Word: triumphale
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...Tunisian campaign was still at a stalemate (see below), but General Sir Bernard Law Montgomery continued to roll along the flat and ugly coast. Transport planes helped move up his vast and vital supplies. Last week, when his Eighth Army marched under the ludicrous triumphal Marble Arch near El Aghéila, one of several which Mussolini had erected along his African highway, he was farther west than any British commander had ever been before in the long, seesaw African campaign...
Behind the fleeing Germans and Italians was a littered trail: ledgers, military manuals, permits for furloughs, letters from home; tins of Danish hams, Norwegian herring, Dutch sausages, French wines, Munich beer; trumpets, tubas, drums (to be used in Rommel's triumphal procession into Alexandria) ; women's underwear, silk stockings, cosmetics; brandy and champagne; arms, cannon, machinery, tanks; trucks trapped by sudden rains that had turned the marshlands around Buqbuq into seas of mud. Beside the coast road lay the German dead, grey faces hidden by the peaked caps of the Afrika Korps. Beside them lay their Italian allies...
...pilots knocked down a convoying plane, killing his personal chef and personal barber. Loss of the barber was not so bad, since II Duce is as bald as a monkey's bottom, but loss of the cook was dismal. Then Rommel was stopped, and there could be no triumphal procession...
Pageants were enormously popular. In Philadelphia Charles Willson Peale whipped up a magnificent triumphal Peace Arch in 1783, groaning with symbols. It was to be illuminated by skyrockets and 1,000 candles, but it caught fire. Undaunted, Peale invented "an ingenious mechanism" for dropping a laurel wreath on the brow of George Washington, who had to put up with that sort of thing wherever he went. The launching of the Constitution was staged "with marine background scenery bordering on the marvelous, with a final climactic picture of Niagara Falls." In Americana and Elutheria Benjamin Franklin stepped out of lightning-forked...
...cure; so de la Falaise, Marquis de la Coudraye, in 1925, she became the first Hollywood actress to enter London and Paris society, which found her "less like an actress and more like a lady than you could imagine." Legend has it that Miss Swanson prefaced her triumphal return to Hollywood with the Marquis by telegraphing Paramount: "Am arriving with the Marquis tomorrow. Please arrange ovation." Gloria Swanson, single once again after her four marriages, has a busy and original mind, a reserved and dignified manner, and a vast store of kinetic energy. She has one eye on the potentialities...