Word: verdun
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When the war began, Romains had finished eight volumes of his novel (16 in the French edition). Published in December 1939 was Verdun, a merciless account of World War I slaughter, and a harrowing picture of inhuman French officership...
Early in World War I Manstein was severely wounded. On recovery he fought at Verdun, drew attention by his energy, will power, harshness. He remained with the army after defeat, served on the hush-hush postwar General Staff, helped to build up the Wehrmacht for the war of revenge...
Ernie Mott's middle name is Verdun, because his tosspot, philandering artist father was killed at Verdun in World War I. Ernie's mother keeps a secondhand furniture store, lends money and receives stolen goods on the side. Ernie is apprentice to a lithographer, is fired for laziness and ineptitude, becomes a hanger-out at the Fun Fair, a penny arcade replete with peep shows, pinball games, shooting gallery and a change girl named Ada -"a proper, right, straight up smasher of a bride" with yellow hair, red fingernails and a close-fitting sweater...
...husky, keen-faced, long-nosed man, he is one of the Red Army's ablest tacticians. His myaso-roobka (meat-grinder) concept has dominated Soviet military thought since 1941, has bled Germany white of her young manhood. Sokolovsky's antidote for Blitzkrieg is slow, continuous grinding, a Verdun multiplied a hundredfold. The advance on Smolensk delights him; only two years ago he had trod this very road in retreat...
...wonderful but far more typical The Little American, in which German soldiers battered at the stateroom doors of the foundering Lusitania in their eagerness to get at U.S. Red Cross nurses. Such films were reportedly shown on hospital ceilings and in rude theaters 90 ft. under the blasts of Verdun. It is hardly surprising that veterans turn up, now & then, who remember dugouts gratefully named Keystone Kottage, Vitagraph Village...