"Sapper" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... shell landed and knocked their home into ruins. They were preparing to dig for their kit and so much of their dinner as would still be eatable. As they took the whole matter as a joke, I joined with them in the laugh. One day as I was going up the line, a young sapper was carried out on a sitting stretcher. He was hit through the chest, and all the way along the bath mats was the trail of the poor boy's blood. He was only nineteen years of age, and had done splendid work ...
— The Great War As I Saw It • Frederick George Scott
... officers could be given a seven weeks' training at Chatham; little enough, "for a man supposed to know the use and repairs of telephones and telegraphs, or the way to build or destroy a bridge, or how to meet the countless other needs with which a sapper is called upon to deal!" Increasing attention was paid to staff training and staff courses. And insufficient as it all was, for months, the general results of this haphazard training, when the men actually got into the field—all short-comings and disappointments admitted—were ...
— Towards The Goal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... repressed, and they were clamorously insisting on being led against the ramparts and the towers, when without warning a heavy fusillade began from the windows and the clock tower of the Capuchin monastery. M. Massin, a municipal officer, was killed on the spot, a sapper fatally wounded, and twenty-five of the National Guard wounded more or less severely. The Protestants immediately rushed towards the monastery in a disorderly mass; but the superior, instead of ordering the gates to be opened, appeared at a window above the entrance, and ...
— Massacres Of The South (1551-1815) - Celebrated Crimes • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... emptying itself into the Orontes at a point a little to the north, formed a natural defence for the town on the west. Its encompassing walls, slightly elliptic in form, were strengthened by towers, and surrounded by two concentric ditches which kept the sapper at a distance. ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 4 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... the President from General Hooker's camp to the review of General Reynolds' corps, a ride had to be taken in a six-mule ambulance. Either not knowing the rank of his passenger, or being a teamster, which in our army replaces the French sapper for rudeness, the driver showered as many oaths of the largest caliber—fire and fury signifying nothing—as snaps of the long cowhide. Lincoln, who had known the genus in the clay of the West, kept his eye on him while leaning out of the window. In an interval when ...
— The Lincoln Story Book • Henry L. Williams
... story in his soft Somersetshire accent, just the plain tale of the fate that has overtaken thousands of our fellow-countrymen since the war began. His name was Maggs, Sapper Ebenezer Maggs, of the Royal Engineers, and he was captured near Mons in August, 1914, when out laying a line with a party. With a long train of British prisoners—"zum of 'em was terrible bad, zur, dying, as you might ...
— The Man with the Clubfoot • Valentine Williams
... dried her tears, furnished her first floor, caught her innocent boy to her maternal bosom, and put the bill up in her parlor window. Did it remain their long? No. The serpent was on the watch, the train was laid, the mine was preparing, the sapper and miner was at work. Before the bill had been in the parlor window three days—three days, gentlemen—a being erect upon two legs, and bearing all the outward semblance of a man, and not of a monster, knocked at the door of Mrs. Bardell's house. He inquired within; he took the lodgings; ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick
... an automobile to-day to Versailles, and thence to Buc with its red brick aerodrome tower, sheds, and long rows of hangars. Here were groups of airmen in the rough, serviceable French sapper uniform—loose-fitting blue coat, blue trousers with a double red stripe, blue flannel scarf about their necks, as if they had all got sore throats, and blue pointed forage caps. Here is Chevillard, that wonderful gymnast of the air. There is Verrier, ...
— Paris War Days - Diary of an American • Charles Inman Barnard
... hear the soldiers discussing the war. There was an argument between a lance-corporal in the Camerons and a sapper private about some trivial incident ...
— Mr. Standfast • John Buchan
... Omdurman—none escaped a parodying portrayal of their mannerisms. He imitated the tones of their voice and twisted and contorted his face and body to resemble the originals. Nothing was sacred from that mimic any more than from a sapper. He showed us Osman Digna's little ways, and gave ghastly imitations of trials, mutilations and executions by hanging in the Mahdist camps. And these things were for relaxation, though maybe they served as a reminder of the dervishes' brutal rule. There were vexations and jokes of ...
— Khartoum Campaign, 1898 - or the Re-Conquest of the Soudan • Bennet Burleigh
... pioneer life had given him a vein of humor which became his "Life-preserver" in times of stress; it had also given him a love for human liberty that was unaffected. He felt that the enslavement of some men was but the advance guard, the miner and sapper, of ...
