The battlefields of Italy seemed very far away from the parochial tranquility that young John Coe had known growing up in Toronto's Beaches -- a world of adolescent romances and piano lessons, now supplanted by numbing fear and the daily horrors of war. As for so many of his generation, World War II became the turning point of Coe's life: everything he had done or would do was measured against this pivotal, definitive experience.