"Impregnability" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... conspuent doodle-doo." And, again, when he was a little older, living at Rosenheim, I.W., there was surely the future defender of Mafeking in the little chap in brown Holland on the sands of Bonchurch digging scientific trenches with wooden spade, and demonstrating to his governess the impregnability of his sand fortress. With his sister and brother, little Ste was once out with this governess on a country ramble near Tunbridge Wells, when the governess discovered that she had walked farther than she intended and was in strange country. Ste was elated. But enquiry elicited ...
— The Story of Baden-Powell - 'The Wolf That Never Sleeps' • Harold Begbie
... An account of the above incident is given somewhat differently by Maurice in his Modern History of Hindostan (1803), who also relates that Akbar used the same trick to enter Rhotas in Behar, after being long baffled by the apparent impregnability of that fortress. ...
— A Holiday in the Happy Valley with Pen and Pencil • T. R. Swinburne
... the enemy for his defeat of July 15th and his gradual loss of the Ridge. The Germans, on the defensive, considered that the failure to take Thiepval at the beginning of the Somme battle proved its impregnability; the British, on the offensive, ...
— My Second Year of the War • Frederick Palmer
... consideration two simple facts. First, that few districts contain two such positions as those of the Confederates at Fredericksburg; and, secondly, that the strength of a position is measured not by the impregnability of the front, but by the security of the flanks. The Fredericksburg lines, resting on the Rappahannock and the Massaponax, had apparently safe flanks, and yet he himself had completely turned them, rendering the whole series of works useless without firing a shot. Were Lee and Jackson the ...
— Stonewall Jackson And The American Civil War • G. F. R. Henderson
... forgot their personal woes in sorrow for the brave men who after a series of brilliant successes had perished in the final effort. Magersfontein hit us hard, though we knew nothing of the "blazing indiscretions" connected with that fatal assault on positions of peculiar strength and impregnability. Its consequences meant another delay, perhaps a long one. Meanwhile our resolution grew stronger to hold Kimberley though the heavens should fall. Eating, after all, was a habit—a bad habit with some of us—which we could not give up in a day. But the story of Magersfontein ...
— The Siege of Kimberley • T. Phelan
... consternation, and immediately steps were taken to place the colony in the best posture for defence, reliance being had on the impregnability of the islands, instead of delivering up the plunder, especially as Captain Wentworth held a commission from the Governor and Council, ...
— Bay State Monthly, Vol. II. No. 5, February, 1885 - A Massachusetts Magazine • Various
... hoped for tardy regrets on his part; an ex-post-facto decision that it didn't matter. The hot-and-cold business had probably been the poor girl's sense of honor working—though, naturally, she couldn't have known (on Naapu) the peculiar impregnability of Stires's prejudices. When you stop to think of it, Stires and his prejudices had no business in such a place, and nothing in earth or sky or sea could have foretold them to the population of that landscape. Perhaps when she let herself go, in the strong seas, she thought that he would be at heart ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1921 and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... Diamond Harbour, a more striking city than Quebec is seldom seen. The great rock rising above the Lower Town, and crowned with its batteries, all bristling with guns, seemed to my eyes the very realization of impregnability. I looked upon the ship that lay tranquilly on the water below, and whose decks were thronged with blue-jackets—to the Highlander who paced his short path as sentry, some hundred feet high upon the wall of the fortress, and I thought to myself ...
— Picturesque Quebec • James MacPherson Le Moine
... carried by assault despite the alleged impregnability of its ramparts, and despite also a garrison of 25,000 Manchus. These last must have fought with the fury of despair; for they well knew what fate awaited them. Not one was spared to tell the tale—this was in ...
— The Awakening of China • W.A.P. Martin
... down souse into the hen-yard. No, it is not the poor bleaching victim hung up to moult its draggled feathers in the rain that he wishes to show us. He loves the hawk-nature as well as the hen-nature; and if he is unequalled in anything, it is in that sunny breadth of view, that impregnability of reason, that looks down all ranks and conditions of men, all fortune and misfortune, with the equal eye ...
— Among My Books - First Series • James Russell Lowell
... quiver of Rosina's mouth which always took the worst of the sting out of all of her many cruel speeches. And yet that very same bow and quiver were bound to breed a fearful doubt as to the degree of faith which one might be justified in holding in regard to the impregnability of her position. Very likely she herself did firmly intend remaining a widow ...
— A Woman's Will • Anne Warner
... A few moments ago she had been almost fond, now she was languidly polite. Hope faded away from all points of his horizon. An easterly mist of doubt was creeping over him. His egotism at its height was only a mild satisfaction in his social impregnability and was readily overpowered by the recollection of personal defects to which he was acutely alive. In the atmosphere of Katie's coolness, he forgot his earldom and thought disconsolately of his nose. He was disconcerted, and after a few embarrassed words ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Volume 3, No. 4 • Various
... hundred miles' distance, must have misapprehended the state of the case. Whether an invasion of Sikkim was either advisable or called for, was a matter in which I had no concern: nor do I offer an opinion as to the impregnability of the country if it were defended by natives otherwise a match for a British force, and having the advantage of position. I was not consulted with reference to any difference of opinion between the civil and military powers, such as ...
— Himalayan Journals (Complete) • J. D. Hooker
... a campaign of a few weeks had secured the conquest of Italy, but the war was in fact prolonged for three years and a half from this time by domestic treachery, foreign invasion, and the almost absolute impregnability of Ravenna. ...
— Theodoric the Goth - Barbarian Champion of Civilisation • Thomas Hodgkin
... tubers and perhaps small animals, birds, and eggs near the foot of the cliff, the last two, possibly, in the caves themselves. Thus might she live on here indefinitely. She felt now a certain sense of security imparted doubtless by the impregnability of her high-flung sanctuary that she knew to be safe from all the more dangerous beasts, and this one from men, too, since it lay in ...
— Tarzan the Terrible • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... similar character in old romances, where great armies are long kept at bay by the arts of necromancers, who build airy towers and battlements, and muster warriors of terrible aspect, and thus feign a defence of seeming impregnability, until some bolder champion of the besiegers dashes forward to try an encounter with the foremost foeman, and finds him melt away in the death-grapple. With such heroic adventures let the march upon Manassas be hereafter ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 57, July, 1862 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... of Verdun, perched beside the River Meuse, in a gorgeously wooded country, and with the heights of the river-side lying between it and the enemy, was encircled by forts, which, prior to the war, gave to the city the reputation of impregnability. But the forts of Liege, in Belgium, had borne that selfsame reputation, and yet, when the Kaiser's forces treacherously invaded that country, and were held up at Liege, the huge guns prepared before-hand for this conflict shattered ...
— With Joffre at Verdun - A Story of the Western Front • F. S. Brereton |
