Patrick Leigh Fermor, A Time of Gifts (Introductory Letter to Xan Fielding):
Indeed, indifference to the squalor of caves and speed at the approach of danger might have seemed the likeliest aptitudes for life in occupied Crete. But, unexpectedly in a modern war, it was the obsolete choice of Greek at school which had really deposited us on the limestone. With an insight once thought rare, the army had realized that the Ancient tongue, however imperfectly mastered, was a short-cut to the Modern: hence the sudden sprinkling of many strange figures among the mainland and island crags.
Strange, because Greek had long ceased to be compulsory at the schools where it was still taught: it was merely the eager choice— unconsciously prompted, I suspect, by having listened to Kingsley’s Heroes in childhood—of a perverse and eccentric minority: early hankerings which set a vague but agreeable stamp on all these improvised cave-dwellers.
