"Barbed wire" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... leg on a barbed wire—no dear I wasn't hurdling the fence—the wire was on the side walk, where everything except the kitchen stove usually lies. I hope I won't have lockjaw—it's harder on a woman than it is on a man anytime. I ...
— Letters of a Dakota Divorcee • Jane Burr
... of hideous confusion. Barbed wire entanglements with their supporting posts had been rooted from the ground. Guns had been torn from their carriages. "Pill boxes" had been smashed to bits. Horses and men and wagons and camp kitchens were ...
— Army Boys in the French Trenches • Homer Randall
... got nearly a square mile fenced in—a sort of valley. Fences of barbed wire ten feet high, and inside that they do things. Chaps about the camp—now and then we get a peep. It isn't only us neither. There's the Japanese; you bet they got it too—and ...
— The War in the Air • Herbert George Wells
... do. Plenty fellow rabbit longa scrub, budgery way north, budgery way south; budgery way eblywhere. Ba'al good barbed wire fence do, ba'al good ...
— Seven Little Australians • Ethel Sybil Turner
... was set to work with young Jack Pollock stringing barbed wire fence. He had never done this before. The spools of wire weighed on him heavily. A crowbar thrust through the core made them a sort of axle with which to carry it. Thus they walked forward, revolving the heavy spool with the greatest ...
— The Rules of the Game • Stewart Edward White
... barbed wire, not so much, I think, from any real deep-seated affection for the stuff itself, or from any confidence in the protection it affords—its disintegration being one of the assumed preliminaries of an attack—as for the satisfaction of writing in the Weekly Work Report, "In front ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, March 1, 1916 • Various
... Connel. "They'll probably send scouts out ahead of those columns and we can make contact with them over there." He pointed toward a high tangle of barbed wire set up in the middle of the near-by street. Astro nodded, and exchanging his broken ray gun for one belonging to a fallen Nationalist, raced to the edge of the barrier with the major. They crouched and waited for the first contact ...
— The Revolt on Venus • Carey Rockwell
... broken bottles and all sorts of rags and debris littered about. The descriptions of the place sent home after the battle are necessarily very inaccurate. Those I have seen all introduce several lines of trenches and an elaborate system of barbed wire entanglements. There is only one trench, however, and no barbed wire, except one fence along a road. There are, however, a great number of plain wire strands, about ten yards long perhaps, made fast ...
— With Rimington • L. March Phillipps
... up from the valley road to the mesa. Along this they traveled, close to the sage-covered foothills. At a point where a draw dipped down to the road, Houck pulled up and dismounted. A gate made of three strands of barbed wire and two poles barred the wagon trail. For already the nester was fencing the ...
— The Fighting Edge • William MacLeod Raine
... to squirm when you think a girl is going to pin you down. You let me get about as serious as a musical comedy with you and then you put up the barbed wire." ...
— Every Soul Hath Its Song • Fannie Hurst
... riding across our prairie at dusk when you can't see the barbed wire. You are the last person in the world to find fault because a thing ...
— The King's Jackal • Richard Harding Davis
... in, no rat-hole too hidden to be ravaged; a gate represented something to be climbed over: an open door was an invitation, a locked one a challenge. They could dodge under the fences of the law and climb the barbed wire of morality with equal impunity, and the utmost rigor of punishment had little terror for those whose hardships could scarcely be artificially worsened. The stagger of despair, the stricken, helpless aspect ...
— Mary, Mary • James Stephens
... silently, he threw his challenge down before Fate, before Germany, before barbed wire entanglements—before everything and everybody. He did not know whether they ever paroled ordinary prisoners, but he hoped they would not parole him, because then he would be bound by honor. And he did not want to be bound by honor. He ...
— Tom Slade on a Transport • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... been started, and there was no sign of its being started. The hysteria of the women was growing, and there was a tension in the crowds. Jeff Cotton had brought in a force of men to assist him in keeping order. They had built a fence of barbed wire about the pit-mouth and its approaches, and behind this wire they walked—hard-looking citizens with policemen's "billies," and the bulge of revolvers ...
