Word: battlefield
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Shades of Red. Ten days after its capture, Danang appeared to be returning to normalcy. Stores were open and cinemas were operating, featuring such Hanoi potboilers as The Revered Flag and Battlefield in Quang Due. North and South Vietnamese currencies were both in circulation, but the black-market value of Hanoi's dong increased daily against Saigon's piaster. Looters sold rice from government storehouses and motorbikes and boats left behind by those who had fled. Such enterprise stopped abruptly when Communist soldiers shot ten looters and led others away with hands bound...
...vein of self-contempt-sometimes but not always playful-runs throughout the book. Clark speaks of "the evasions and half-truths" encouraged by the lecture form. Reviewing his decision to become a museum director, he concludes: "I took the wrong turning." The London art world he compares to "a battlefield at nightfall," and seems to despise himself for surviving it: "I learnt adaptability and what is known in boxing as footwork...
...surrounded by the highway signposts, the concrete dividers and huge green directional signs, we could only imagine the blood-soaked land we were passing through. Still, certain places with history caught us in their web so that we experienced more than our seatbelted cocoon. Just beyond Chattanooga was the battlefield of Chickamagua, where my great-great-grandfather was killed in 1863, leading his unit of a Wisconsin Norwegian regiment...
Agreed: the hero, Captain Bluntschli, does load his revolver with chocolates and does flee the battlefield when the Bulgarian army mounts a charge, but this is not comedy, this is the natural response of a reasoning man to the horrors of war. How opposed to the flatulent conceits of the Bulgarians, for whom heroism is embodied by bewhiskered Sergei Saranoff leading the harebrained charge, and for whom "higher love" is typified by the couple that coos and clutches effusively. Yet in spite of the laughter still echoing in the theater--for this is a funny play--Bluntschli wins out soberly...
Sergius is an awesome assertion of a man with an uncompromising attachment to his heroic and romantic fustian. Rather than concede that his "higher love" for Raina is just or that his battlefield maneuvers are empty-headed, the idealist Sergius breaks down and crows cynically that the world is a hollow sham and life a farce. As Sergius, Timothy Cunningham and his perpetual scowl of a face execute the finest performance in the Loeb production. Cunningham brings to the role a pair of eyes that the properties manager could only have obtained from a ping-pong table...