Word: bamboos
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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From Scratch. The Red Cross Corps had to start literally from scratch, for the entire army was infested with lice, and lice carry typhus and relapsing fever. Bamboo delousing stations have been set up all over China. Many hospitals have no sterilizers, so the doctors use clay pots; surgical instruments are beaten out of old knives. Modern operating tables cost at least $200, but Chinese doctors now build useful tables out of bamboo for ten cents. Only the most essential drugs are used, and often surgeons must operate without anesthetics. But they try to practice 1941 medicine. At present they...
...open spaces around the great naval airfield at Surabaya, Java, are set with bamboo stakes, about waist high, their tops whittled razor-sharp. A visiting journalist recently asked what they were for. The commander of the base explained that they were designed as an unpleasant reception for parachutists, and added: "When Holland first fell and we were very excited we put poison on the tips of all these stakes...
...story out of Paris, where university students have been forbidden to stage any kind of demonstration against the German occupation. One demonstration which the Germans did not understand was put on by 1,000 students marching up the Champs Elysées behind leaders carrying two 14-foot bamboo poles. Every time the leaders raised the poles the students cried "Vive!" The French word for pole is gaule. Two poles is deux gaudes, or De Gaulle...
Nanking University, now moved some 900 miles west to Chengtu, has faced similar problems. Its organizers have taught thousands of refugee peasants to help themselves and China by training them to work portable bamboo spinning wheels, spin wool yarn for army blankets. Only outside materials the program needs are steel for spindles and aluminum for spinning forks. These come from shot-down Japanese airplanes. Thus far the supply of metal has been quite adequate...
...politics, where short French soldiers laughed with not quite proper young ladies at the Cercle Sportif Français, where Russian princes turned barbers and German barbers turned princes. It became a city of American complexion-of skyscrapers, streetcars, movie houses, as foreign to China as a city of bamboo huts and Buddhist temples would be on the marshes of the Chesapeake...