The steppes near Stalingrad where Vladimir Kantovski fought.

I recently learnt that a close friend of mine has cancer.  And instead of falling to pieces – like I fear I perhaps might at such news – he is brave and stoical. Why? Where does such courage come from?

I could never have predicted that he would be so brave – he never seemed a particularly courageous sort. But now that he is being tested he is reacting heroically. But then, thinking about it, I shouldn’t be surprised, because the bravest man I ever met was similarly mild mannered. He was called Vladimir Kantovski, and I met him a dozen years ago in his run down flat in the suburbs of Moscow. As a student he had protested at the arrest of his teacher in 1940 – an act which, unsurprisingly, meant that he was sent straight to a Gulag. When the Germans invaded the following year, fiercely patriotic as he was, Kantovski volunteered to serve in a ‘Penal Battalion’ on the front line.

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