"Platoon" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... of these men as they passed. They were hardly ten feet from me. Platoon after platoon, company after company, whole regiments in columns of fours. And seeing the faces brought an instant shock; they all wore the same calm, steady, slightly weary expression, but there was in the whole line scarcely a young man. Here were men of the thirties, ...
— They Shall Not Pass • Frank H. Simonds
... take in a platoon, Indian file I dare say one of those pines, now, may be thirty ...
— Home as Found • James Fenimore Cooper
... operation was under direct observation by enemy balloons, and as soon as the Companies moved an intense barrage was put down. B Company, on the right, however, had a comparatively good time and suffered very few casualties, whilst No. 5 Platoon, under Lieut. A.B. Hare, had none at all, and reached Zonnebeke Crossing in safety. The remaining Companies got the full effect of the barrage, which included gas shells, and lost direction towards the left. Capt. W.H.D. Devey, commanding C Company, was wounded, Capt. ...
— The Story of the 6th Battalion, The Durham Light Infantry - France, April 1915-November 1918 • Unknown
... we received orders to pack our knapsacks, and left Frankfort for Seligenstadt, where we remained until the eighth of March, by which time all the recruits were well instructed in the use of the musket and the school of the platoon. From Seligenstadt we went to Schweinheim, and on the twenty-fourth of March, 1813, joined the division at Aschaffenbourg, where Marshal Ney passed ...
— The Conscript - A Story of the French war of 1813 • Emile Erckmann
... French dragoons at the left-back of the scene. The rear platoon of the Forty-third turns, fires, and proceeds. The next platoon covering them does the same. This is repeated several times, staggering the pursuers. Exeunt French dragoons, giving up the pursuit. The coughing sergeant and the remnant ...
— The Dynasts - An Epic-Drama Of The War With Napoleon, In Three Parts, - Nineteen Acts, And One Hundred And Thirty Scenes • Thomas Hardy
... its confusion and strange sounds, all in passing, and slip through without stopping long enough to feel the thrust of the reality, it would be delightful. But the charm disappears, the dream is brought to earth, the vision becomes tinsel when you draw up in front of a big caravansary and a platoon of uniformed porters, bell-boys, and pages swoop down upon everything you have, including your pocket-book; then the Olympian clerk looks at you doubtfully, puzzled for the first time in his life, does not know whether you are a mill-hand from Pittsburgh who should ...
— Two Thousand Miles On An Automobile • Arthur Jerome Eddy
... not gone above a league when I fell in with a scattered platoon of the mob, who were rambling along as if on a party of pleasure; tossing their pikes and clashing their sabres to all kinds of revolutionary songs. I was instantly seized, as a 'courier of the Aristocrats.' Their sagacity, once at work, found out a hundred names ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine—Vol. 54, No. 333, July 1843 • Various
... Major, shaking back the long powdered curls of his Ramillie wig, and looking remarkably grave; "you cannot mean to have a bout with Sir William? He hath a sure hand and a steady eye. I would rather stand a platoon than be once covered with ...
— The International Monthly Magazine, Volume 5, No. 1, January, 1852 • Various
... trench, seeing the men of my platoon properly disposed so as to stiffen the resistance of B Company. Then I returned for the latest news of the crisis to where Doe was conversing with an unknown officer. They were recalling how they had once travelled in the train together from ...
— Tell England - A Study in a Generation • Ernest Raymond
... placed flanking companies. The command was given to load, and the ramrods soon rang in the gun-barrels. Major Lestoype's voice shook as he gave the commands, which were repeated hoarsely, brokenly, nervously, by the company and the platoon officers. The dispositions of the men were soon concluded. The place of the Marquis was behind the line, but he rode to the right of it in a little depression cut out by the rains of winter in the side of the ...
— The Eagle of the Empire - A Story of Waterloo • Cyrus Townsend Brady
... half dozen they dropped; even those who dropped, fought until they were dead. Soon the platoon was merely a squad; the squad melted to a spot; there was a swirl, covering the spot; and the ...
— Boys' Book of Indian Warriors - and Heroic Indian Women • Edwin L. Sabin
... uniforms, he drew himself up proudly and saluted. Already he saw his dead body recovered from the enemy, and borne to the grave beneath a tricolour. He heard the lamentations of his friends, and the firing of the platoon. He saw General Montaudon in tears. He was shaken with emotion. But Jarras's next words fell upon him like ...