— King Coal - A Novel • Upton Sinclair
... should not blame him if he gave sermons or lectures about it (with magic-lantern slides), so long as it was in Bromley and about Bromley. Cigarettes may be bad for the health: bombs and bayonets and even barbed wire are not good for the health. I never met a doctor who recommended any of them. But the trouble with this sort of man is that he cannot adjust himself to the scale of things. He would do very good service if he would go among ...
— Utopia of Usurers and other Essays • G. K. Chesterton
... floods were receding. Along the Yser Canal mud-caked flats began to appear, with here and there rusty tangles of barbed wire. And with the lessening of the flood came new activities to the little house. ...
— The Amazing Interlude • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... this talk about military discipline. Take the case of my own Colonel, for instance, a man who, before he took to staff work, had probably dug enough trenches, put out enough barbed wire and, generally, made enough mess of respectable agricultural land to earn for himself a special vote of censure from the United Association of French and Belgian Farmers. Now, there's a soldier, if ever there was one; but are his orders obeyed when they ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, March 22, 1916 • Various
... consequently take place within the 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 ...
— Paris War Days - Diary of an American • Charles Inman Barnard
... quite unconcerned about the fact that they could be plainly seen. Periodically our air service issued aeroplane photographs showing the extraordinary development of these trenches, their elaborate construction, the concrete dug-outs, and solid rows of heavy barbed wire, until it almost came to be recognised that an assault upon them would only be attempted by the maddest of leaders, and the prospect of having to take part in it ...
— The Seventh Manchesters - July 1916 to March 1919 • S. J. Wilson
... and imposing, and must have proved itself a formidable fortress. Crowning a slight eminence, it overlooks most of the town. On the three sides are ramparts, varying from about twenty to sixty feet in height, while on a fourth it is now bounded by barbed wire and high railings, with only a slight drop on the other side. At the main entrance the road crosses the old moat and passes under a massive archway which adjoins the guardroom. All the approaches to the outer walls ...
— 'Brother Bosch', an Airman's Escape from Germany • Gerald Featherstone Knight
... 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
... the camp, the most forbidding of those surrounding heights reared its deeply wooded summit three thousand feet above the sea level. A wilderness of tangled underbrush, like barbed wire entanglements, baffled the hardiest adventurer. No scout had penetrated those dismal fastnesses which the legend of camp reputed to ...
— Tom Slade's Double Dare • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... however, could neither eat, nor sleep, nor rest. Her temples throbbed, her eyes ached; every nerve was a barbed wire; her soul was manacled by promises; she would not use her reason; the fever in her veins was not to be quelled, and the one agitating relief to her physical suffering was a constant perusal of David Rennes's letter. It was the first passionate love-letter she had ever received. Just as ...
— Robert Orange - Being a Continuation of the History of Robert Orange • John Oliver Hobbes
... royal crown over the letters G.R., and with the arrow which is supposed to mark the property of the government. The barrel is three feet four inches long, and the bore is that of an artesian well. The native fills four inches of this cavity with powder and the remaining three feet with rusty nails, barbed wire, leaden slugs, and the legs and broken parts of iron pots. An officer of the W.A.F.F.'s, in a fight in the bush in South Nigeria, had one of these things fired at him from a distance of fifteen feet. He told me all that saved him was that when ...
— The Congo and Coasts of Africa • Richard Harding Davis
... the vision of lovely dark eyes and rippling brown hair with just a hint of red in it, danced before him. Chiniquy, taking advantage of his master's preoccupation, wandered aimlessly against a barbed wire, taking very good care not to get too close to it himself. Jim came to himself just in time to save his leg from a ...
— Sowing Seeds in Danny • Nellie L. McClung
... spirit of the new Finland. On the Russian side we came to the same grey old wooden station known to all passengers to and from Russia for polyglot profanity and passport difficulties. There were no porters, which was not surprising because there is barbed wire and an extremely hostile sort of neutrality along the frontier and traffic across has practically ceased. In the buffet, which was very cold, no food could be bought. The long tables once laden with caviare and other zakuski were bare. There was, however, a samovar, and we bought tea at ...
— Russia in 1919 • Arthur Ransome
... Val had set his teeth on edge. Bernard could have meant no harm: no one had ever known the truth except Lawrence and Val, and possibly Dale with such torn shreds of consciousness as H. E. and barbed wire had left him: but in all innocence Bernard had set the rack to work as deftly as Lawrence could have done it himself. Lawrence pitied—no, that was a slip of the mind: he was not so weak as to pity Stafford, but their intercourse was ...
— Nightfall • Anthony Pryde
... hundred feet was enclosed by a barbed wire fence, and this space was quite as interesting as the ...
— Ralph on the Engine - The Young Fireman of the Limited Mail • Allen Chapman
... a moment, then he said he would go and get his deed and his shotgun. I said shotguns suited me exactly, and I told him to bring two of them loaded with giant powder and barbed wire. I would not live alway. I asked not to stay. When he got behind the corn-crib I climbed the fence and fled with my ...
— Remarks • Bill Nye
... the sight of us was too much for his philosophy, or whether he had gone for reinforcements, we did not inquire. We instantly lost our interest in birds and birds' nests; we gathered up our belongings and fled, not stopping to breathe till we had put the barbiest of barbed wire fences between ...
— A Bird-Lover in the West • Olive Thorne Miller
... promenade," ... we issued en queue, firmly grasping our spoons and bread, through the dining-room door. Turning right we were emitted, by the door opposite the kitchen, from the building itself into the open air. A few steps and we passed through the little gate in the barbed wire fence ...
— The Enormous Room • Edward Estlin Cummings
... field should be stronger than any citadel. But, as I say, these things were hidden from us, and our allies gave the finishing touches to their trenches, to the high entertainment of the Angels, as Stevenson would have told us. If only those miles of trench and acres of barbed wire had been placed ten miles away, and backed by British guns, the story of Antwerp might have been a ...
— A Surgeon in Belgium • Henry Sessions Souttar
... Mexican and South American trade—though I handle a good many orders for country dealers, too," replied Mitchell. "My specialty is agricultural implements, barbed wire, machinery and iron stuff generally, for the export trade. There's things about it would surprise you. Why, such things, farm machinery more especially, retail in Buenos Ayres at from 40 to 60 per cent, of what they do here, after paying freight charges and ...
— The Desire of the Moth; and The Come On • Eugene Manlove Rhodes
... his dinner. But as she passed by the artesian well, she met young Delaney, one of Annixter's hands, coming up the trail by the irrigating ditch, leading his horse toward the stables, a great coil of barbed wire in his gloved hands and a pair of nippers thrust into his belt. No doubt, he had been mending the break in the line fence by the Long Trestle. Annixter saw him take off his wide-brimmed hat as he met Hilma, and the two stood there for ...
— The Octopus • Frank Norris
... to Peace's lot to be the hare. With an apron full of gay dandelion blossoms for the trail, the active little body set out on a wide detour of the woods, across the bridge, up through the Hartman pasture land, reaching the barbed wire fence on their own little farm just in time to see Hope dropping a last handful of grain into a gopher hole before returning to the house with ...
— At the Little Brown House • Ruth Alberta Brown
... were hoisting and letting down into the hold an automobile from Dayton, Ohio, bound for New South Wales. Gone were the figs and almonds, the indigo, ivory, tortoise shells. Into the brand-new ledgers over which my father worked, he was entering such items as barbed wire, boilers, car wheels and gas engines, baby carriages, kegs of paint. I reveled in the commonplace stuff, contrasting it vividly in my mind with the starlit ocean roads it would travel, the picturesque places ...
— The Harbor • Ernest Poole
... unpleasant symptoms after picking up morsels at camping grounds. Several have died. We were quite surprised, for hitherto there has been no better cure for Emu indigestion than wire nails, hoop iron, and preserved milk cans. The worst symptoms have yielded to scraps of barbed wire in my own case. But these Emus died in spite ...
