Word: commandeering
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...minute village of Fenghwa in Chekiang Province. After running away from being apprenticed to a merchant he managed to win a military scholarship and embraced the career of arms under the doomed Dragon Throne. When patriotic bombs began to pop, Chiang Kai-shek (then a stripling of 24) secured command of a revolutionary brigade in Shanghai and lived for several months the gay life of a looter, profligate ?drunken and debauched. Suddenly he cut short this spree and when convivial friends assembled to remonstrate he cried: ''You are my friends! My friends? Bah! I have given up your kind...
...keenest brains which a coalition of Northern War Lords could fling against him in a Death struggle to retain their power. This part of Chiang's saga should be told at epic length, for it was marked by heroic vicissitudes. At one time, sorely defeated, the Generalissimo resigned his command and retired to his native village (TIME, Aug. 22, 1927). Within a few months he had cheered up, married a sister of the surviving widow of Dr. Sun Yatsen, and was seen victoriously back in the fray. Just as Russia had supplied the cash and propaganda to assist Chiang...
...hero of Podunk is completely obscured at West Point! And in him, perhaps, is born the realization that he is important only as one of the Corps; that he must be a part of the team or not play at all that he must learn subordination of self to command...
...Command Performance celebrates one of those witty romances which occur constantly even at this late era in Moldavia, a non-existent country. An actor rescues a lady, assailed by ruffians in the street. One of the ruffians is the decadent Prince of Moldavia; the actor is arrested and haled before the queen...
...this has been done a thousand times before; generally, however, with boots, spurs, duels, serious passions. The Command Performance is modern romance, feathery, sophisticated. The queen smokes cigarets; the King of Wallachia abuses his wife, as does Lord Trench in The High Road; the actor, played well by Ian Keith, kisses the queen's hand in farewell and then pats it with affection; the prince, played less well by Ian Keith, sets off for the U. S. to make his living, one suspects, in a night club...