Word: train
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Victory by '52? In July, impelled by De Lattre's drive, the Viet Nam government decreed total mobilization. All men between 20 and 45 were subject to military draft. The machinery to train a national army was already in operation. De Lattre proposed to use the 60,000 Vietnamese who have been fighting in the French army, as a seasoned nucleus. He set up schools for Viet Nam officers (good Vietnamese officers are rare). By year's end, he hopes the Viet Nam army will be 120,000 strong; how good it will be is another question...
...Asch Express pulled out of Prague's Woodrow Wilson Station at 9:55 one morning last week, Conductor August Beb. his paunch taut but official in his brass-buttoned uniform, walked slowly through the train to see that all was in order. His train was not a big one: a baggage car and three coaches with 100-odd passengers. And there were two baskets of fruit he was supposed to deliver at the Asch station. For a veteran Communist who had spent years studying Marxism, the run was not much to look forward to. Beb often complained to friends...
There were other passengers that Conductor Beb might have been interested in. At Eger, Truksa's wife got on. He pretended not to know her. At other stops along the line, more people boarded the train, including the wife and children of Engineer Jaroslav Konvalinka, up ahead in the cab. Some of the new passengers seemed nervous. Two or three sat down in Truksa's compartment, others near by. A few, as if by accident, sat down near the hand brakes...
...Franzensbad, Truksa got out to stretch his legs on the platform. At the same time Engineer Konvalinka got down from his cab and slipped between the tender and the baggage car, shutting off the airbrake line (this meant that no one would be able to stop the train by pulling the emergency brake). As Konvalinka got back into his cab and started the train, Truksa followed him into the cab. He whipped out his pistol and trained it on the fireman, a Communist, and ordered him to lie face down on the floor...
...train was approaching Asch, its last stop. But instead of slowing down, it picked up speed. On the Asch station platform, baggage men watched wide-eyed as the locomotive, a 3-ft.-high Red Star on the front of its boiler, roared toward them. "I pushed the throttle all the way forward," Konvalinka said later...