Word: verdun
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...asylum. A year ago. Jean Clement, 62, owned a 600-acre farm in Algeria. Today he is a grocer in Montpellier on the verge of bankruptcy. Complaining that his store is boycotted because he is a pied-noir (European of Algeria), Clement says angrily: "My father was killed at Verdun. I helped liberate France in 1944. I'm as good a Frenchman as anyone in Montpellier, but the animosity of the local population is terrible...
...conduct of the referendum (probably in June) in which Algerians are expected to vote overwhelmingly for "independence in cooperation with France." A rotund bon vivant as fluent in French as Arabic, Fares comes from a Berber family (his father was killed fighting with the French army at Verdun in World War I), and at 25 became the first Moslem notary public in Algeria. After the rebellion began in 1954. the French government sent Fares on a lecture tour of the U.S., where he proclaimed Algeria's deep attachment to France. With his Berber wife and three children. Fares moved...
Died. Berthe-Eugénie-Alphonsine Hardon Pétain, 84, stoic widow of France's Marshal Henri Philippe Pétain; after a long illness; in Paris. Married to Pétain at the height of his World War I glory as the defender of Verdun, Mme. Pétain dutifully shared his World War II ignominy as chief of the puppet Vichy regime, after his postwar sentence for treason followed him to the tiny Ile d'Yeu, where she was his only visitor during six years of solitary confinement, and upon his death in 1951 persuaded...
...Christ says one has to turn the other cheek. For me, if a man strikes me on the cheek, I knock his head off." Nikita's preference for knocking heads became clear after a visit to Douaumont, where thousands of the French and German soldiers who fell at Verdun in World War I are buried. As French Minister of State Louis Jacquinot launched into a polite speech recalling the sacrifices France has made in repelling "invaders," Nikita cut in: "Name them, name them! Who invaded you?" Seizing the microphone, he went on: "I have not had the background...
...chief engineer in Ferdinand de Lesseps' unsuccessful earlier attempt to build a Panama Canal. President Roosevelt gave tacit support to a Panamanian revolution against Colombia. The U.S.-backed plot succeeded; Bunau-Varilla (who went on in later years to lose a leg in an air raid near Verdun) suddenly became Panamanian Minister...