Word: tatterdemalion
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...sprawling, creeping Chinese front is inching forward in the wake of the Japanese retreat much as a boy tiptoes through a haunted house, testing each plank as he treads. Behind this front, held by old tatterdemalion outfits, new armies and new weapons are being tooled to the future strategic pattern of the war in Asia. They are not yet in action and will not be for some time to come. In these months of grace it is the old army that is retracing the course of its great retreat last year, advancing in the same way it fled-tired, hungry...
...87th Division crossed the Moselle in as sault boats. Weak enemy, mortar and machine-gun fire soon died out, and later that day Coblenz was in U.S. hands. The Nazis began shelling the city from the Ehrenbreitstein fortress across the Rhine. Some 500 prisoners rounded up in Coblenz were tatterdemalion survivors of 15 or 20 different outfits. They were angry at SS troops who had scuttled for safety across the Rhine and blown up the bridges...
...dreamlike quiet in Madrid during which not a shot was heard another furious bombardment was launched in which correspondents counted a shell every ten seconds. Across the Straits of Gibraltar from Spanish Morocco, Generalissimo Franco rushed 14,000 more troops, some of them foreign volunteers and tatterdemalion striplings. In a few weeks he will sidetrack great numbers of troops to reap the July grain harvest if he wants his soldiers to have enough to eat this autumn...
Honduras. While tatterdemalion Christians sought refuge in the catacombs beneath Pagan Rome, the Mayas of Central America were spreading from city to city a glittering civilization. One such metropolis was Copan. Archeologists were at work there a half century ago, unearthing elaborately carved steles and sacrificial altars. Last year earthquakes rocked the region, sent some of the ruins tumbling into the Copan River. At the invitation of the Honduras Government, a commission from the Carnegie Institution of Washington arrived last month to undertake restoration and protection. Behind a collapsed wall Head Commissioner Gustav Stromsvik was startled to find stone staircases...
...case without trouble. But a number of the members [of the House] are afraid if I waive immunity they will be bothered in the future by charges for little things. . . ." Finally he changed his mind again and agreed to a trial by jury. A mob of long unpaid, tatterdemalion Chicago schoolteachers invaded big Chicago banks to demand cooperation between banks and the taxless school board. Melvin Alvah Traylor put them off with an "I agree with you." Charles Gates Dawes cowed them with: "To hell with trouble makers...