Word: mistral
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Dates: during 1940-1940
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Down from the bald crags of France's "azure coast"-between Nice and Marseille-blows the angry mistral. It is a strong, dry wind, so bitter that it burns like cold steel...
Plugging along at a good clip, with a night mistral lashing her buttocks, the Italian motor ship Orazio last week made for Barcelona. She lay 38 miles south of Toulon. Below decks slept 412 passengers -an aviator with his two small children, four nuns warm in their cotton gowns, the noble counselor of the Italian Embassy in Chile, merchants, soldiers, teachers, tourists. On the bridge the petty officers mumbled against French wind, and against the French contraband authorities who had detained the Orazio four hours to search her and take off some Germans. Captain Michele Schiano was a happy...
Following the distress signals, Italian naval planes, flying across the mistral, found the Orazio, gave her position to several nearby vessels. But it was late afternoon before the first reached her. By that time she was a furnace in the wind-passengers later swore that from the lifeboats they could see her ribs silhouetted and the sea boiling against her red-hot plates...
...four nuns. Rescued passengers grimly described how those who had obeyed orders and gone to the saloon were trapped and burned, how a mother, clothes afire, leaped overboard, how a lifeboat was swamped by the seas. Some in scant night clothes died of exposure to icy spray and mistral...