So when the going gets tough, the toffs get going . . . .

(From Irish Independent)

HOW brave the British warships looked at dawn.

Spread over the pale blue Mediterranean, bristling with cannons and machine guns and missiles, it was an armada led by the destroyer 'Gloucester' and the USS Nashville and the 'York' and the sleek French anti-submarine frigate 'Jean-de-Vienne'.

They represented us, those ships upon which the Lebanese stared with such intensity yesterday. They represented our western power, the military strength of our billion-dollar economies. Who would dare challenge this naval might?

It was, our journalists told us, to be the greatest evacuation since Dunkirk. There it was again, the Second World War. And it was another cruel lie which the Lebanese spotted at once. …