The National Archives in London holds copies of Leigh Fermor's wartime dispatches from occupied Crete in file number HS 5/728. The vaults of the great chamber faded into infinity through blue strata of smoke. Hobnails grated, mugs clashed and the combined smell of beer and bodies and old clothes and farmyards sprang at the newcomer. I squeezed in at a table full of peasants, and was soon lifting one of those masskrugs to my lips. It was heavier than a brace of iron dumb-bells, but the blond beer inside was cool and marvelous, a brooding, cylindrical litre of Teutonic myth. Lancers' torsoes taper into their sashes like bobbins. Red and white ribbons cross their breasts and sometimes the Golden Fleece sprouts from those high star-crusted collars. Hands rest on the hilt of a sabre looped with a double-ended sabretache. Others nurse a plumed shako, a dragoon's helmet or an uhlan's czapka with a square top like a mortar-board and tufted with a tall aigrette." [p124]

To my ears, this is just painfully overwritten. Including infinity and blue strata and iron dumb-bells in a simple bar scene is too much. And the final touch of calling a glass of beer a “brooding, cylindrical litre of Teutonic myth”—besides being a nonsensical image—is yet another example of his adolescent imagination: he can hardly touch anything German without his fantasy flying off into legendary knights and Germanic sagas. There is something to be said for enlivening a regular scene using colorful language; but there is also something to be said for honest description. Rainey-Smith, Maggie (10 June 2008). "Greece: The write stuff". NZ herald . Retrieved 13 January 2019. The archway at the top of these shallow steps, avoiding the threatened anticlimax of a flattened ogee, deviated in two round-topped lobes on either side with a right-angeled central cleft slashed deep between the cusps. There had been days, I was told, when horsemen on the way to the indoor lists rode in full armour up these steps: lobster-clad riders slipping and clattering as they stooped their ostriche-plumes under a freak doorway, gingerly carrying their lances at the trail to keep their bright paint that spiraled them unchipped. But in King Vladislav’s vast Hall of Homage the ribs of the vaulting had further to travel, higher to soar. Springing close from the floor from reversed and bisected cones, they sailed aloft curving and spreading across the wide arch of the ceiling: parting, crossing, re-joining, and—once again—enclosing those slim subdivided tulips as they climbed.

Two of his later travel books, A Time of Gifts (1977) and Between the Woods and the Water (1986), cover this journey, but at the time of his death, a book on the final part of his journey remained unfinished. This was edited and assembled from Leigh Fermor's diary of the time and an early draft he wrote in the 1960s. It was published as The Broken Road by John Murray in September 2013. [9] Finally, Fermor's prose exceeds poetry in its beauty and grace. Fermor's work supports my contention that prose can exceed poetry in its beauty, fueled by more extended metaphors, descriptions, and narratives—if penned by the hand of a master such as Fermor. Poetry mimics music in its fleeting melody and open suggestions. Prose, like painting, is more plastic and invites detailed consideration, revealing nuances of meaning as the text retards time of allow a deeper contemplation of the scene created. Others, like William Dalrymple, praise Fermor as one ofthe great English prose-stylists. I concur. Fermor paints verbal portraits and landscapes that rival a Turner or Constable in beauty.

When I began this book, I fully expected to join the universal chorus of praise. The premise of this book could hardly be more promising: a naïve, bookish nineteen-year-old decides to walk from Holland all the way to Constantinople. We have here all the makings of a literary adventure: an author sensitive enough to language and art to appreciate the finer points of culture, and impetuous enough to get into scraps and misadventures. The only book I can think of that holds comparable promise is Gerald Brenan’s South From Granada, which begins, similarly enough, with the young, bookish Brenan settling down in the south of Spain to read Spinoza. Now, I am being rather unduly harsh towards a book that is generally good-natured and light-hearted. Partly this hostility comes from defensiveness: If I am to accuse someone as highly respected as Leigh Fermor of writing badly, I must make a strong case. As the final exhibit in my prosecution, I include this snippet of a description from a bar in Munich: In these two volumes of extraordinary lyrical beauty and discursive, staggering erudition, Leigh Fermor recounted his first great excursion… They’re partially about an older author’s encounter with his young self, but they’re mostly an evocation of a lost Mitteleuropa of wild horses and dark forests, of ancient synagogues and vivacious Jewish coffeehouses, of Hussars and Uhlans, and of high-spirited and deeply eccentric patricians with vast libraries (such as the Transylvanian count who was a famous entomologist specializing in Far Eastern moths and who spoke perfect English, though with a heavy Scottish accent, thanks to his Highland nanny). These books amply display Leigh Fermor’s keen eye and preternatural ear for languages, but what sets them apart, besides the utterly engaging persona of their narrator, is his historical imagination and intricate sense of historical linkage…Few writers are as alive to the persistence of the past (he’s ever alert to the historical forces that account for the shifts in custom, language, architecture, and costume that he discerns), and I’ve read none who are so sensitive to the layers of invasion that define the part of Europe he depicts here. The unusual vantage point of these books lends them great poignancy, for we and the author know what the youthful Leigh Fermor cannot: that the war will tear the scenery and shatter the buildings he evokes; that German and Soviet occupation will uproot the beguiling world of those Tolstoyan nobles; and that in fact very few people who became his friends on this marvelous and sunny journey will survive the coming catastrophe.”— Benjamin Schwarz, The Atlantic

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I admit that I am lobbing these accusations at Leigh Fermor with an uneasy conscience, because in so many ways he is leaps and bounds more learned and eloquent than I am. Yet to misuse one’s gifts seems more culpable than not having gifts in the first place. But let me stop being vague. Consider this passage from the beginning, right when the writer is setting out and saying goodbye to his loved ones: This beloved account about an intrepid young Englishman on the first leg of his walk from London to Constantinople is simply one of the best works of travel literature ever written. This is the first installment of an epic journey undertaken by a very young man who by December 1933 was finding himself at the end of his tether. Expelled from his public school for dalliance with a grocer's daughter, not sure (having passed School Cert. at a London crammers) he wanted the experience of Sandhurst and a military career, he conceived the mad plan of walking across Europe to Constantinople on a shoestring. Basically it was to be up the Rhine and down the Danube.