— Ensign Knightley and Other Stories • A. E. W. Mason
... rules of civilized literature. Hence the secret of its popularity, that it is the organ of average as distinguished from highest thought. Science and art are the goals of destiny, but rarely is there a thinker or writer who has an eye single to them. It is an heroic, self-sacrificing, and small platoon which in every age brunts Fate, and, fighting on the shadowy frontier, makes conquests from the realm of darkness. Their ideas are passed back from hand to hand, and become known in fragments and potent as tendencies ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 34, August, 1860 • Various
... I seen a kiltie platoon wading through the cold porridge of snow and slush of which our front used to be composed, but I have said, with my French friend, "Mon Dieu, les currents d'air!" and thank Fate that I belong to a race which reserves its national costume for ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, May 23, 1917 • Various
... and shouting "God save the King." Dumas, now chief in command, thought that all was lost. "I advanced," he says, "with the assurance that comes from despair, exciting by voice and gesture the few soldiers that remained. The fire of my platoon was so sharp that the enemy seemed astonished." The Indians, encouraged, began to rally. The French officers who commanded them showed admirable courage and address; and while Dumas and Ligneris, with the regulars and what was left of the Canadians, held the ground in front, the savage warriors, ...
— Montcalm and Wolfe • Francis Parkman
... the two parallel hedges, which made both ranging and observing difficult. They then commenced an attack on the house supported by machine-gun fire, which proved a far more serious affair, as in the house itself we lost two men killed and some wounded, while in the trench we lost two valuable men, Platoon-Sergeant Abelarde and Lance-Corporal McGurk. The former had crawled out along the hedge to a dangerous and commanding knoll, and from there put eighteen of the enemy out of action before a sniper's bullet found him. The dead lay exposed where they fell, ...
— From the St. Lawrence to the Yser with the 1st Canadian brigade • Frederic C. Curry
... attend drawing daily till November 1st, when it is divided into two equal parts or platoons, which attend drawing and riding on alternate clays. Riding! "Yearling riding!" I must advert to that before I go further. First let me describe it. A platoon of yearlings, twenty, thirty, forty perhaps; as many horses; a spacious riding- hall, with galleries that seat but too many mischievous young ladies, and whose interior is well supplied with tan bark, make up the principal objects in the play. Nay, ...
— Henry Ossian Flipper, The Colored Cadet at West Point • Henry Ossian Flipper
... been excited, was indeed perceptible enough. Instead of the deep silence which five minutes ago had prevailed in the bivouac, a strange hubbub of shouts, and questions, and as many cries, rose up the night air; nor did many minutes elapse, ere first one musket, then three or four, then a whole platoon, were discharged. The reader will easily believe that the latter circumstance startled us prodigiously, ignorant as we were of the cause which produced it; but it required no very painful exertion of patience ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, Issue 264, July 14, 1827 • Various
... continued performing this difficult and dangerous work, only once making the mistake of ordering my men to take a left turn and myself taking a right one. Fortunately this happened in a local town of tortuous by-ways, and so it fell out that I and my platoon only met again later in the day; and a most touching meeting it was. Discussing the matter afterwards with my C.O., I inclined to the view that it was an accident which I, for my part, was quite ready to forgive ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, April 12, 1916 • Various
... with the Latinized appellations of youthful progenitors, and Hic liber est meus on the title-page. A set of Hogarth's original plates. Pope, original edition, 15 volumes, London, 1717. Barrow on the lower shelves, in folio. Tillotson on the upper, in a little dark platoon of octo-decimos. ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... in the front line and the daily anti-aeroplane shoots, both by our own and by the enemy's "Archies." Here we were able to carry out a certain amount of training, and to organize the battalion upon the lines of the new "normal formation," giving the platoon commander control over each kind of weapon with which the infantry are armed—rifle, bayonet, bomb, rifle-bomb and Lewis gun. Gas masks were issued, and all ranks were instructed in their use. In a couple of weeks this training, or rather adaptation of our previous ...
— With the British Army in The Holy Land • Henry Osmond Lock
... of me, to which they considered they had a right. I was very nearly the cause of a serious dispute between the two Services. A compromise was at length entered into by the suggestion of my father, who agreed that the Jollies might teach me the sword and platoon exercise, while the Blue-jackets might impart as much nautical knowledge as I was capable ...
— Ben Burton - Born and Bred at Sea • W. H. G. Kingston
... Hullo! here's my platoon, the lot I had last year. "The War'll be over soon." "What 'opes?" "No bloody fear!" Then, "Number Seven, 'shun! All present and correct." They're standing in the sun, impassive and erect. Young Gibson with his grin; and Morgan, ...
