Fermor
walked
from Holland to Hungary in 1933
at age
18.
Later, as a British soldier, he fights in the war and the book interweaves the later knowledge that much of what he witnessed and explored was forever destroyed. His description of how snow affects a landscape (between pages 102-106 of the 1977 edition of "A Time of Gifts") is a perfect reflection on being in the woods in winter. He continuously shows a magical grasp on what is powerful about time spent in nature.
A passage starts with "All was frozen" and ends with his sitting "clenched and shivering in this prehistoric burial posture and listen[ing] to my teeth rattling" before realizing that he is a few hundred meters from another German village. He finds a bar with "lamplit and steaming rustics round the table, veiled in the smoke of their lidded pipes, [who] were maundering away with slurred vowels over their mugs."
"It was no good trying to explain."
