by Carol Van Strum
“Wars and a man I sing…”
— Publius Vergilius Maro, aka Virgil (70-19 B.C.), The Aeneid, opening line. Translated by Robert Fagles, 2006.
An American hero died in July. Sadly, few outside the halls of academe know or care. Whether we care matters little or nothing to him now, but matters a great deal to us.
His name was Bernard Knox. An account of his 95 years on Earth would read like a John Le Carré or Alan Furst thriller: an ordinary young scholar, thrust by wartime exigencies into the world of espionage, secret missions, and unsought heroics, devotes his long post-war life to the equally thrilling — if less harrowing — search for wisdom and solace in accounts of ancient wars and passions.
Knox was born November 24, 1914 in Bradford, West Yorkshire, England. While studying classics at St. John’s College, Cambridge, he became horrified by England’s complacent indifference to the spread of fascism throughout Europe. Shortly after graduating in 1936, he joined the International Brigades in the Spanish Civil War. Wounded and left for dead when a bullet pierced his carotid artery, he somehow survived both his wounds and the amateur care of a young volunteer who learned nursing “from American films.” Eventually, he was shipped back to England for more professional medical treatment. There, in 1939, he married an American, Betty Baur, and moved to the U.S. to teach Latin in a Connecticut private school. Their 67-year marriage ended only with Betty’s death in 2006.
After Pearl Harbor, Knox enlisted in the U.S. Army and volunteered for the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), which trained him as a parachutist and dropped him into occupied France to teach explosives techniques and coordinate French Resistance and Allied efforts after the Normandy invasion. The OSS later sent him to northern Italy to work with Italian partisans. There, taking a break from his machine gun in a bombed-out, abandoned villa, he idly picked up from the rubble a miraculously intact volume of Virgil’s Georgics (from the Greek, “On Working the Earth”), which fell open in his hands to the prophetic, haunting lines: