Word: niles
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...last summer General Sir Archibald Percival Wavell called three of his officers into the Cairo headquarters of the Imperial Army of the Nile. He was worried about rumored Italian plans to slice in through the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan from southeastern Libya. But to get firsthand accounts of Italian troop and supply dispositions meant a hazardous trek of over 1,000 miles across rocky, dune-ribbed desert. The three men before him jumped at the job. For ten years they had made a sport of just such traveling, spending their vacations exploring the Sahara. Within six weeks they had trained...
Whether or not the battle which was in progress last week would be remembered in history above the great battles of Lord Nelson-the Nile (1798), which broke Napoleon's Oriental ambitions, and Trafalgar'(1805), which limited his ambitions in Europe-remained to be seen. Those affairs exposed the marrow of British power. One summer evening at Abukir Bay, after a maddening two months' search in which his fleet had been without benefit of speedy frigates for scouting, Nelson with his 14 ships of the line came on the fleet of 15 Frenchmen at anchor. Moving down...
Nelson received a head wound at the Nile which he was convinced was mortal. But he survived for Trafalgar seven years later. There, just west of Gibraltar, 27 British ships bore down on 33 of the enemy in two columns, one led by Admiral Cuthbert Collingwood Collingwood, the other by Nelson himself aboard his 100-gun flagship Victory. Nelson flashed his famous signal: "England expects every man to do his duty." Collingwood struck the enemy's rear, Nelson the centre. The British lost no ships, in the end captured or destroyed 22 of the Frenchmen. Nelson himself was mortally...
...kept nibbling at U. S. trade in the Mediterranean. William Eaton, a Connecticut schoolteacher, and Presley O'Bannon, a lady-loving, fiddle-playing marine, raised an army of eight marines, 38 Greeks, 91 Arabs, a few footmen, cavalry, and camel drivers, and planned a fantastic march from the Nile across 500 miles of desert to subdue the Barbary pirate chief at Dérna. They actually made the march and took the town. Presley O'Bannon was the first man to raise the U. S. flag on African soil...
...must classify it, call it a philosophy." Geography, Peattie thinks, nudged mankind into history. The human mind had to evolve to meet ice-age problems of finding shelter, food, defense, and has probably not progressed since the great glacier withdrew. Then nomadic men settled in the grasslands of the Nile, Euphrates, Yangtze, etc., to become tillers and develop cultures. Out of the nomadic, pastoral life of the early Jews grew the symbolism of their religion and of Christianity-e.g., "The Lord is my Shepherd, I shall not want...