Word: plain
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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Last week's staggering crises, diplomatic reversals, panics, had one plain effect on the Balkans. They sent citizens back to the simple nationalistic faith of their fathers like bombed refugees running for an air-raid shelter. Plain from Lake Balaton to the Black Sea, the trend was plainest in Hungary, where Hungarians had plenty of reasons for uneasiness: their...
...Europe, crisscrossed north and south as well as east and west by sworling mountain ranges, the theatres of war are limited with almost mathematical precision. Every great plain and basin in western and central Europe has been soaked in blood, every pass and gap and gateway has been powdered by the hobnails of marching men. Possession of the mountain bastions frequently determines just whose plains and basins are the site of bloodletting...
...master of Europe." What he meant to say was that so long as Germany controlled the Bohemian bastion it would be relatively easy to keep invaders from the east from carrying warfare into the South German Basin or out on to the north German reaches of the Baltic plain. Similarly, command of the heights on either side of the Rhine has a lot to do with whether a war between Germany and France is to be fought in front of Munich or in front of Paris...
...Germans outflanked the obstructive cuestas by slipping into the Paris Basin from the Flanders Plain, where the stony outcroppings tend to disappear. This Flanders Plain is an extension of the Baltic Plain that runs all the way from the North Sea to Russia. There Winston Churchill's great ancestor, the first Duke of Marlborough, won his victories of Ramillies (1706) and Malplaquet (1709). There the French under the great Marshal Saxe defeated the British and the Dutch at Fontenoy in 1745. There Waterloo was fought and Napoleon finally defeated in 1815. The Flanders Plain is protected to the East...
...Duke of Marlborough won his "famous Victory" in 1704-the victory over the French that so nonplussed the grandfather of Little Peterkin in Robert Southey's poem. To prevent a new war from being carried into the South German Basin or to the western end of the Baltic Plain the Nazis have built the Siegfried-or Limes-line. At its vital segment (between the Lorraine Gateway and Luxemburg) where the French might penetrate into the German concentration areas on the Rhine, this "line" is not a mere chain of forts, but a network organized in depth. A year...