The feeling of being lost in time and geography with months and years hazily sparkling ahead is a prospect of inconjecturable magic.’ Moss featured the events of the Cretan capture in his book Ill Met by Moonlight. [6] (The 2014 edition contains an afterword on the context, written by Leigh Fermor in 2001.) It was adapted in a film by the same name, directed/produced by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger and released in 1957 with Leigh Fermor played by Dirk Bogarde. [2] Leigh Fermor's own account Abducting A General – The Kreipe Operation and SOE in Crete appeared in October 2014. [16] [17] Many years after his travel, Leigh Fermor's diary of the Danubian leg of his journey was found in a castle in Romania and returned to him. [5] He used it in his writing of the book, which also drew on the knowledge he had accumulated in the intervening years. In the book, he conveys the immediacy of an 18-year-old's reactions to a great adventure, deepened by the retrospective reflections of the cultured and sophisticated man of the world which he became. He travelled in Europe when old monarchies survived in the Balkans, and remnants of the ancient regimes were to be seen in Austria, Czechoslovakia and Hungary. In Germany Hitler had recently come to power but most of his atrocities were not yet evident. Chancellor, Henry (2005). James Bond: The Man and His World. London: John Murray. p.43. ISBN 978-0-7195-6815-2.

There are plenty of adventurous moments that every reader can empathize with... like losing his passport in Munich together with all his belongings. They disappeared from a youth hostel to which he could not return for the night as a result of passing out drunk at the beer festival. But PLF always manages to get out of every scrape with flying colours ! From Solesmes to La Grande Trappe", in The Cornhill Magazine, [41] John Murray, London, no. 982, Spring 1950. Hailed as a masterpiece, A Time of Gifts is in part a coming-of-age memoir, but it is also a rich and compelling portrait of a continent that – despite its resplendent domes and monasteries, its great rivers and grand cities – was soon to be swept away by war, modernisation and profound social change. A Time to Keep Silence (1957), with photographs by Joan Eyres Monsell. [39] This was an early product of the Queen Anne Press, a company managed by Leigh Fermor's friend Ian Fleming. In it he describes his experiences in several monasteries, and the profound effect the time spent there had on him. Introduction to Into Colditz by Lt Colonel Miles Reid (Michael Russell Publishing Ltd, Wilton, 1983). The story of Reid's captivity in Colditz and eventual escape by faking illness so as to qualify for repatriation. Reid had served with Leigh Fermor in Greece and was captured there trying to defend the Corinth Canal bridge in 1941.

A word about the title which is a little obscure for a travelogue, however unusual and distinguished. It is taken from a line of poetry by Louis MacNeice and in my understanding honours the people who were so kind and generous to him along the way. One must remember he was not yet nineteen when he first set out and his youth, good looks and sense of humour charmed very nearly all he met and he certainly displayed a supreme ability to get along with just about anybody. His mother, who was born 26 April 1890 and died, at 54 Marine Parade, Brighton, on 22 October 1977, was the daughter of Charles Taafe Ambler (1840–1925), whose father was Warrant Officer (William) James Ambler on HMS Bellerophon, with Captain Maitland, when Napoleon surrendered. Muriel and Lewis married on 2 April 1890. Not only is this journey one of physical adventure but of cultural awakening. Architecture, art, genealogy, quirks of history and language are all devoured — and here passed on — with a gusto uniquely his’ COLIN THUBRON, SUNDAY TIMES Then, late in a long and well-lived life, the accomplished author returned to his memories, without the benefit of contemporary notes, to see if he could make something of his unaided recollections. The books themselves were written when the wandering boy had become an old man, a great writer at the height of his powers. The first volume came out in 1977 when I was at Oxford, but somehow I completely missed them until now, to my great loss. The second volume appeared in 1986. Both attracted universal critical acclaim, and the world waited patiently for the concluding volume. But Fermor died in 2011 with the trilogy incomplete. In 2013, it was finished and lightly edited by Colin Thubron and Artemis Cooper and, although the third volume is not quite as brilliant as the first two, it is extremely well done and eminently readable. It beautifully completes this remarkable saga. For the last few months of his life Leigh Fermor suffered from a cancerous tumour, and in early June 2011 he underwent a tracheotomy in Greece. As death was close, according to local Greek friends, he expressed a wish to visit England to bid goodbye to his friends, and then return to die in Kardamyli, though it is also stated that he actually wished to die in England and be buried next to his wife. [30]During periods of leave, Leigh Fermor spent time at Tara, a villa in Cairo rented by Moss, where the "rowdy household" of SOE officers was presided over by Countess Zofia (Sophie) Tarnowska. [2] Wartime honours [ edit ] Leigh Fermor, photographed by Dimitri Papadimos Foreword of Albanian Assignment by Colonel David Smiley (Chatto & Windus, London, 1984). The story of SOE in Albania, by a brother in arms of Leigh Fermor, who was later an MI6 agent. Sattin, Anthony (15 September 2013). "The Broken Road – A Review". The Observer . Retrieved 22 August 2016.