Word: madman
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Last week the Americans broke down one stubborn fortress, secured a minor port. Stiff-backed Colonel Andreas von Auloch, the "madman of Saint-Malo," finally surrendered. Begrimed (but with boots shining), proud of their stand (but reeling after a farewell bout with the bottle), the Germans gave up after eleven days of pounding. Before they marched out of their tunneled redoubt the Germans freed seven U.S. prisoners. The Americans had been treated well, had scarcely noticed the air bombardments in the four-story-deep granite fortress...
...remained were a ragtag little army of cooks, truck drivers, sailors, punishment platoons. But their commander was a man obsessed: tall, grey Colonel Andreas von Auloch. He had been at Stalingrad, had seen the Russians turn that siege to victory. Captured Germans said he was a madman, added that his wife and children had been killed in a Berlin bombing...
...madman's hopeless situation: there was no escape. But he was in a seagirt fort, approached only over a narrow bottleneck of land. The Americans had battled past Saint-Malo's ancient walls and towers, past modern pillboxes to this last fort, set 50 feet deep in the granite, crisscrossed with underground tunnels...
...searchlight bridge opens up now, and the wallowing hulk of the U-boat is clearly outlined in the glare. It shudders and rocks as the three-inch shells pour into it at the water line. Everybody on the cutter is yelling like a madman. Up forward you can see the Negro crew of number five gun, working like a machine, and grinning all the while. They throw the shells into the gun in a steady stream-the fastest gun crew on the cutter. And their lips move as they pour hot steel into the submarine. They're singing...
Pundits' Praise. By this time many a pious Hindu, including the two most famed pundits of the time-Gauri and Vaishnavcharan-declared that this walking pantheon was himself an Incarnation of God. Other pious folk thought him a madman. His strange acts while in trance varied from imitating a monkey to feeding Kali's food to a cat. Later he made fun of people who proclaimed his divinity by pointing to his left arm, which he had broken in a trance, and saying, "Have you ever heard of God breaking...