You would not have wanted to have been...
    From point blank range, the mountains took on a different aspect. Unlike all other ranges in the Province, the Long Hais had a speckled appearance, quite apart from the burnt-out sections and the pockmarks of bomb craters that gave them their name. It was as if the rest of slopes were inflicted with a fearful acne, a disease that deranged and discoloured the appearance of the foliage, and you didn’t get too far into that stricken area before you began to realise why.
 
The island of Malta, lying in the middle of the narrow section of the Mediterranean between Sicily and Libya was a critical strategic location in the first years of WWII and the British held onto to it grimly against blockade, air-raids and threatened invasion. The Malta Story tells all this, with Jack Hawkins as the island commander holding out desperately against the onslaught and with few supplies and hardly anything to fight back with. But this superb, realistic war film concentrates on the amicable character played by Alec Guinness who daily flies an unarmed Spitfire over enemy territory taking photographs to help Hawkins figure out how and when the invasion is going to come. When he is blown out of the sky at the end of the film and the helpless Spitfire falls into the sea, it is one of the saddest of all hero-dies-at-the-end war films, and this is due to the strength and honesty with which it was constructed.