Word: trenches
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...rebellion became a national crisis. On Oct. 5, 1897, a year after the first expedition, the last defenders of the village were killed. There were four of them, a boy, an old man, two grown men. They faced an army of 5,000 soldiers. They died in a trench which had also been dug to serve as a grave. When the soldiers stormed the trench they were paralyzed. "There before them, a tangible reality, was a trench of the dead, plastered with blood and running with pus. It was something beyond their wildest imaginings." The last defenders died at dusk...
...Germans struck on June 22, 1941, Red Army commanders were green. Their teamwork was bad. The Red Air Force (then being re-equipped with new models) was weak, tank tactics faulty. In the bitter days of retreat, Voronov found himself woefully short of the weapon his foe had aplenty-trench mortars. But his heavier guns fought with skill and stubborn valor: of the few thousand German tanks disabled in the first months of war, Voronov's guns wrecked every third...
Voronov virtually rewrote the artillery manual, changed commanders again & again. He preached constantly: reconnoiter thoroughly, camouflage tirelessly, do not fear close-range combat, do not fear encirclement. Stalin helped him out: a separate commissariat was set up to build trench mortars...
...three successive days the guns struck. Never before had so many cannon been fired at once; seldom had the devastation been greater. Into the huge gaps torn in the enemy defenses poured the waiting Russian tanks and men. Along with them went the "support artillery"-light field guns and trench mortars-to destroy what men survived the first barrage. Behind, the big guns rumbled...
...Thirty-one Marines are . . . laid out in a line. . . . Some are bloated, some have already turned a sickly green. Some have no faces, one's guts are hanging out of his body. The eyeballs of another have turned to a jellied mass." A bulldozer lumbers up, scoops a trench three feet deep; the bodies are pushed in and the bulldozer casually shoves the dirt back...