Word: barkings
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...There were corpses on the road. A girl no more than 17, slim and pretty, lay on the damp earth, her lips blue with death; her eyes were open and the rain fell on them. People chipped at bark, pounded it by the roadside for food; vendors sold leaves at a dollar a bundle. Ghostlike men were skimming the stagnant pools to eat the green slime of the waters. Once our horses sheered off violently from two people lying side by side in the night, sobbing aloud in their desolation...
...Belem, mouth of the Amazon, the trekkers were treated to pep talks on the romance of the jungle, shown how to cut the bark of the hevea (rubber tree), and then pushed into the jungle. Disillusion came fast. The hevea did not grow in stands; sometimes the trees were miles apart. Dwellings were mostly mud huts which the men built themselves in tall forests through which the sunlight never entered. Flesh-eating piranha fish kept them from river baths. Snakes bit them. The atabrine that the U.S. sent down to combat malaria was stolen by middlemen...
...canker, ¼ in. in diameter, appears in the familiar fine-needle cluster of the white pine. The canker matures, in two to four years, into a festering blister, outlined by bile-green and pale yellow rings, exuding small drops of a yellow, poisonous fluid. Wherever this poison touches the bark, black or dark red scars appear. The following year these scars develop into new, white blisters, crammed with spores which the wind carries away for further propagation. The canker grows until the branch, and eventually the tree, sickens and dies...
...Italy, children with spidery legs and leathery skin stalked the streets, struck down by malnutrition (see MEDICINE). Greece, Yugoslavia and Poland were down to a two-weeks' supply of bread grains. In Germany, hungry burghers rooted through refuse; in some parts of China, mud, grass and tree bark were staple foods...
Between the implacable factions writhed the impotent moderates. Cried Chungking's independent Ta Rung Pao: "The corpses of those who have starved to death strew the roads. People eat grass roots and tree bark. . . . Troops are sucking the blood out of villagers. . . . Local officials are making their lives bitter. . . . What makes our hearts ache most is this: all China needs peace, without which we shall not survive. If ambitious persons insist on more adventures, we shall all perish...