Word: majored
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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When they got back to the U.S. from the Philippines in 1945, Major Hans George Hornbostel was 64, his wife Gertrude was 54. World War II had treated them cruelly. Major Hornbostel, an ex-Marine officer who had been commissioned by the Army when war broke out, had fought on Bataan, had endured the infamous Death March and spent years in prison. Gertrude had spent three years as a prisoner in Manila amid the dreary terrors of Santo Tomas...
Actually, his story is too diffuse and impersonal to be read as an ordinary novel of character and situation. It is rather a chronicle of events, told through the actions of characters who themselves seldom understand and never control the events: British Major Michael Walker, who directs an Athens underground during the Nazi occupation; U.S. Airman Tommy McPhail, whose plane has been shot down over Greece and who wants to be gotten back to his base; royalists and Communists; patriots and plotters; Greek girls and English girls, and one calculating American number in a Red Cross uniform...
Train the Cadres. The book shuttles from one locale to another, from the headquarters of Major Walker's underground to the northern mountains where zealous Greek Communists train their cadres and build their armies, and back to the bloody streets of Athens...
...political maelstrom, personal lives veer crazily. In the underground days, for instance, Major Walker makes the Greek cause his own. At first, he disapproves of the stern British tactics against he Communist-liberal coalition, ELAS. He tries to argue with his superiors ("What are you after," a Brigadier asks, "a Greek army that reads the Statesman and Nation?"). But the major slowly suppresses his disapproval, just as he suppresses his feeling for Nitsa, the Greek girl who has worked beside him in the underground. As the civil war bleeds Greece, Walker's ife begins to seem flat and inadequate...
...Major Operation. In Rochester, Minn, police finally caught up with the man who dressed in a surgeon's gown, visited the hospital floors of the Kahler Hotel, told a patient to roll over, took $374 from his wallet and assured the victim: "Your back looks...