— The War Poems of Siegfried Sassoon • Siegfried Sassoon
... A platoon of corporals and soldiers (twelve rifles) detached themselves from the double military mass. A sub-officer with a blond beard, small, delicate, was commanding it with an unsheathed sword. Freya contemplated him a moment, finding ...
— Mare Nostrum (Our Sea) - A Novel • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... from the Yellowstone to the Sonora line, and who hold a savage mob in utter contempt. Here by the hub of the Gatling's wheel stands old Feeny, close at the elbow of dark-faced Drummond. "C" troop's first platoon "mans" the Gatling gun, and under its old leader of the Arizona campaigns "leads the procession" into the "Garden City" of the ante-bellum days. By Drummond's side is a railway official gazing ahead to see ...
— Foes in Ambush • Charles King
... o'clock Christmas night the crowd began to line up at the Garden doors. At 6:30 a platoon of police arrived. At 6:40 the line reached twice around the Garden. At 6:45 they sent for more police. At 7:15 every street was solid with people. They called out the police reserves and clubbed about ...
— Colonel Crockett's Co-operative Christmas • Rupert Hughes
... "But never a platoon fired a volley," I recalled. "It was steel and targe from the onset." And then I would add, "What's ...
— John Splendid - The Tale of a Poor Gentleman, and the Little Wars of Lorn • Neil Munro
... the other day about a religious reformer who arose in Eastern lands a few years since, and gathered many disciples. He and his principal follower were seized and about to be martyred. They were suspended by cords from a gibbet, to be fired at by a platoon of soldiers. And as they hung there, the disciple turned to his teacher, and as his last word on earth said, 'Master! are you satisfied with me?' His answer was a silent smile; and the next minute a bullet was in his heart. Dear brethren, do you turn to Jesus Christ with the same question, ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren
... time much kindness was experienced from the regular battalions to which the attachments were made. The units of the Battalion not doing attachment duty were used for working parties in the trenches and suffered several casualties. No. 2 platoon, right flank company, specially suffered, being caught by shrapnel fire on the Bethune-La Basse road, ten N.C.O.'s and men ...
— The 23rd (Service) Battalion Royal Fusiliers (First Sportsman's) - A Record of its Services in the Great War, 1914-1919 • Fred W. Ward
... want leave, see the platoon sergeant," he told me. The platoon sergeant, who was in a bad temper, spoke harshly when I approached him. "No business of mine!" he said; "the company clerk will ...
— The Amateur Army • Patrick MacGill
... our Foreign Office? What is being done? We are in the third year of the War and yet, while the German Minister is distributing free arrowroot to the populace, Whitehall slumbers on. It may be nothing to our mandarins that a full platoon was added to the Thibetan field-strength only last week, and that the Government dinghy ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, May 9, 1917 • Various
... arrogance, generally despise their own order. One of the first symptoms they discover of a selfish and mischievous ambition is a profligate disregard of a dignity which they partake with others. To be attached to the subdivision, to love the little platoon we belong to in society, is the first principle (the germ, as it were) of public affections. It is the first link in the series by which we proceed towards a love to our country and to mankind. The interest of that portion of social arrangement is a trust ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. III. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... doesn't understand what you mean by sin. He is confused to bits about it; but the main thing that stands out is that a man may break all the Ten Commandments theologically and yet be a rattling good pal, as brave as a lion, as merry as a cricket, and the life and soul and Christ of a platoon. That's the fact, and it is the one thing that matters. But there is another thing: if a man sins, how is he to get forgiveness? What sort of a God is it Who will wipe the whole blessed thing out because ...
— Simon Called Peter • Robert Keable
... my father; 'that a boy of his years should entertain an opinion of his own—I mean one which militates against all established authority—is astounding; as well might a raw recruit pretend to offer an unfavourable opinion on the manual and platoon exercise; the idea is preposterous; the lad is too independent by half. I never yet knew one of an independent spirit get on in the army, the secret of success in the army is the spirit ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow
... thousands, and had driven everybody away from the North Carolina estate of one of the Wallings. Here was a man who was building himself a yacht with a model dairy and bakery on board, and a French laundry and a brass band. Here was a million-dollar racing-yacht with auto-boats on it and a platoon of marksmen, and some Chinese laundrymen, and two physicians for its half-insane occupant. Here was a man who had bought a Rhine castle for three-quarters of a million, and spent as much in restoring it, and ...
