Word: verdun
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Germans marched into deserted Paris on June 14. Reynaud fled to England, leaving the government in the hands of Marshal Henri Petain, 84, who was still revered as the man who had defended Verdun during World War I under the watchword, "They shall not pass." But on June 17 he asked Hitler for an armistice. Hardly noticed in the debacle was an appeal from London one day later by an obscure French general named Charles de Gaulle, who, in a speech that was to become the rallying cry for the Resistance, asked all Frenchmen to fight on under his leadership...
...Verdun-like trenches that divide the two villages, young men who used to play together now exchange obscenities across a narrow no man's land. Walid, a Druze fighter in Aytat, must crawl through a series of trenches to reach his home, from which he takes potshots at Suq al Gharb out of a carefully sandbagged upper-story window. Walid says of his six-year-old daughter, who has neatly twined pigtails and the only clean clothes in the house: "I will teach her to hate the Phalangists and how to kill them." Oscar, a Phalangist commander...
...Sergeant Mitterrand was shot in the chest, then captured by the Germans near Verdun. He felt his imprisonment in a Nazi P.O.W. camp was his "first real encounter with other men." He recalls: "At noon the Germans distributed tureens of rutabaga soup and loaves of bread. At first, it was the survival of the fittest-government by the knife. The first men to get hold of the soup or the bread served themselves, passing on no more than a few drops of dirty water to the others." After three months, however, camp leaders emerged to "cut the black bread into...
...President was born in 1916 in the small southwestern town of Jarnac, in the Cognac region. His active political career began with World War II. Shot in the chest and captured near Verdun, he escaped from a German prison camp and joined the Resistance as an organizer of former P.O.W.s. Shortly after the war, Mitterrand was elected to the National Assembly as a candidate for the Democratic and Socialist Union of the Resistance, a small but pivotal center party that won a surprising number of Cabinet posts under the Fourth Republic. Over a 13-year period, Mitterrand held eight Cabinet...
...peanut butter. Cuisinarts, Inc. of Greenwich, Conn., which sells processors of various sizes, priced from $100 to $260, had good reason to launch the commercial blitz. Its status as the Cadillac of kitchen cutters is being seriously challenged by Robot-Coupe, the French firm whose founder, Pierre Verdun, invented the machines...