- From:The Australian
- June 18, 2011
THE death of Patrick Leigh Fermor at the age of 96, commemorated in many obituaries as the end of a celebrated travel writer, in fact rings down the final curtain on an extraordinary group of British irregular warriors whose contribution to the defeat of Hitler, significant in military terms, still managed to recall an age when nobility and even chivalry were part of warfare.
All these men were "travel writers" in their way, in that they were explorers, archeologists, amateur linguists, anthropologists and just plain adventurers. Men, as Saki put it so well in The Unbearable Bassington, "who wolves have sniffed at". But they put their amateur skills to work after the near-collapse of Britain's conventional forces in 1940 had left most of the European mainland under Nazi control, and after Winston Churchill had sent out a call to "set Europe ablaze" by means of guerilla warfare.Suddenly it was found that there were many bright and brave young men, not very well suited to the officers' mess, who nevertheless had military skills and who had, moreover, back-country knowledge of many tough neighbourhoods in the Balkans, the Mediterranean and Middle East.
According to Fermor's memoirs: "We were all three lying smoking in silence, when the general, half to himself, slowly said: 'Vides et ulta stet nive candidum Soracte.' (See how Mount Soracte stands out white with deep snow.) It was the opening of one of the few Horace odes I knew by heart. I went on reciting where he had broken off. The general's blue eyes swivelled away from the mountain top to mine and when I'd finished, after a long silence, he said: 'Ach so, Herr Major!' It was very strange. 'Ja, Herr General.' As though for a moment the war had ceased to exist. We had both drunk at the same fountains long before, and things were different between us for the rest of our time together."
Rest of piece.
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