Word: ramrodded
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...gaunt, impassive Marine staff sergeant snapped to ramrod attention before the officers at the court-martial table, the little sounds of restlessness in the green-walled auditorium fell off to dead silence. There was tension in the sultry air, for the court had stayed out for a seemingly endless four hours of deliberation. Now the fans whirred softly overhead, and sweat glistened on the faces of most of the spectators...
...Carnegie Hall (a mere coincidence, he insists-"I hate anniversaries"). In that half century he has grown from a prodigy to a musical playboy to a great artist with the broadest popular following of any front-rank musician in the world. The compact dignity of his entrances, his ramrod back and frizzled grey crown, his highhanded hammering of the keyboard are known and loved wherever there are pianos...
When Hoover and 2,500 other citizens left the tomb* after the annual ceremony, stillness descended on the scene, broken only by the precise footfalls of the ramrod-stiff sentry on his everlasting guard: he took 29 paces before the tomb, halted, about-faced, and resumed his march...
...passion to save her, some of these attitudes were understandable at the time. But to be suffering from niggling suspicions and intransigeance more than a decade later suggests that De Gaulle either has not consulted the record of the war now available or prefers to keep unbent the ramrod that seems always to have extended from his back through his mind. The Call to Honour carries the De Gaulle story only to mid-1942, but the tone is set, and it is as annoying as it is undoubtedly sincere. Even a hero's worshipers must be embarrassed to hear...
More than once Alexander Papagos had rescued his country from political dissension. A ramrod-backed cavalry officer, he was educated at a Belgian military academy and first served his King and country in the Balkan War, curtain raiser to World War I. A royalist to the tip of his long, aristocratic nose, he went into exile in 1918 after King Constantine was deposed, but a couple of years later came back as a staff officer. After taking part in the campaign against Turkey, he was bounced from the army for joining a plot to restore the monarchy under George...