"Escalade" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... prolongation of the line connecting the castle and the town. This shoal being covered by a foot or two of water, the builders of the fort counted upon it for protection in that direction against ships, and against attack, either by regular approaches or by escalade. The work itself was in general outline a parallelogram, with bastions at the four angles. The longer sides fronted the east and west; and of these the former, facing the shoal and the open gulf, contained the ...
— Admiral Farragut • A. T. Mahan
... and a sally from the town was beaten back at the same time; the Europeans seemed ready to meet any odds. With these victories, Henry was confident that Tangier must soon fall; he ordered another escalade, but all his scaling ladders were burnt or broken and many of his men crushed beneath the overhanging parts of the wall, that were pushed down bodily upon the storming parties. In this final assault of the 5th of October, two Moors were taken who told Henry of immense ...
— Prince Henry the Navigator, the Hero of Portugal and of Modern Discovery, 1394-1460 A.D. • C. Raymond Beazley
... point of the spit of land on which the fort was built. In vain the Turks swarmed up the scaling-ladders; company after company was hurled down, a huddled mass of mangled flesh, and the ladders were cast off. Again the escalade began:—the Knights rolled huge blocks of masonry on the crowded throng below; when they got within arms' reach the scimitar was no match for the long two-handed swords of the Christians. At all three points after a splendid ...
— The Story of the Barbary Corsairs • Stanley Lane-Poole
... the vast to bring Needeth not doctor nor divine, Too well, too well My flesh doth know the heart-perturbing thing; That dread theology alone Is mine, Most native and my own; And ever with victorious toil When I have made Of the deific peaks dim escalade, My soul with anguish and recoil Doth like a city in an earthquake rock, As at my feet the abyss is cloven then, With deeper menace than for other men, Of my potential cousinship with mire; That all my conquered ...
— New Poems • Francis Thompson
... cover of a fire from the ships, and after a little resistance from the Sooloo men—who were excessively frightened by the appearance of the steamers, whose facility of movement they were quite unprepared for—the fort, consisting of bamboo, was taken by escalade after a brave resistance. The attacking force, consisting of about 4000 men, behaved with great coolness and decision, when exposed to the enemy's fire and missiles of all sorts, such as arrows, javelins, &c. About eighty of the defenders of the place were slain, many of ...
— Recollections of Manilla and the Philippines - During 1848, 1849 and 1850 • Robert Mac Micking
... a moment afterwards, seated in a border of small rosebushes. His hands and knees were cut and bleeding, for the wall had been protected against such an escalade by a liberal provision of old bottles; and he was conscious of a general dislocation and a painful swimming in the head. Facing him across the garden, which was in admirable order, and set with flowers of the most delicious perfume, he beheld the back of a house. ...
— New Arabian Nights • Robert Louis Stevenson
... rapture and agony, with which it teems. To 'compete with life,' whose sun we cannot look upon, whose passions and diseases waste and slay us—to compete with the flavour of wine, the beauty of the dawn, the scorching of fire, the bitterness of death and separation here is, indeed, a projected escalade of heaven; here are, indeed, labours for a Hercules in a dress coat, armed with a pen and a dictionary to depict the passions, armed with a tube of superior flake-white to paint the portrait of the insufferable sun. No art is true in this sense: ...
— The Pocket R.L.S. - Being Favourite Passages from the Works of Stevenson • Robert Louis Stevenson
... guidebook truly says: 'It is as abrupt as the ascent of a ladder; and wide spaces of smooth rock often intervene without any notch or projection offering a foothold. To those who cannot look down a sheer precipice many hundred feet deep without a tendency to giddiness, there is danger in this escalade, as well as in passing over some smooth projecting shoulders of rocks.' The climb is, in truth, most arduous—'bien penible,' as my guide said. My chaussure was sadly against me—thin-soled boots, which doubled ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 456 - Volume 18, New Series, September 25, 1852 • Various
... till they almost reached to the holes between the palisades, through which they pointed their muskets; and as the savages contrived to slope them down from the stockade to the ground, it was evident that they meant to mount up and take them by escalade. At last, it appeared as if all the faggots had been placed, and the savages retired farther back, to where the cocoa-nut ...