— The Metropolis • Upton Sinclair
... Bengal. It stated that on December 19th, 1798, at eight o'clock in the evening, a large, luminous meteor was seen at Benares and other parts of the country. It was attended with a loud, rumbling noise, like an ill-discharged platoon of musketry; and about the same time, the inhabitants of Krakhut, fourteen miles from Benares, saw the light, heard an explosion, and immediately after the noise of heavy bodies falling in the neighborhood. The sky ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 4, September, 1850 • Various
... are numerous. It is possible that a small group of men may show a white flag without authority from any proper officer, in which case their action is, of course, not binding on the rest of the platoon or other unit. But this will not apply to the case of a whole unit advancing as if to surrender, or letting the other side advance to receive the pretended surrender and then opening fire. Under this head we find many depositions by British soldiers and several by ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 3, June, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... platoon of penguins had crossed the river and marched up to the sacred precincts of the seal beach. Turning her head to see what the disturbance was about she sighted the penguins just at the end of their march and three bulls fronting them. The penguins wished to pass, either from impudence or a ...
— The Beach of Dreams • H. De Vere Stacpoole
... Polish Jew (from Commercial Road, E.) and has long been the despair of his platoon sergeant. He is fat where there is no need to be fat, his clothes bulge where no clothes are expected to bulge, and he is the kind of man who loses a cap-badge once a week, preferably just before the C.O. comes round. There is only ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 156, April 9, 1919 • Various
... as we swung parallel with the road at the market-place, where the Grenadiers made a gallant stand, as was known by the more orderly platoon firing. Then we, too, broke out in great blaze, and after, what with fog and smoke, a fight in a cellar ...
— Hugh Wynne, Free Quaker • S. Weir Mitchell
... provincials reached Fort Edward, they were drilled daily and taught to fire by platoon and to shoot at a mark. They were sent into the woods to learn ...
— Ben Comee - A Tale of Rogers's Rangers, 1758-59 • M. J. (Michael Joseph) Canavan
... never met anyone he disliked so intensely as Mr. Swenson—not even his Aunt Adeline. The man was a human octopus. Sam could count seven distinct legs twined round him and at least as many arms. It seemed to him that he was being done to death in his prime by a solid platoon of Swedes. He put his whole soul into one last effort ... something seemed to give ... he was free. Pausing only to try to kick Mr. Swenson in the face Sam shot to the surface. Something hard and sharp prodded him in the head. Then something ...
— Three Men and a Maid • P. G. Wodehouse
... retort, Bill flashed off so many pans at once that he seemed to be a platoon of militia. My companion also enjoyed it immensely. Being an invalid, I could not participate in the ...
— Acadia - or, A Month with the Blue Noses • Frederic S. Cozzens
... officers were ordered up to drill their men. Captain Majoribanks and Mr Irving had one party at the platoon exercise. ...
— Newton Forster - The Merchant Service • Captain Frederick Marryat
... the other, moodily. "I thought I had bagged a small boy in a Lord Fauntleroy suit on the sixth, but he ducked. These children make me tired. They should be bowling their hoops in the road. Golf is a game for grownups. How can a fellow play, with a platoon of progeny blocking ...
— The Clicking of Cuthbert • P. G. Wodehouse
... order, up they jumps, and we heerd the word passin', 'Prepare to receive cavalry!' They formed square at once, and the same minute we plumped into them with such a charge as tore a lane right through the middle of them. Before they could recover, we opened a platoon fire on their flank; they staggered, broke, and at last fell back in disorder upon Aeth, with the whole of the French army after them. Such firin'—grape, round-shot, and musketry—I never seed afore, and we all shouting ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 2, No. 12, May, 1851. • Various
... Ella look more beautiful; as, pale and trembling, she seemed to cling to his arm for support. The ceremony was at length begun and ended, amid a deep and breathless silence. As the last words, "I pronounce you man and wife," died away upon the air, the first platoon advanced a pace and fired a volley—the second and third followed—and then arose a soft bewitching strain of music; during which the friends of the newly married pair came forward to offer their congratulations, and wishes for their long life ...
— Ella Barnwell - A Historical Romance of Border Life • Emerson Bennett
... in like manner, and in a parallel direction. We should probably, therefore, have to resist the attack of a dozen companies, one after the other; and it was to be feared that the Mexicans would finish by getting over their panic terror of our rifles, and exchange their distant and ineffectual platoon-firing for a charge with the bayonet, in which their superior numbers would tell. We observed, also, that the cavalry, which had been keeping itself at a safe distance, was now put in motion, and formed up close ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXIX. January, 1844. Vol. LV. • Various |
