Word: caves
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Near Bardia, a handful of fugitive Italians disappeared into a coastal cave. A British sergeant called a colonel from his swim, and while the colonel, clad only in his slippers, stood guard with revolver at the entrance, the sergeant wriggled into the cave, shooting. Out crawled the Italians, among them Francesco Argentina, erstwhile commander of Sidi Barrani, eleventh Italian general to be captured in the British attack on Libya. For three days the general went on a hunger strike, then ate, wailed: "For all I care about this desert, you can have it! I myself am a poet...
...from the north. That afternoon 15,000 of the Italians were in British hands, the rest "confined to a restricted area." The Rome radio warned the Italian people that Bardia was about to fall. The Italians no longer stood by their positions. Three thousand were taken out of one cave. Neither side's casualties were heavy...
They both had good English accents. They carried papers to prove that they were Dutch refugees from the Nazis, but they did not play the refugee game. They hid in a cave on a lonely stretch of coast, or slipped from dark barn to thick forest to empty warehouse, peeking, listening, taking notes. At night they crawled into lonely hedgerows, unpacked two small leather cases containing a wireless transmitter, and sent whatever they knew...
...believed buried in its ruins. A few gained the air-raid cellar and called frantically for aid over a still live telephone wire. Then the oil tanks of the central-heating plant exploded, bathing the rubble in flames. Nearly 100 prisoners saw the walls and ceiling of their cells cave in on them as the Doflana prison was shaken to the ground. Thousands of German troops. Iron Guardists, Rumanian soldiers and civilians worked frantically to extricate victims...
...Byron died at Missolonghi, Trelawny was not with him. He had met another "glorious being," a patriotic Greek outlaw named Odysseus, "a Bolivar who might become a Washington." They hunted bears and Turks together. Soon Trelawny (in a Greek kilt) was living with the Odysseus family in their mountain cave, had married Odysseus' half sister. But she was too fond of European fashions, and they parted. "Marriage," wrote Trelawny, "is a most unnatural state of things...