Word: verdun
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...year, draftees have been getting angrier and angrier and have even dared to demonstrate publicly. Just before the reforms were announced, 50 conscripts protested in Nancy during a conference organized by Young Communists to discuss conditions in the army. Several days later 150 soldiers, their fists clenched, marched through Verdun...
...German government consisted of "swine and cads." His attempt to recruit Irish soldiers captured by the Germans and dragoon them into fighting the British proved a wretched fiasco-and even his hosts showed their distaste for the notion of tampering with soldiers' loyalties. In the days of Verdun and Jutland, there were, after all, 250,000 Irish volunteers fighting on the Allied side. Casement nevertheless persuaded the Germans to ship arms to Ireland...
Indeed it had been. A group of grave robbers-who apparently crossed the Bay of Biscay to the He d'Yeu by auto ferry-had spirited away the coffin containing the body of Marshal Philippe Petain, who was revered by Frenchmen for stopping the Germans at Verdun during World War I and later reviled for heading the collaborationist Vichy government during World...
...bizarre theft occurred only two weeks before France's parliamentary elections, the caper had distinct political overtones. If Pétain's body were to be found before the elections, there would be considerable public clamor to bury it in the national military cemetery at Douaumont near Verdun; in 1971 a public-opinion poll, taken for the Bordeaux newspaper Sud-Ouest, showed that 72% of the French people favored such a move. The "nou-velle affaire Pétain," as the French were calling the caper, revived old political quarrels over the sensitive issue of national loyalties during...
...must have been the most intensive corpse hunt in history. Nearly half of France's 94,000-man police force was combing the country minutes after the disappearance of Petain's body was discovered. Roadblocks were set up on every highway leading from the Atlantic coast toward Verdun, where the culprits-who were presumed to be ultra-rightists-might be planning to bury the corpse. All trucks capable of hauling the 450-lb., zinc-lined oak coffin were stopped and systematically searched. Police also circled the sprawling cemetery at Douaumont, where workers dug up graves in which they...