Word: verdun
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...define the psyche and sensibilities of a people for decades -- until the next one rewrites memories and reshapes character. The legacy of World War I defined the Western peoples for 20 years. The sense of order, optimism and patriotism that marked the Edwardian age died in the trenches of Verdun. In their place arose the pacifism, the nihilism, the psychic cubism...
...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...
...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...