Word: trenches
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...this detracts from Chandler's ability to separate the amateur from the prose. Modern Russian literature is supposed to have tumbled from Gogol's overcoat; the American detective - from Ross MacDonald's Lew Archer to Gordon Parks' Shaft - enters in Philip Marlowe's trench coat. Even Dashiell Hammett's earlier fictions have not been so pervasive - largely, as Chandler noted, because "his writing has no echo and no tone." Chandler's does. The shady poetry of his similes ("I was as out of place as a tarantula on a wedding cake"), his metaphors...
...BLACK SOLDIER who was in the trench next to Michael when he was killed wrote to the Mullens and gave them insight into their son's character. "I was the only Black in our squad," Private Willard Polk from Detroit wrote, "and I can honestly say I heard the word Nigger enough to last me a lifetime. You see, I could talk with Michael, he didn't care if you was Black or White. He was a good guy and we both had a great deal of respect for each other...
...part of the Lawrence cult was the purity of his war. After the Somme, a new kind of battleground had been given to England: an open mass grave under a leaking sky, inhabited by shell-shocked troglodytes. The filth, stasis, boredom and despair that were the overmastering realities of trench warfare between 1914 and 1918 destroyed the chivalric picture of conflict. That picture survived in only two arenas. One was the sky, where the Royal Flying Corps, the "knights of the air" in their gyring Sopwiths, preserved the image of man-to-man conflict. The other was Arabia. On that...
...past or dive beneath or ride up over each other. The majority of quakes-and volcanic eruptions-in Central America are caused by the movement of the Cocos Plate, a section of the Pacific floor that tends to move northeastward and slides beneath Central America at a deep oceanic trench just off its west coast...
There are problems with The Great War, however. First is Fussell's overriding assumption that the current idea of the Great War--of miserable trench warfare in Northern France and Belgium--must set the parameters for the work. This is almost tautological, because Fussell is trying to prove that this current idea emerged out of the war. Fussell also tends to concentrate on how the officers, the gentlemen warriors of WWI, saw things. He does refer to "what the ordinary man has to say about it all," but this is submerged beneath his emphasis on the literary effete...