Word: gumbo
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...cold, dismal rain drips steadily on American infantrymen slogging through the mud. Snow caps the high hills. On roadsides, in vineyards and olive groves of "sunny Italy," troops snatch much-needed rest. Punch-drunk with weariness, shoulders hunched against the chill wetness, they sit with their feet in the gumbo. Hot coffee is a Waldorf luxury. Wood is too wet to burn. When some anonymous genius discovered that the two wrappings around the K rations would burn just long enough to heat a canteen-cup of coffee, he won the soldiers' undying gratitude...
Armistice. In September 1918, Colonel George C. Marshall, Chief of Operations for the First Army, finished the planning. On the 12th the First Army attacked along the salient at St. Mihiel. By the end of October the whole Meuse-Argonne front was aflame. In the gumbo mud of France 117,000 men of the First Army were dead or wounded. The German army was in retreat. On Oct. 30 Pershing wrote: "We should . . . continue the offensive until we compel [Germany's] unconditional surrender...
Skillful German rearguards fitted the rains into the pattern of delaying action. Mines under the firm roads forced Allied columns to flounder in the gumbo beside the highways. Demolition charges toppled bridges into angry streams. Shielded by low clouds from strafing planes, the rear guards huddled in orchards and behind stone walls, sniped viciously with rifle, machine gun and mortar...
...scores of muddy British airdromes, pilots of the U.S. Army Air Forces glowered at the grey sky that fingered down into the feathery treetops. On puddled runways ground crews tested, adjusted and retested the four motors of their B-17s. Navigators, bombardiers and gunners sloshed through the sticky gumbo to ground classes, listened to daily lectures on the fine points of aerial combat. In the long English twilight, which lasts until 11 p.m. in the summer, airmen lazed around the stove-warmed Nissen huts, playing blackjack and cursing the conditions which kept them idle...
...guest room and two lieutenants in the garage. Editor Mat Jones put up a captain and his wife: "We just gave them the run of the house and we got along fine." A Negro couple boarded three Negro officers. A month of rain turned the ground to sticky gumbo; it became regulation for the soldiers to take off their muddy shoes before entering a house. "They're real gentlemen," the townspeople said. Gatesville gave the auditorium for lectures on tank warfare and women ran the high-school cafeteria for the soldiers. In return, the grateful visitors entertained Gatesville...