Word: troop
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...Animals. In Antwerp, joyous burghers rounded up remaining Germans and collaborationists, stuck them in empty cages at the zoo-officers in the lion house, Belgian Fascists in the tiger pens, wailing women in the wildcat cages. The day before, a troop of flustered "Mice"-grey-clad German women auxiliaries-had piled their belongings on a truck, which then drove off. The truck was driven by members of Belgium's underground "White Brigade," would never reach the Reich...
...troop commander told the sergeant, the troop recorder, to be ready to burn his papers. One of the lieutenants looked over at the sergeant, quietly sorting documents into two piles on a table, and said: "It will be the first time this C.P. ever pulled out of any place...
Decision: Retreat. The troop commander put off the first retirement for two more hours. His tired old-young face, lean as a shell splinter, mirrored his doubt, his brief hope that he could hold, and finally his resolve to save what he had left for another day. He made that decision only after an infantryman from the fragile line near the town burst into the C.P. His face was bleeding slightly, his eyes were glazed. He could hardly talk until the troop medico had patched and soothed him. Then he said, still stammering, that German tanks had broken into...
...troop commander told his officers to pass the word to assemble the troop. The limping lieutenant, the tank commander, and the second in command followed him into the darkness. Only the sergeant was left in the room. "It's tough on them," he said. Soon the troop's armored cars, tanks and bantams (cavalry slang for jeeps), were rolling up the dark road, toward the rear. As we turned into the field where we would bivouac, the bearded sergeant said: "Well, it usually ends like this." He meant, not that it usually ended in retirement, but that...
That was all, except that the troop, promised a rest, got exactly half an hour of "rest," after they went into a rear area the next morning. When I last saw them, the column was on the road again, forming up for a counterattack in our valley...