Word: sword
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Hands clasped over sword hilt, Admiral Gouton sat in the High Commissioner's office and ne bougeait pas. Unless the Allied commanders called on him first, he would not budge. General Georges Catroux, who commanded the Free French in the Syrian campaign, equally refused to make the first gesture. At last General Sir Henry Maitland Wilson, the Allied Commander in Chief, went in and got the Admiral to come out. When he left the building, trumpets flourished...
...even crippling her as she set out to raid Britain's supply lines would be a victory. It would be particularly pleasing to the Coastal Command of the R.A.F., for previously all the spectacular British torpedo-bombing had been done by the Fleet Air Arm with Fairey Sword-fishes-rickety biplanes trussed up with as many outside stays as grandma's corset. (These "string bags" nicked the French battleship Strasbourg as she fled from the Battle of Oran, had crippled three heavy units of the Italian Fleet at Taranto, slowed the Vittorio Veneto in the Battle of Matapan...
...must have thought of the Knights of the Sword and the Teutonic Knights, who Germanized the shores of the Baltic, where the Hohenzollerns were to found their Kingdom, and of Friedrich Wilhelm, the Elector of Brandenburg, who helped bring about the Treaty of Westphalia after the Thirty Years' War that reduced Germany to ruin. It was Friedrich Wilhelm who started the Hohenzollerns on the road to the leadership of Germany, and his son, Friedrich I, who persuaded the Holy Roman Emperor to style him King in Prussia. Of Friedrich's grandson, Frederick the Great, the Kaiser must have...
...refused to renew the Reinsurance Treaty with Russia, through which Bismarck had protected Germany's rear for adventures in Western Europe, and further alienated Russia by supporting Austria's annexation of Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1908. He blocked French seizure of Morocco for a while, rattled his sword at France...
Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox ordered an about-face for the eagles on the Navy's uniforms, having discovered that they had been violating heraldic law (by turning their backs on the sword arm) for more than 100 years...