— Dot and the Kangaroo • Ethel C. Pedley
... he caught sight from the window of immense stores of war—German waggons with their military destinations still marked in chalk, painted guns of all calibres, drums of barbed wire, higgledy-piggledy truck-loads of scrap, all sorts of flotsam and jetsam of the great conflict. All useless, done with, never to be thought of again, so the world hoped, in the millennium that was to be brought about ...
— The Mountebank • William J. Locke
... provided the weather remains passable, one can live there. Upon the danger-side the windows are closed and shuttered. Weeds grow apace in the garden. No smoke emerges from the chimneys. (If it does, the Mess Corporal hears about it from the Staff Captain.) A few strands of barbed wire obstruct the passage of those careless or adventurous persons who may desire to explore the forbidden side of the house. The front door is bolted and barred: visitors, after approaching stealthily along the lee of ...
— All In It K(1) Carries On - A Continuation of the First Hundred Thousand • John Hay Beith (AKA: Ian Hay)
... returned. Ambrose and Macfarlane helped him through the barbed wire, and he set off, making a wide detour behind the houses that faced the river, meaning to join the Indians from ...
— The Fur Bringers - A Story of the Canadian Northwest • Hulbert Footner
... but the Vision of a dear desire! Marriage, the Ashes, whence has fled the fire! Cast into chains which you, yourself, have forged! Caught, like a sheep upon a stray barbed wire! ...
— The Rubaiyat of a Bachelor • Helen Rowland
... from El Caney on the north, and running in an irregular line to Aguadores on the south. Throughout this territory the Spaniards had done everything possible to hinder the advance of our troops. Barbed wire was strung in many directions, and often the brushwood would conceal dangerous pitfalls, so that any advance had to be made ...
— American Boy's Life of Theodore Roosevelt • Edward Stratemeyer
... distinguish between what may and what may not happen, though there will always be individual differences, and the more poetic souls are apt to suffer when the outrush of their imagination is checked by a barbed wire of fact. The question "Is it true?" and the desire for true stories arise in the average child of seven to eight years, and at that age history stories are enjoyed. Real history is of course impossible to young children, whose idea of time is still very vague, and whose ...
— The Child Under Eight • E.R. Murray and Henrietta Brown Smith
... sides of these dunes were steep, and his shoes got so full of sand, that from time to time, in spite of the urgency of his errand, he was forced to pause in order to empty them out. He stumbled in rabbit holes, he caught his foot and once his trousers in strands of barbed wire, the remnant of coast defences in the Great War, he crashed among potsherds and abandoned kettles; but with a thoroughness that did equal credit to his wind and his Christian spirit, he searched a mile of perilous dunes ...
— Miss Mapp • Edward Frederic Benson
... (pig's face). Anthistria ciliata (kangaroo-grass). Paspalum distichum (water couch-grass). Zoysia pungens (coast couch-grass). Lepturus repens (creeping wire-grass). Panicum leucophaeum (pasture-grass). Andropogon refractus (barbed wire-grass). Tragus racemosus (burr-grass). Eragrostis brownii, var. ...
— Tropic Days • E. J. Banfield
... was turned against the supporting German trenches; but the Teutons' wire entanglements remained intact. Heretofore the big guns had been able to sweep such obstructions away. When the infantry reached the barbed wire, it found the Germans had improved this particular method of defense by using specially manufactured wire cable, well barbed, which was from one and one-half to two inches in diameter. And, to protect their cable entanglements, the Germans had built parapets in front of the entanglements. ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume V (of 12) - Neuve Chapelle, Battle of Ypres, Przemysl, Mazurian Lakes • Francis J. Reynolds, Allen L. Churchill, and Francis Trevelyan
... it was not sufficient. He climbed over all the fences round the neighbouring villas, over all the walls that were protected by barbed wire and ...
— The Son of His Mother • Clara Viebig
... Enid's assistance he got into a night course at the university, and proceeded to attack his ignorance with something of the fierce determination he had attacked the Hun the year before in France. He plunged through bogs of history, got hopelessly entangled in the barbed wire of mathematics, had hand-to-hand struggles with belligerent parts of speech, and more than once suffered the shell-shock of despair. But his watchword now, as then, was, "Up and at 'em!" And before long he had the satisfaction of seeing his enemy ...
