of the German and Italian counterattacks, as Axis tanks tried to drive back the British advance. What followed was one of the classic anti-tank actions of the war. All day the German and Italian armor came at them, wave after wave, and all day Turner's gunners fought them off. The six-pounder was a new and effective gun, and the riflemen used it brilliantly, holding their fire until the tanks were close, then knocking them out, gun duels at short range across the desert, the little outpost wreathed in smoke and dust, ammunition running low, guns and crews being knocked out one by one. The battalion beat off counterattack after counterattack by something like ninety tanks, destroying or crippling more than fifty of them over the course of the day, a staggering toll. Turner was everywhere through it, moving from gun to gun under fire, directing the defense, steadying his men, redistributing the dwindling ammunition. At one point a six-pounder crew was shot down until only an officer and a sergeant were left to work it, and Turner himself knelt in beside them and acted as the loader, and the three of them together knocked out five more tanks. He was wounded in the head during the fighting but kept on directing the battle. The stand at Snipe was a small epic of the desert war, a single battalion holding an exposed outpost and gutting the enemy armor sent to crush it, exactly the kind of attrition that was breaking Rommel's tank strength day by day in the larger battle. Turner's Victoria Cross recognized a commander who held an impossible position through a day of massed tank assault and got down to load a gun himself when the crews were gone. He survived his wounds and the war. Outpost Snipe became one of the proud names of El Alamein, the place where the riflemen stood and the tanks burned.