April 1944, occupied Crete. As dawn breaks, General Heinrich Kreipe stares at Mount Ida and murmurs some opening lines from Horace: “Vides ut alta stet nive candidum Soracte…” (Do you see how Soracte stands there with its blanket of deep snow?) The young English officer sitting next to him – for Kreipe has been captured by a party of Cretan guerrillas and British commandos – continues where the German breaks off and recites the remaining stanzas.
Many years later, this same Englishman wrote that it was as though “for a long 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.”
The English soldier was Patrick Leigh Fermor, who died five years ago this month aged 96. He told the story in A Time of Gifts, the first volume of a famous trilogy recounting his pre-war walk across Europe as an 18-year-old.
The great Catholic historian Christopher Dawson died in 1970, seven years before the publication of A Time of Gifts. Had he lived to hear it, he might have been very moved by Fermor’s anecdote. Dawson believed fervently in a European republic of letters, a free, spiritual community of which every scholar of whichever nation was a citizen: “At first sight it seems highly absurd to take an English farmer’s son or the son of a German shopkeeper and drill him into writing imitation Ciceronian prose or copies of Latin verses. Yet for all that, it did set the stamp of a common classical tradition on a dozen vernacular European literatures and gave the educated classes of every European country a common sense of the standard classical values.”
The tale of a German general and his English captor pausing to exchange lines of Latin verse on a Greek island, while the continent tore itself apart around them, would have struck Dawson as emblematic of both the glory and the tragedy of Europe.
Dawson and Fermor were, on the face of it, very different characters: Fermor an ebullient man of the world, Dawson an academic of the most rarefied kind. Dawson expressed his vision of Europe in vast historical panoramas written from his study. Fermor, on the other hand, turned himself into a kind of tramp, striding out from the Hook of Holland to the gates of Constantinople. Though expelled from his public school, Fermor’s natural curiosity and great memory meant he salvaged a huge amount of learning from the wreckage of his formal education.
But despite these cavernous differences in temperament and lifestyle, Fermor was, in his scholarly wanderings, the quirky embodiment of what Dawson championed in the world of thought.
As Fermor disembarked in Rotterdam in the dead of night in 1933, at the beginning of his epic trek, the first person he saw was Erasmus, in the form of a snow-covered statue. Later, in the house of the widow of a German classics professor, he discussed the correct pronunciation of Erasmic Latin. In Transylvania, he found himself at a party where all conversed in French as if it were their first language. He spent time with peasants, gypsies, bargemen and others, soaking up customs and dialects. He advised the son of a Hungarian count destined for Ampleforth about the monks who umpired cricket matches with white coats over their habits. His biographer, Artemis Cooper, says he liked to think that he could still detect a sort of eternal, cultural Europe, untouched behind the cities and factories, where life was dictated by the rounds of the seasons and the feasts of the Church.
Indeed, religion offers another strip of common ground. Dawson was a Catholic convert and occupied the chair of Roman Catholic studies at Harvard. Fermor, though he never converted, identified himself as “RC” on official forms until the end of the war. He claimed descent from counts of the Holy Roman Empire who came to Austria from Sligo. He was profoundly influenced by the French Catholic novelist JK Huysmans. He made a point of being in Rome for the crowning of John XXIII. More frivolously, he once recorded how Penelope Betjeman stuffed copies of the Catholic Herald under a cushion whenever her husband John entered the room.
While deprecating his own capacity for religious belief, Fermor was also the self-confessed beneficiary of “spiritual windfalls” from retreats made in ancient monasteries, Catholic and Orthodox. He lamented the desolation caused by the Reformation, seeing the ruined abbeys of England as “the peaks of a vanished Atlantis drowned four centuries deep”.
In 1972, Kreipe, Fermor and the Cretan guerrillas were reunited. When asked how he had been treated after capture, the German returned again to the fountains of European culture for his answer: “Ritterlich! Wie ein ritter.” (Chivalrously! Like a knight.)
Areas of Catholic Herald business are still recovering post-pandemic.
However, we are reaching out to the Catholic community and readership, that has been so loyal to the Catholic Herald. Please join us on our 135 year mission by supporting us.
We are raising £250,000 to safeguard the Herald as a world-leading voice in Catholic journalism and teaching.
We have been a bold and influential voice in the church since 1888, standing up for traditional Catholic culture and values. Please consider donating.