Word: bafflements
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Last week, in utter bafflement, the Navy called off its search. A board of inquiry began to sift far-fetched theories and farther-fetched rumors. A peacetime mystery was as unfathomable as any the war had produced...
First Front. Russia was still the first front, massive and man-consuming. The Wehrmacht found no rest at the Dnieper, only more blood, battle and bafflement. The Red Army crunched through Zaporozhe, grappled fiercely for Gomel, Kiev and Melitopol, crashed through the German lines between the key cities, battered at the flank of the enemy's Dnieper loop, threatened with disaster his powerful forces in the Crimea...
Except among politicos, there was hardly any pre-election excitement at all. The light registration had long been noted; it was an axiom that this year voters were "apathetic." Whether it was really apathy, or some deeper discontent or bafflement, would be clearer after the results were...
Perhaps the "military idiots" of London and Washington were merely inciting Adolf Hitler to further rage and bafflement (see p. 23). Perhaps the Germans were merely inciting the Vichyfrench to open war on Hitler's side. Or perhaps the many signs of visible preparation last week meant what they seemed to mean: that the Allies, unwilling to risk a second front in Western Europe this year, were getting ready to move in Africa instead...
Contemplators of Land of the Free will probably rate it above Panic and The Fall of the City, But they will feel both worried and baffled. The bafflement they can blame on a hybrid art form that at least is earnestly ambitious, at worst is a humorless bollix. The worry they can blame on Poet MacLeish's extraordinary ability to hit topical points straight on the head with whatever instrument happens to come to hand. The conclusion they will probably draw is that Archibald MacLeish is so much of a poet that even his bad books make good points...