11 SEPTEMBER 1953, Page 6

Bootless A vague sadness came over me when I saw

in a newspaper a photograph of the hundreds and hundreds of pairs of boots discarded by Communist prisoners on the road just short of the Panmunjom reception centres.. This carpet of footwear is said to extend for three quarters of a mile but, though it has a wanton and wasteful appearance, it represents in material terms only a drop in the great flood of extravagance which is unleashed by every war; besides, spurned boots, un- like spent bullets, can always be used again. For me the boots had an elusive poignancy because they seemed to symbolise the great gulf fixed between Asia and the West. The Chinese planned a grand gesture of defiance and con- tempt. The boots were almost certainly the best that any of them will ever own, and in the act of sitting down and taking them off there can have produced little of that emotional release which German pilots used often—and always, I thought, rather oddly—to find in spitting at their captors when they were shot down over England. Yet off the boots came, and the Chinese must have felt that they had struck a parting blow for their cause and left their hated foes writhing under the sting of contumely. But of course they hadn't done anything of the kind. Their action seems to us merely puerile It would have been the lame, only the other way round, if our prisoners had marched into freedom carrying home-made cricket bats; we should have thought it a capital gesture, but it would not have registered with the Chinese. a