Word: bamboos
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...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...
...brought to western China-a wilderness before they arrived-medical facilities, new manners, new dress, new farming methods, reading and writing (since 1938 nearly 50,000,000 Chinese have been taught to read and write). Their students, of whom a third are entirely supported by the Government, live in bamboo and mud huts, 16 boys or eight girls sleeping in a single room. They eat boiled cabbage, bean soup, a few other vegetables, often suffer from acute undernourishment. They do their own laundry, are awakened by bugles at 5 a.m. in order to make the most of daylight, save electricity...