On what's happening with the British hostages

I found a link to this at Instapundit, and it reminded me of two things.

The first was an incident in India(I believe) of a British officer captured by whatever force they were fighting at the time*. He was basically given the choice to crawl and live, or die. He looked them in the eye and said "Do your worst". He was killed; and the people who saw it spoke of him with honor for the rest of their lives, and worried about a people who produced soldiers like that.

The other? With British sailors and Marines being held hostage- largely because the Brit government didn't allow them to open fire in self-defense- and the Brit government bitching to the UN and so forth, I remember a phrase I once heard. Compare this crap to the Royal Marines who strapped themselves onto the weapon wings on Apache choppers because it was the only way to try to rescue one of their own, and an old phrase rings true: "Lions, being led by mice".