Word: basin
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...Europe, crisscrossed north and south as well as east and west by sworling mountain ranges, the theatres of war are limited with almost mathematical precision. Every great plain and basin in western and central Europe has been soaked in blood, every pass and gap and gateway has been powdered by the hobnails of marching men. Possession of the mountain bastions frequently determines just whose plains and basins are the site of bloodletting...
Bismarck once said: "Whoever is master of Bohemia is master of Europe." What he meant to say was that so long as Germany controlled the Bohemian bastion it would be relatively easy to keep invaders from the east from carrying warfare into the South German Basin or out on to the north German reaches of the Baltic plain. Similarly, command of the heights on either side of the Rhine has a lot to do with whether a war between Germany and France is to be fought in front of Munich or in front of Paris...
...Germans outflanked the obstructive cuestas by slipping into the Paris Basin from the Flanders Plain, where the stony outcroppings tend to disappear. This Flanders Plain is an extension of the Baltic Plain that runs all the way from the North Sea to Russia. There Winston Churchill's great ancestor, the first Duke of Marlborough, won his victories of Ramillies (1706) and Malplaquet (1709). There the French under the great Marshal Saxe defeated the British and the Dutch at Fontenoy in 1745. There Waterloo was fought and Napoleon finally defeated in 1815. The Flanders Plain is protected to the East...
...artistic beauties than because it showed: "Columbia sitting aloft on a Barge of State, heralded by Fame at the prow, oared by the Arts and Industries, guided by Time at the helm, and drawn by seahorses of Commerce. . . . Horns of Plenty pour their abundance over the gunwales. . . . In the basin of the fountain four pair of seahorses, mounted by riders who represent Modern Intelligence, draw the barge, while babes and mermaids disport themselves in the surrounding spray...
...some $5,000,000 for the reconstruction. Law forbids them to erect it on the grounds of the Capitol or the Library of Congress, and, thanks to an amendment by Congressman John Costello of Hollywood, they will not be able to set it down in the Tidal Basin, or in the reflecting pool before Lincoln's austere memorial. But there are lots of other conspicuous places in Washington...