To Fortify the Mind

One of Britain's inner defenses against Hitlerism, something the Fuehrer himself would never have understood, was a modest little feature tucked in the back columns of the London Times. It was neither more nor less than a daily quotation, usually, but not always, from the oak-timbered British past, "a passage old and true [to] keep high the heart and fortify the mind." Samples:

P: After the North Africa landings: "No cause they espouse can fail; no cause they oppose can triumph. The future is in large part theirs. . . ."--Lord Russell of Killowen.

P: After Mussolini and his mistress were killed: "Hand joined to hand and face to face; In noisome, pestilent embrace. So trickling down with foul decay, They wore their lingering lives away"--Virgil's Aeneid.

Last week, after five years and eight months of quotations apt to each day's mood, the final "Old and True," No. 1747, appeared: "In every life there are certain pauses and interruptions which force consideration upon the careless, and seriousness upon the light; points of time where one course of action ends and another begins; and by the vicissitudes of fortune ... we are forced to say of something, this is the end"--Samuel Johnson.

The Times hastened to explain that, in dropping "Old and True" right after V-E day it had neither forgotten nor undervalued the Japanese war. It merely meant, said the Times, that "the course of the struggle in the East is not to be easily or aptly annotated from the experience of the West."

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