Journey Through the Past: Patrick Leigh Fermor’s Endless Amble

By Armistice Day, 1918, the British weren’t just happy for war’s end, they were desperate to move as they pleased. Surviving soldiers had of course endured the continent’s trenches, but civilians, too, had lived for four years under an ever-expanding list of restrictions known as the Defense of the Realm Act, which rationed food, travel, and foreign communication back home.

The worst of those restrictions ended upon German surrender, inaugurating two decades of joyously far-flung travel for those Britons whose relief or claustrophobia compelled them to escape. All those infantrymen and officers who had dreamed of tropical respite from the freezing, bloody front; all those writers like D. H. Lawrence and Norman Douglas who had grown disgusted with repressive, xenophobic England— they set off for the Mediterranean, the Greek Isles, the Middle East, the Balkans, anywhere a ship could take them. And since this interwar period was, in historian Paul Fussell’s terms, the last era of “genuine” travel, when trip-taking was still “conceived to be like study, and its fruits were considered to be the adornment of the mind,” Britain produced a shelf’s worth of brilliant journey books by the time the Nazis invaded France. In these idiosyncratically written, unclassifiable narratives, foreign wandering is an invitation to explore deeper realms. Lawrence’s Sea and Sardinia is a record of Italian eccentricities and the author’s own dyspepsia; Robert Byron’s Persian tour The Road to Oxiana is a catalog of traveler’s follies and ancient architecture; and Rebecca West’s Black Lamb and Grey Falcon is a thousand-page treatise on gender relations disguised as a deep reading of Slavic history.

Born in 1915, Patrick Leigh Fermor was much younger than these adventurers (he was, in fact, a primary schoolmate of Rebecca West’s son), but he managed one of the period’s greatest excursions. From late 1933 to New Year’s Day 1935, Fermor walked from the Hook of Holland to Istanbul with little more than Army surplus clothes, The Oxford Book of English Verse, and some empty notebooks in his rucksack. But it wasn’t until the 1960s, after he’d earned multiple military decorations for service in Greece and Crete during World War II and established himself as an author, that Fermor finally began writing the record of what he called his “Great Trudge.” An infamous perfectionist, he didn’t publish the first volume, A Time of Gifts, until 1977; the second, Between the Woods and the Water, appeared in 1986 and took young Paddy as far as the Yugoslavia–Bulgaria border. When Fermor died in 2011, he left behind an unfinished manuscript that has been lightly edited by his biographer, Artemis Cooper, and the travel writer Colin Thubron and published as The Broken Road: From the Iron Gates To Mount Athos. While it’s a grand, moving book in its own right, covering the walk through southern Romania and Bulgaria into Turkey, this final installment also marks the end of an entire era of thinking and writing. We’ve seen the last of the imperial gentleman-scholar-soldier-aesthetes, and the belated final product of an ecstatic moment in British literary and intellectual history.

Early in The Broken Road, Fermor delights in the ethnic and architectural diversity of Plovdiv, a central Bulgarian city where, “rather momentously for me, as things were going to turn out in the following years,” he meets and befriends his first Grecian. After waking in the man’s house and setting out for the day, he takes note of the...