The Bridge on the River Kwai [antikvár]

The insupcrablc gap between East and West that exists in somé eyes is perhaps nothing more than an opticai illusion. Perhaps it is only the conventional way of expressing a popular opinion based on insufficient evidence and masquerading as a universally recognised statcment of fact, for which there is no justification at all, not even the plea that it contains an element of truth. During the last war " saving face " was perhaps as vitally important to the British as it was to the Japanese. Perhaps it dictated the behaviour of the former, without their being aware of it, as forcibly and as fatally as it did that of the latter, and no doubt that of every other race in the world. Perhaps the conduct of each of the two enemies, superficially so dissimilar, was in fact simply a different though equally meaningless manifestation of the same spiritual reality. Perhaps the mentality of the Japanese colonel, Saito, was essentially the same as that of his prisoner, Colonel Nicholson. These were the questions which occupied Major Clipton's thoughts. He too was a prisoner, like the five hundred other wretches herded by the Japanese into the camp on the River Kwai, like the sixty thousand English, Australians, Dutch and Americans assembled in several groups