  Despite a largely classical education, Hare’s mind was already turning towards moral philosophy. He ascribed this to two things, the need to define an attitude towards fighting, and a feeling of guilt at living in moderate comfort. He spent much time while still at Rugby working with the unemployed, and finally decided not to be a pacifist, but to join the OTC. When war broke out, he volunteered for service in the Royal Artillery, and circumvented the results of a medical test in order to be permitted active service overseas. He was eventually put on a ship for India in autumn 1940. He had a year training Punjabi soldiers, and enjoying some adventures (twice finding his own way back through the jungle, once after losing his guns to the Japanese). He was finally taken prisoner when Singapore fell in February 1942. He then suffered a long march up the River Kwai to near the Three Pagodas Pass, with a group of officers whose task was to work as coolies building the railway from Siam into Burma. So he knew too well the “violent untiring labours” that Aristotle associates with virtue in an ode to a dead friend that was dear to Hare’s heart. He writes in his autobiography, “I prefer to pass over our sufferings during the eight months we were there” (2002: 283); he rarely mentioned them (except when more fortunate critics of his views rashly imputed to him the exemption from a wider experience of life that can be the privilege of an Oxford fellowship). He was eventually imprisoned with fellow officers in Singapore, whence he was released after exactly three and a half years when the War ended.