Word: skies
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Dates: during 1920-1929
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They not only saw the Canal's defenses, but saw them in action, in a "war game" last week. Eleven Navy bombing planes played "enemy" against 25 Army defense planes under a torrid blue sky and at night, under a tropic moon. The "defenders" won. Threatening cruisers and submarines were "sunk" by shore batteries. "Invaders" landed troops, sweated through miles of jungle, reached locks along the Canal, but were finally "captured and killed." The Canal was saved...
...this short walk; others skittered sideways, excited by the sight of other horses, by the crowd (250,000) that showed like a dark ocean along the fences, washing up into a wave in the grandstand. It had been raining in the morning, but the rain had stopped; the sky was full of shifting clouds through which the sunlight shone in patches. Three times the horses, picked English, French, American jumpers, lined up and broke before the flag sent them away for the Grand National, the world's most famed steeplechase, run annually since 1839, near Liverpool, England...
...possible, something of an epic note. To do that there is no need of high-flown words or violent actions. Only a constant sense of the streaming generations, of the processes of historic change, of the true character of man's magnificent and tragic adventure between earth and sky...
...failure of the rebellion was the beginning of a tragic and surprising war; battles were fought under the smoky sky, fugitives hid in the soft stillness of the mountains. A succession of dark generals led their ebony soldiers to cruel and bewildering victories. Ugly Toussaint, who beat a Napoleonic army, was captured and sent far away to die. Clumsy Jean Jaques Dessalines made himself emperor of the black island and imported two ballet masters to teach him how to dance; before he had time to learn, a soldier murdered him. Henry Christophe, the billiard marker, during all this time...
Haiti is a quiet island again now, a place in which infinitely indolent, ill-natured Negroes move slowly about their business. It would be incredible that wars had ever been waged under that muffling sky, as heavy as a curtain, that a splendid emperor had ruled the ruinous country- were it not for the fortress which still stands up on the hilltop, a black fist against the sky, the citadel of Christophe, the monument of a man born no one knows where, mysteriously named, a slave and a king, whose enemies defeated him. There is a rumor that Christophe with...