— The Upward Path - A Reader For Colored Children • Various
... stride, yet he wore his hat on one side, as is shown by the lighter skin of that side of his brow. His weight is against his being a sapper. He ...
— Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes • Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
... we been? Why, bless my heart, Where have we been since the bloomin' start? Right in the front of the army, Battling day and night! Right in the front of the army, Teaching 'em how to fight!' Every separate man you see, Sapper, gunner, and C.I.V., Every one of 'em seems to be Right in the front of ...
— Rio Grande's Last Race and Other Verses • Andrew Barton 'Banjo' Paterson
... peu a peu ils [that is, "les lettres"] parvinrent a sapper les fondements du pouvoir feodal et a elever l'etendard royal la ou flottait la banniere du baron."—Histoire de l'Universite, par M. Eugene ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 107, September, 1866 • Various
... Reader can judge with what face President Lasource, he of the 'painful probabilities,' who presides in this Convention Hall, might welcome such jubilee-tide, when it got thither, and the Decreed of Accusation floating on the top of it! A National Sapper, spokesman on the occasion, says, the People know their Friend, and love his life as their own; "whosoever wants Marat's head must get the Sapper's first." (Seance in Moniteur, No. 116, du 26 Avril, An 1er.) Lasource answered with some ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... days ago I sat by the bedside of a wounded sapper—a reservist—and heard the story of life in a signal-box on a branch line in the North of England. The man was dying. I think he knew it. But the zest of his everyday life was still strong in him. He described the manner in which, on leaving the army originally, ...
— Current History, A Monthly Magazine - The European War, March 1915 • New York Times
... she is," he answered. "And now you can bile up a pot of tea in your own way while I clean these here fish for sapper." ...
— Ruggles of Red Gap • Harry Leon Wilson
... Badeners had opened the Halle gate, had gradually worked their way to the region of the bridge where having joined some of the Saxon guard they had occupied some houses from which they started to fire on the French columns. The sapper charged with the responsibility of detonating the mine was deceived by this fire into thinking that the enemy had arrived and that the time had come for him to carry out his mission, and so he put a light to the fuse. ...
— The Memoirs of General the Baron de Marbot, Translated by - Oliver C. Colt • Baron de Marbot
... a letter from Sapper F. Adcock, published in a home newspaper, are also of interest. After a brief description of the situation, he continues:—'It was at this time that the heliographers of the Dublin's showed their pluck, for, fixing up their stand amidst ...
— The Second Battalion Royal Dublin Fusiliers in the South African War - With a Description of the Operations in the Aden Hinterland • Cecil Francis Romer and Arthur Edward Mainwaring
... smiled. "A Zouave? Just as nothing is sacred to a sapper, so is nothing hurtful to a Zouave. They have hides like hippopotamuses, those fellows. You could dip them in vitriol ...
— Septimus • William J. Locke
... of the army, at Puebla, awaiting reinforcements before moving into the valley of Mexico, the regular instruction of the company—both as infantry and as engineer soldiers—was resumed. Besides the "School of the Sapper" as taught them before they left the United States, the men were now instructed, theoretically and practically, in the "School of the Miner". They were engaged too in work upon the fortifications of Puebla; and had practice in loop-holing walls, and received instruction for ...
— Company 'A', corps of engineers, U.S.A., 1846-'48, in the Mexican war • Gustavus Woodson Smith
... good-bye. 'Don't forget to go to Lloyd's,' he grated in my ear. I expect it was a wan smile that I returned, for I was at a very low ebb, and my fortress looked sarcastically impregnable. But the sapper was free; 'free' was my ...
— Riddle of the Sands • Erskine Childers
... short, sharp orders were given, the men ceased their hopeless toil, and a sapper sergeant and a dozen men set to ...
— Gil the Gunner - The Youngest Officer in the East • George Manville Fenn
... and Sapper Winter on the telephone board to-day," I advised Bliss, the youngster who had come to headquarters the day before to do signal officer. "The colonel will be doing a lot of telephoning, and they know his methods. Be ...
— Pushed and the Return Push • George Herbert Fosdike Nichols, (AKA Quex) |