— Quin • Alice Hegan Rice
... home begging for more engineers, a lot of hand grenades, trench mortars, periscopes and tools. The barbed wire bothers me! Am specially keen about trench mortars; if it comes to close fighting on the Peninsula with its restricted area trench mortars may make up for our lack of artillery and especially of howitzers. Luckily, they can be turned ...
— Gallipoli Diary, Volume I • Ian Hamilton
... protect his eyes or wear it so as to protect the base of the skull . . . Military experts admit that continuance of the present trench warfare may lead to those engaged in it, especially bombing parties and barbed wire cutters, being more heavily armoured than the knights, who fought at Bouvines and at Agincourt.—The Times, July ...
— The Angels of Mons • Arthur Machen
... country there is such a place,—a wide, rough, sage-grown expanse where cattle and horses and sheep scarce know the look of barbed wire, and where brands are still the sole mark of ownership. Set down between high mountain ranges, remote, sufficient unto itself, rudely prosperous, the Black Rim country has yet to ...
— Rim o' the World • B. M. Bower
... Yet when we attempt to provide for the Belgians by finding work for them the Board of Trade has to point out that by doing so we are taking the bread out of the mouths of our own people. Hence we arrive at the remarkable situation of starving Britons and Belgians looking hungrily through barbed wire fences at flourishing communities of jolly and well fed German prisoners of war (whose friendly hat wavings to me and my fellow passengers as I rush through Newbury Racecourse Station in the Great Western Express I hereby acknowledge publicly with all possible good feeling). I therefore ...
— New York Times, Current History, Vol 1, Issue 1 - From the Beginning to March, 1915 With Index • Various
... 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 to ...
— 1914 • John French, Viscount of Ypres
... in Austria committed suicide when at length the Transvaal ceased to be a "nation.") Men went through the seat of that war after it was all over, and found humanity unchanged, except for a general impoverishment, and the convenience of an unlimited supply of empty ration tins and barbed wire and cartridge cases—unchanged and resuming with a slight perplexity all its old habits and misunderstandings, the nigger still in his slum-like kraal, the white in his ugly ill-managed shanty. ...
— In the Days of the Comet • H. G. Wells
... Doc. He hadn't touched her bottle though his insides were probably snarled up like barbed wire for the want of it. He'd shaved and pressed a shirt instead so he'd look decent enough to rate a shot of gin she'd offer him as a reward. It wasn't such a doubtful gamble at that, because Doc has a way with him when he bothers ...
— To Remember Charlie By • Roger Dee
... the advertisement and crowing gladsome; "they'll take to that like your temp'rance aunt to brandy cough-drops. We'll have to put up barbed wire to keep 'em off." ...
— Cape Cod Stories - The Old Home House • Joseph C. Lincoln
... her company was ordered over the top to capture the German sector opposite them, and with fixed bayonets the men moved forward under a heavy fire from the batteries of their own artillery. It was a severe attack, bravely delivered, but doomed to failure because the barbed wire entanglements of the enemy had not been destroyed by the Russian shells. Men dropped by the score, and when the company was finally compelled to retreat there were only seventy left out of two hundred and fifty that had begun the advance. Maria was one of the ...
— A Treasury of Heroes and Heroines - A Record of High Endeavour and Strange Adventure from 500 B.C. to 1920 A.D. • Clayton Edwards
... successfully practiced during his reign of terror in the coke regions. Secretly, and while peace negotiations were being purposely prolonged, Frick supervised the military preparations, the fortification of the Homestead Steel Works, the erection of a high board fence, capped with barbed wire and provided with loopholes for sharpshooters. And then, in the dead of night, he attempted to smuggle his army of hired Pinkerton thugs into Homestead, which act precipitated the terrible carnage of the steel workers. Not content with ...
