"Barbed wire" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Cuba this time I had read in our newspapers about the Spanish trocha without knowing just what a trocha was. I imagined it to be a rampart of earth and fallen trees, topped with barbed wire; a Rubicon that no one was allowed to pass, but which the insurgents apparently crossed at will with the ease of little girls leaping over a flying skipping rope. In reality it seems to be a much more important piece of engineering than is generally supposed, and one which, when completed, ...
— Cuba in War Time • Richard Harding Davis
... riderless horses were being led, that some of the horses and many of the men were wounded, and that one regiment of lancers was pathetically small. It was the 2nd Cavalry Brigade, that had charged the enemy's guns, to find them protected by barbed wire. ...
— Adventures of a Despatch Rider • W. H. L. Watson
... around toward the front of the house thinking how the Irish was a great nation, and what shall I do now, anyhow? And I says to myself: "Danny, you was a fool to let that circus walk off and leave you asleep in this here town with nothing over you but a barbed wire fence this morning. Fur what ARE you going to do next? First thing you know, you WILL be a reg'lar tramp, which some folks can't be made to see you ain't now." And jest when I was thinking that, a feller comes down the front steps of that ...
— Danny's Own Story • Don Marquis
... horribly to me how far behind we must be in all matters of ingenuity, device, and mechanical contrivance. I am reminded again of the days during the Boer war, when one realised that it had never occurred to our happy-go-lucky Army that it was possible to make a military use of barbed wire or construct a trench to defy shrapnel. Suppose in the North Sea we got a surprise like that, and fished out a parboiled, half-drowned admiral explaining what a confoundedly slim, unexpected, almost ungentlemanly thing the enemy had ...
— An Englishman Looks at the World • H. G. Wells
... suddenly the world upheaved behind the leaders. Rocks, earth, and rubble went up in clouds into the air, and with them scores of the Chinese regular troops, under whose very feet mines of the new explosive had been fired by Parker. And the howling mobs in front were held up by barbed wire, while from the despised trenches and breastworks a storm of lead swept the crowded masses of the attackers away. At that close range every bullet from the machine guns and rifles of the defenders drove through two or three assailants, every bomb ...
— The Elephant God • Gordon Casserly
... a second front is impossible; but, at the same time, they are desperately rushing troops in all directions, and stringing barbed wire all the way from the coasts of Finland and Norway to the islands of the ...
— The Fireside Chats of Franklin Delano Roosevelt • Franklin Delano Roosevelt
... living among them in her little log house. Shall I speak of the needs of our school boys and girls? You patient mothers know so well what are the needs of forty-two play-loving active children, who wrestle, play football, tag, jump rope and barbed wire fences; and the needs of Indian boys and girls are nearly identical with those of the same ...
— The American Missionary - Volume 50, No. 1, January, 1896 • Various
... countenance was a look of such supreme delight, that the angry farmer ended by laughing heartily; but after that experience he surrounded the beehives with a stout barbed wire fence. ...
— Black Bruin - The Biography of a Bear • Clarence Hawkes
... saw the top of the gate beneath his body, and he felt a thrill as he beheld twisted strands of barbed wire, cruel and jagged, across it; then, with a great sensation of joy, he knew that he had cleared the top, and a second later, he landed on the ground, in the ...
— T. Haviland Hicks Senior • J. Raymond Elderdice
... not see the first of the boys to go over the top for they were over by the time he reached the second-line trench, but as he passed along the fire trench toward the road he could see them crowding over, and when he reached the road the barbed wire entanglements lay flat in many places, the boys picking their way across the fallen meshes, the clumsy tanks waddling on ahead, across No Man's Land. As far as Tom could see along the line in either direction this shell-torn ...
— Tom Slade Motorcycle Dispatch Bearer • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... jerked away her hands, the blood showing dully under her brown skin. "Stop it, you silly boy. Is that Nora? Yes, it is." She waved her hand wildly at Nora, who was struggling frantically with the barbed wire fence. "Wait, I am ...
— The Major • Ralph Connor
... shadow of a ramada showed where man had built his puny dwelling high in order to escape its fury. At their feet lay the ranch pasture, a broad elbow of the valley rich with grass and mesquite trees and fenced in with barbed wire that ran from cliff to cliff. Beyond the eastern wall the ground was rough and broken, cut up by innumerable gulches and waterways, and above its ridges there rose the forbidding crags of a black butte whose shoulders ran down to and confined the ...
— Hidden Water • Dane Coolidge
... through the valley, and in the moonlight the children could see that a fence had been made at the end nearest them. It was a wooden fence, and not one of barbed wire, such as there were many ...
— The Curlytops at Uncle Frank's Ranch • Howard R. Garis
... material, but some article of utility manufactured from it. In carrying out this idea, the iron exhibit comprised 32,000 pounds of the crude ore, and around it were grouped nails, spikes, bolts, steel rails, barbed wire, and pig iron ...
— Final Report of the Louisiana Purchase Exposition Commission • Louisiana Purchase Exposition Commission
... came in a little later, she was sitting in their living-room nervously stitching at the sleeve of a shirt that he had managed to tear on some barbed wire. He had his pipe in his hand, and there was an air of grim satisfaction about him that seemed to denote a consciousness of ...
— The Top of the World • Ethel M. Dell
... the 6th Infantry Brigade (1st Batt. The King's (Liverpool) Regt., 2nd Batt. S. Staffs Regt., 1st Batt. R. Berks Regt. and 1st Batt. K.R.R.) was attacked three times during the day, and on one occasion the enemy infantry reached the barbed wire, close ...
— 1914 • John French, Viscount of Ypres
... Mr. Perrin unexpectedly. 'Nor yet phonographs, nor railways, nor factory chimneys, nor none of them loud ugly things. Nor yet advertisements, nor newspapers, nor barbed wire.' ...
— The Magic City • Edith Nesbit
... the roar of the guns getting more and more distinct, we come to a place that leaves no manner of doubt that there is a war on. There are graves by the roadside, and shell-holes. Lines of trenches and coils of barbed wire arrest your attention. Now there comes into view the battered remnant of what was once a busy mining village. The great slag-heap towers up on our right hand, its sides scarred and smashed by shell-fire. Not a house is left ...
— War Letters of a Public-School Boy • Henry Paul Mainwaring Jones
... range of the Paris forts. Work on the entrenched lines connecting the forts is actively carried out and is said to give every satisfaction. The positions, believed to be impregnable, are strengthened by ingenious arrangements of barbed wire. It is reported that some of this barbed entanglement contains live wires fed by the electric ...
— Paris War Days - Diary of an American • Charles Inman Barnard |
