"npx degit sveltejs/template abc" resulting in "could not fetch remote https://github.com/sveltejs/template"

• at first I thought it was a firewall issue
• I banged away trying different things including stopping the firewall
• none of this worked because the firewall wasn't the problem
• I was too thick to stop and walk away
  
• instead I took the kids to swimming class
• afterwards, I was playing around and ran "npx degit" for fun and induced an error and discovered:
• (Use `node --trace-warnings ...` to show where the warning was created)
• I ran "npx --trace-warnings degit sveltejs/template abc" which gave:
• npm ERR! code ENOENT
  npm ERR! syscall spawn git
  npm ERR! path git
  npm ERR! errno -2
  npm ERR! enoent Error while executing:
  npm ERR! enoent undefined ls-remote -h -t ssh://git@github.com/sveltejs/template.git
  npm ERR! enoent
  npm ERR! enoent
  npm ERR! enoent spawn git ENOENT
  npm ERR! enoent This is related to npm not being able to find a file.
  npm ERR! enoent
  
  npm ERR! A complete log of this run can be found in:
  npm ERR!     /root/.npm/_logs/2020-12-12T04_25_29_798Z-debug.log
• At first, I thought I was missing ssh
• Then I discovered I was missing git
• Running "npx --trace-warnings degit sveltejs/template proj02" resulted in failure
• command not found: template
  
• But once I removed "--trace-warnings" I had success:
• DESKTOP-NNBAUML:~# npx  degit sveltejs/template proj01
  > cloned sveltejs/template#master to proj01