— Anarchism and Other Essays • Emma Goldman
... villas, and even the Kursaal all closely boarded up with lead-coloured shutters. Only other person on Promenade a fisher-boy scrooping over the tiles in sabots. I come to a glazed shelter, and find the seats choked with drifting sand, and protected with barbed wire. This depresses me. I did not want to sit down—but the barbed wire does seem needlessly unkind. Walk along the sand-dunes; must pass the time somehow till dinner, and the arrival of my luggage. Wonder ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 102, June 4, 1892 • Various
... facts necessary to make him as harmless as he was happy; chiefly not to bark at old ladies and babies, no matter how threatening their aspect, as they passed our house. A few things he had already learned—to avoid fences of the barbed wire, to respect the big cat from across the way who sometimes called and treated him with watchful disdain, and not to chew a baby robin if by any chance he caught one. This last had been a hard lesson, his first contact with a problem only a few days younger than Eden itself. It came ...
— The Boss of Little Arcady • Harry Leon Wilson
... was now in sight. The German cause was doomed. One great victory remained to be gained, the clearing of the Argonne forest, wild, tangled, meshed with thousands of miles of barbed wire, crowded with machine gun nests and swept with a hurricane of shot and shell. But nothing could stop America's boys now that their blood was up, and they did much in helping to win here the final and greatest battle of the war. All the Army Boys, fighting like tigers, ...
— Army Boys on German Soil • Homer Randall
... streets were howling mobs, every constable was on duty. The hall was stormed and when Lloyd George appeared on the platform he faced turmoil. Hundreds of men carried sticks, clubs and bricks covered with rags and fastened to barbed wire. When he rose to speak Bedlam let loose. Jeers, catcalls and frightful epithets rained on him and with them rocks and vegetables. He removed his overcoat and stood calm and smiling. When he raised his voice, however, the grand assault was made. Only a double cordon of constables ...
— The War After the War • Isaac Frederick Marcosson
... seemed to have an exact map of the country in his mind; he soon left the station road, went around a house, through a vineyard, till he struck a stone fence that crossed his course at right angles; this he followed eastward till it was joined by a barbed wire fence, under which he passed and again entered the highway he had first taken. Then down the road he paddled with renewed confidence: under the trees, down a hill, through a grove, over a bridge, up ...
— The Wit of a Duck and Other Papers • John Burroughs
... answered her. One wild leap in the air, and the sound of tearing clothes as her already tattered skirt came in contact with the barbed wire—and Tess was crouching down in the safe-keeping of the brindle bull. The dog whirled frantically around, licking her face. Fear weakened her tongue—she could not speak—only little spasmodic sobs burst from the parted lips. She caught the huge dog ...
— Tess of the Storm Country • Grace Miller White
... been warned to be on their guard against wire-worms, and special constables are keeping a sharp look-out by the potato-beds. A still more efficacious method of protection is to enclose the allotment with barbed wire-wormless. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, March 14, 1917 • Various
... those days, and it remained the nearest neighbor still, with the exception of one usurper and outcast homesteader, Alan Macdonald by name, who had invaded the land over which Chadron laid his extensive claim. Fifteen miles up the river from the grand white house Macdonald had strung his barbed wire and carried in the irrigation ditch to his alfalfa field. He had chosen the most fertile spot in the vast plain through which the river swept, and it was in the heart of ...
— The Rustler of Wind River • G. W. Ogden
... the house, low, white and roomy, with broad porches and wide windows; further down the coulee, at the base of a gentle slope, were the sheds, the high, round corrals and the haystacks. Great, board gates were distributed in seemingly useless profusion, while barbed wire fences stretched away in all directions. A small creek, bordered with cottonwoods and scraggly willows, wound aimlessly away ...
— Chip, of the Flying U • B. M. Bower
... doing that for their charges the Red Cross people soon hope to have enough workers to take care of mending the aviators' clothes, for aviators have to wear lots of clothes, and, when they land in trees, in barbed wire, on stone walls and so forth, their clothes suffer in consequence. A doughboy, who wears one suit at a time, doesn't have a hard job keeping it in order; but an aviator with heaven knows how many layers ...
— The Stars & Stripes, Vol 1, No 1, February 8, 1918, - The American Soldiers' Newspaper of World War I, 1918-1919 • American Expeditionary Forces
... her eyes, her fine white hands were folded in her lap. There was in voice and manner an air of finality, which was as impervious as a barrier of barbed wire. Not for any bribe in the world would I have attempted to ...
