A SPECTATOR'S NOTEBOOK
OT merely in the short history of the British Empire but in the long history of war there has never been anything like the Commonwealth Division now serv- al in Korea. We are today fairly Well accustomed to staffs being organised on an international as well as an inter-service basis; and here and there, both in the last war and since, a reasonably high degree of teamwork has been achieved by these pyramids of multilingual brass. But conditions round the conference-table are seldom capable, even when the agenda are controversial, of leading to a situation in which many men may, and some certainly will, be killed or wounded; the ties of mutual respect and confidence which unite the disparate elements serving in the Commonwealth Division have emerged With credit from the acid test of battle. It would surely be the greatest pity to let the Division, so hopeful and so concrete a aYmbol of the possibilities of human co-operation under stress, fade gracefully away into the mists of legend. It must of course be largely disbanded when the United Nations finally with- draw from Korea; but might not one Commonwealth Brigade Group be kept in being ? The problem of where to station it would present difficulties, since the further away from home a soldier is the more he costs his Government, so that wherever you put the Brigade Group somebody would get a raw deal. But I hope, all the same, that some effort will be made to preserve the nucleus of the first field formation Mustered from the forces of five separate sovereign Powers.
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