Word: waterous
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Spring Water. It began when the House Un-American Activities Committee sat down with Chambers in closed session to hear the proof of his friendship with Hiss. Chambers' new testimony showed an amazing knowledge of Alger Hiss's private life. With meticulous precision, Chambers described the interior of three houses and one apartment occupied by Hiss. He remembered a car Hiss had once owned-an old jalopy with a hand-operated windshield wiper. He recalled that Mrs. Hiss,* like himself, was a Quaker. Once, said Chambers, Hiss had told him a boyhood story of using a child...
Early in October 1944, the British bombed the Dutch island of Walcheren (pop. 60,000), which is largely below sea level. When the bombs fell, "the dikes bowed their straight backs like animals rearing in fright . . . Suddenly the water began to move across Walcheren. It billowed in through the front door of Flushing and the side door of Westkapelle; through the back door of Veere it ran out . . . Now the air photos grew daily more satisfactory. Dozens of red circles were marked in the gray. Each circle stood for a group of enemy pillboxes. On each new photograph a dozen...
...spring tide, 1,364,000,000 gallons of sea water poured in, flooding the island's 45,000 acres. By November the island was cleared of the enemy, but the sea water had washed between trees and over hedges, slapped against the wallpaper in the lower rooms of houses, carried away chairs and cradles...
...this drowned world the Dutch water engineers prepared to rebuild the dikes and dry the land behind them. It was calculated that the work had to be completed before November 1945 or the damage to the island would be permanent. To accomplish it, the engineers started with four rowboats, three cars, eight horse-carts, twelve hand shovels, two wrenches, and a few hundred laborers. They succeeded...
...characterizations of the engineers and contractors and dike workers are not in themselves of sufficient interest to carry the story, and the depersonalized project, impressive as an example of courage and tenacity, turned out in detail to be just hard work. But some of the processes of the water workers-especially the fascine workers, who lace brushwood mattresses to be spread like skin on the ocean floor, to prevent the channels from deepening-make absorbing reading. And some of the glimpses of daily life in the occupation and after the liberation have a matter-of-fact, unexciting acceptance of hazard...