the reality of the world...

Having already been severely wounded during the Spanish Civil War, the great classicist Bernard Knox participated in WWII where:

"After D-Day he was parachuted into Brittany as part of Operation Jedburgh to coordinate elements of the French Resistance. Later he was sent to northern Italy to lead a group of Italian partisans and took part in heavy fighting during the Gothic Line and Po Valley campaigns.

It was in Italy that he rediscovered his love for classics. Holed up in a bombed-out farmhouse, he chanced upon a copy of Virgil's Georgics and opened it at random to read a passage which began: "Here right and wrong are reversed; so many wars in the world, so many faces of evil."

As he later recalled in Essays Ancient and Modern (1990): "These lines, written some 30 years before the birth of Christ, expressed, more directly and passionately than any modern statement I knew of, the reality of the world I was living in: the shell-pocked, mine-infested fields, the shattered cities and the starving population of that Italy Virgil so loved, the misery of the whole world at war." He resolved that, if he survived, he would go back to the classics and study them seriously."