Word: afoot
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...wolf loose. Once four young cowpunchers rode their horses into a New Mexico saloon where an Eastern drummer was having a drink. When the drummer complained to the bartender that the horses jostled him, the bartender snorted, "What the hell y'u doin' in here afoot, anyhow?" When two friendly riders met on the trail, they stopped and sooner or later swung off their horses, squatted on their bootheels, began scratching in the dirt with broomweed stalks. "A cowhand kin jes' talk better when he's a-scratchin' in the sand like...
...Along the lanes and highroads, past the bare beech forests and the smooth slopes of the Downs, came the farmers of Sussex. Afoot and in wagons, they converged on Chichester Cathedral, whose distant spire was a grey needle against the sea. They filed into the famed early Norman church, packed it to the doors, and waited self-consciously. For the first time in 300 years, the British festival of Plough Monday was being celebrated...
...because Leyte Gulf was guarded by three sentinel islands. On A-minus-three,* company combat teams from an Army Ranger battalion landed from light, fast assault craft on Homonhon, Dinagat and Suluan. Jap communications were hamstrung but not completely destroyed. Tokyo got some kind of word that something was afoot, but apparently could not make up its mind that this was it. Field Marshal Count Juichi Terauchi, once the butcher of North China and now island commander in the Philippines, made no special preparations for resisting a major assault...
...Hoof and Wheel. The Japanese were there in force and they were mobile, ahorse, afoot and truck-fed. They could marshal superiority in numbers at any point they chose. They had a fifth column of diabolical proportions. In Kweilin, some said, General Kenji Doihara himself was directing the fifth column, but they were wrong. Behind the elbow of every soldier stood the fear of a traitor; the fifth column was among the refugee flood on southbound trains, collecting information, firing buildings, shooting at sight...
...rain fell endlessly. But somehow the word buzzed around Grenoble's streets : at 7 p.m. six Milice would be shot against a factory wall at the end of the Cours Berriat. By 6 o'clock the rain-drenched streets were jammed with people afoot, on bicycles, in trolleys and decrepit autos, hurrying toward the death scene...