A SPECTATOR'S NOTEBOOK T HE whole story of the magnificent stand
by the Gloucesters in Korea, and the impressive citation in which General Van Fleet paid tribute to their heroism, is deeply moving in itself. But there is something much more in it than that.
" Their shoulders held the sky suspended ; • They stood, and earth's foundations stay." And they did that not, as so many men in so many famous regiments have done through the centuries, fa the defence of their native land, but for the defence of a principle—on which, • in the end, no doubt, the defence of everyone's native land in the end depends. They fought and died in resistance against aggression which was no aggression directed against their own -country, and in defence of a rule of law which they had no immediate reason to invoke on their own behalf. Americans and British and French and Australians and New Zealanders and Dutchmen and even Ethiopians are doing that in Korea. This is something new in history—combined resistance to Hitler was not the same thing—and deplorable though the necessity for it is, it marks progress.
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