Word: underground
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They burrowed underground like gophers, into damp shelters and subways where they slept on hard benches, on concrete floors or sitting upright like yogis. Those who had worked hard all day slept most easily. Chief bores were oldsters, who kept others awake chattering about the raids, and all those, young & old, who snored. Official "shelter shakers" moved about waking the snorers; and apartment-house porters became self-appointed Admirable Crichtons, supervising sleeping arrangements, moving furniture, brewing...
...most dreaded scourge, pestilence, yet appeared. Germany claimed that influenza raged in London, that millions of rats swarmed the centre of the city. But the colds that came from sleeping underground were not influenza, and the rats had been there always. Most feared epidemic was typhoid, from water contamination after bombing of water mains and reservoirs, but the germination period of typhoid is almost two weeks, and London had been steadily bombed for only nine days at week...
Immediate ancestors of the Tristan myth were the troubadours of Provence. They were Albigensians, heretics, and their songs, their protocols of courtly love, were simply the elaborate double-talk of a theology driven underground. With them, in the 12th Century, passion took root in Europe. Thence sprang the whole of European literature, the whole shape and vocabulary of European mysticism, the whole ferocious timbre of European war fare, the whole possibility of such megalomaniacs as Hitler, the whole suffering wreckage of European love and marriage. De Rougemont believes there is an almost universal schizophrenia, a tide rip created in millions...
Insurrection, said Lenin, is an art. He did not add that the technique of insurrection is conspiracy. But Lenin taught his eager Bolsheviks that, besides every well-behaved, "legal" Communist Party, they must organize an "illegal," underground Communist Party. Its function, like the submerged three-quarters of an iceberg, would be to destroy in secret. Apt students of the Bolshevik art of conspiracy, as Hitler told Hermann Rauschning, were the Nazis. Soon Nazi Alfred Rosenberg modeled his foreign section of the Nazi Party after the foreign section of the Communist International. Soon Heinrich Himmler modeled his Gestapo after Russia...
...England: Indian Summer opens sombrely with America's Tragic Era, 1865. The Civil War - "Mrs. Stowe's war," Lincoln liked to call it - was won. The great and near-great figures of New England's flowering had been up to their transcendental ears in Abolitionism and underground railroading. But with the thrill of victory came a chill realization that it was not the same country. It was not even quite the same New England. The slave power was gone, but the bankers remained. Most of the young men were dead or gone West. The New England mind...