— Masterman Ready - The Wreck of the "Pacific" • Captain Frederick Marryat
... falling down the gulf of oblivion, and suddenly, with a dull thud, I landed on the remains of Howlglass. The softness of his head had really preserved me from what might have been a severe shock, because the distance from Parnassus to Fleet Street, as you know, is considerable, and the escalade might have been more serious. I reached my rooms in Half Moon Street, however, having seen only one star, with just a faint nostalgia for the realms into which for one brief day I ...
— Masques & Phases • Robert Ross
... me dominion! Within your spirit's arms I stay me fast Against the fell Immitigate ravening of the gates of hell; And claim my right in you, most hardly won, Of chaste fidelity upon the chaste: Hold me and hold by me, lest both should fall (O in high escalade high companion!) Even in the breach of Heaven's assaulted wall. Like to a wind-sown sapling grow I from The clift, Sweet, of your skyward-jetting soul, - Shook by all gusts that sweep it, overcome By all its clouds ...
— Poems • Francis Thompson
... to tell you the reason why These sixteen Specials kept letting fly From eleven till one, as the Chronicle speaks? They did it, my boys, to annoy the Greeks, Who kept up a perpetual cannonade On the walls, and threaten'd an escalade. The sixteen Specials were so arranged That the shots they shot were not shots exchanged, But every shot so told on the foe The Greeks were obliged to draw it mild: Diomedes—"A fix," Ulysses—"No go" Declared it, the "king of men" cried like a child; Whilst the Specials, ...
— The Germ - Thoughts towards Nature in Poetry, Literature and Art • Various
... given, but who, from carelessness, timidity, or ignorance of practical life, imagine that everything is done that can be when the work is completed, and wait for public admiration and fortune to break in on them by escalade and burglary. They live, so to say, on the outskirts of life, in isolation and inertia. Petrified in art, they accept to the very letter the symbolism of the academical dithyrambic, which places an aureola about the heads of poets, and, persuaded that they ...
— Bohemians of the Latin Quarter • Henry Murger
... delighted Bretons. They began to lift the bark over the barricade. Twenty more toises, and it would glide into the ocean. It was during this time that the company arrived, was drawn up by the captain, and disposed for either an escalade or an assault. Aramis watched over everything, to favor the labors of his friends. He saw the reinforcements, counted the men, and convinced himself at a single glance of the insurmountable peril to which fresh combat would expose them. To escape by sea, at the moment the cavern was about to ...
— The Man in the Iron Mask • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... Le lierre, le chiendent, l'eglantier sauvageon, Font, depuis trois cents ans, l'assaut de ce donjon; Le burg, sous cette abjecte et rampante escalade, Meurt, comme sous la lepre un sanglier malade; Il tombe; les fosses s'emplissent des creneaux; La ronce, ce serpent, tord sur lui ses anneaux; Le moineau franc, sans meme entendre ses murmures, Sur ses vieux ...
— La Legende des Siecles • Victor Hugo
... advance upon Jerusalem without a large baggage train was next to impossible; and indeed if the Christians were to arrive before that city, they could effect nothing without the aid of the heavy machines necessary for battering the walls or effecting an escalade. ...
— Winning His Spurs - A Tale of the Crusades • George Alfred Henty
... the fortresses they would have swept France clear of all organised bodies of troops within two months of the frontier battles. During the Peninsular War Wellington made twelve assaults on breached fortresses of which five were successful; of his twelve attempts to escalade six succeeded. The Germans in 1870-71 never attempted a breach and their solitary effort at escalade, on the Basse Perche of ...
— Camps, Quarters, and Casual Places • Archibald Forbes
... neighbourhood. Last year, intending to make a study of this insect and finding my efforts to hunt it fruitless, I was obliged to have recourse to the good offices of a forest-ranger, who sent me a pair of couples from the Lagarde plateau, that bleak district where the beech-tree begins its escalade of ...
— The Wonders of Instinct • J. H. Fabre |
