“The hazards of war landed me among the crags of occupied Crete with a band of Cretan guerillas and a captive German general whom we had waylaid and carried off into the mountains three days before. The German garrison of the island were in hot, but luckily temporarily misdirected, chase. It was a time of anxiety and danger; and for our captive, of hardship and distress. During a lull in the pursuit, we woke up among the rocks just as the dawn was breaking over the crest of Mount Ida. We had been toiling over it, through snow and then rain, for the last two days. Looking across the valley at this flashing mountain-crest, the general murmured to himself:
"Vides ut alta stet nive candidum
Soracte..."
It was one of the ones I knew! I continued from where he had broken off:
nec iam sustineant onus
silvae laborantes geluque
flumina constiterint acuto,"
and so on, through the remaining five stanzas to the end. The general's blue eyes had swiveled 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. 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.”
— Patrick Leigh Fermor, A Time of Gifts
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