— The Lady of the Basement Flat • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... sometimes both. On the night of my re-arrival I went up with the digging party, and have the honour to report the following conversation between a certain one of our diggers and a friend who loomed up carrying about four engineer dug-outs, two coils of barbed wire, and a maul. You could just make out the man under it all as he stumbled erratically along a ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 150, February 2, 1916 • Various
... advance over a front of plain bounded by a river with hills beyond. They cleared the plain, they crossed the river, they fought a battle very like our own battle of the Aisne upon the slopes of the hills, taking 20,000 Austrian prisoners, and now they are faced by barbed wire, machine guns, cemented trenches, and every other device which has held them as it has held every one else. But remember what they have done for the common cause and be grateful for it. They have in a year occupied some forty Austrian divisions, and relieved our Russian allies to that very appreciable ...
— A Visit to Three Fronts • Arthur Conan Doyle
... he had "improved;" it gloried in what looked at a little distance like a single-file procession of glaring new posts, which on approaching were found to be the supports of one of man's neighborly devices—barbed wire. Rejoicing in this work of his hands on the left, he longed to turn his murderous weapons against the right side. He was labored with; he bided his time; but I knew in my heart that whoever went there next summer would find ...
— Little Brothers of the Air • Olive Thorne Miller
... Orange River Colony had been marked off into sections by the rows of blockhouses strung upon barbed wire. Drive after drive had been made into these enclosures; and every drive had brought its bag of game. But still the general himself had eluded them. Early in February, however, a giant drive had been planned, directed away from the enclosure in order that, once De Wet took refuge in his ...
— On the Firing Line • Anna Chapin Ray and Hamilton Brock Fuller
... thickness of sandbags. A 6 or 8-inch high-explosive shell, which is the largest caliber practicable for trench warfare, may burst near a double layer of bags of stone rubble without hurting anyone in a cellar 30 feet underneath. The rain of shrapnel bullets which mows the barbed wire in front of a trench, as hail mows ripening grain, will not reach a single man in the trench to the rear, if he ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume I (of 8) - Introductions; Special Articles; Causes of War; Diplomatic and State Papers • Various
... either side of us was a rich and highly cultivated country. There were hedgerows as neat as those which separate our English fields; and here and there a fox-hunter would have observed with disgust that barbed wire fences had spread as far as Java. At regular intervals, bamboo cottages with red-tiled roofs had been built for the signalmen. Among the fields were scattered groups of tropical trees, palms, and bamboos; and more than once we caught far-off glimpses ...
— A Visit to Java - With an Account of the Founding of Singapore • W. Basil Worsfold
... past the face of the moon and cold illumination flooded the narrow lane and patched with light the drive leading up to the front of the isolated mansion. Wrought-iron gates closed both entrances and a high wall, surmounted by broken glass and barbed wire, ...
— The Golden Scorpion • Sax Rohmer
... pounded the enemy (and having but few rounds this did not last very long) we were given the order to advance. First we went over the wall,—and you must remember that every fence in this country, stone, snake, or otherwise, is decorated with barbed wire—and formed our line, lying flat, a couple of rods beyond it. Now we put in practice for the whole battalion the tactics we had studied by platoons, sending men forward from the right by squads in rushes, making a new line by degrees, always keeping ...
— At Plattsburg • Allen French
... purpose; a place which the hounded bear and deer had avoided even when hard driven, and inviting only to copperhead, skunk, and fox. About it lay "laurel-hells" thick-matted and gnarled, briars that were like entanglements of barbed wire, and woods so black of recess that bats flew through their corridors of pine at midday. But these men had cut, and used familiarly, tortuous and hidden zig-zags of entry and exit, and they came separately from ...
— The Roof Tree • Charles Neville Buck
... old lane is glorified, even the barbed wire fence on either side scintillates. The house is too small, I am going out on the River Road, and see the cherry blossoms on the hill sides and the sunlight on the water, and feel the road under my feet. I feel like a prospector who has struck gold. Whatever comes of it all, for ...
— Lady of the Decoration • Frances Little |
