"Loopholed" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... flat and brown as an oaken floor, to the snowy crescent of the Alps. Scenes of past wars it still bears upon its face, in its farm-houses clustered together for common protection, in the stout walls and loopholed watch-towers of its towns, record of its warlike and eventful past. One must be prosaic indeed whose imagination remains unstirred by a journey across this historic plain, which has been invaded by Celts, Istrians, and Romans; Huns, Goths, and Lombards; Franks, Germans, and Austrians ...
— Italy at War and the Allies in the West • E. Alexander Powell
... Edinburgh wynd; but Bobby stopped, uncertain as to where this narrow roadway, that curved upward to the right, might lead. It was not a dark fissure in a cliff of houses, but was bounded on the outer side by a loopholed wall, and on the inner by a rocky ledge of ascending levels. Wherever the shelf was of sufficient breadth a battery of cannon was mounted, and such a flood of light fell from above and flashed on polished steel and brass as to make the little dog blink in bewilderment. And he whirled like ...
— Greyfriars Bobby • Eleanor Atkinson
... there of witnesses? If the townspeople here had listened to me, you would have found the streets barricaded, the houses loopholed, and the people in arms to hold the town against you to the last man. But you arrived, unfortunately, before we had got out of the talking stage; and then it was ...
— The Devil's Disciple • George Bernard Shaw
... similes, no points of comparison, no flaw in its polished facets, no handle by which he could hold it up and view its shape and structure, as he familiarly and often contemptuously had done with other towns. The houses were interminable ramparts loopholed for defense; the people were bright but bloodless spectres passing ...
— The Trimmed Lamp • O. Henry
... Thither, in 1608, he went, and sailing up the river to a point where a mighty promontory rears its head, disembarked and erected the first rude huts of the city which he called by the Indian name of Quebec, or "The Narrows." A wooden wall was built, mounting a few small cannon and loopholed for musketry, and the conquest of Canada had begun. A magnificent cargo of furs was dispatched to France, and Champlain and twenty-eight men were left to winter at Quebec. When spring came, only nine ...
— American Men of Action • Burton E. Stevenson
... Chateau rose a tower of rough masonry—crenellated on top, and loopholed on the sides—which had been built as a place of defence and refuge during the Indian wars of the preceding century. Often had the prowling bands of Iroquois turned away baffled and dismayed at the sight of the little fortalice surmounted by a culverin or two, ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... were strongest in defence, and acted accordingly. Every place they held was turned into a hive of cells, in which they lurked, stings ready. It was generally some kopje covered with loose stones, cracks, and crevices, while the open portions were soon made formidable with loopholed walls of loosely built-up stones. If their resting-place was in the more open country, it was a laager whose walls were the wagons, banked up and strengthened with stakes, thorn bushes, and a terrible entanglement of ...
— The Kopje Garrison - A Story of the Boer War • George Manville Fenn
... shape is triangular. The apex is 'Tower Hill,' so named from a ruined martello, supposed to have been built by the Dutch, and till lately used for stores. The barracks, which lodge one of the West India regiments, are six large blocks crowning the hill-crest and girt with a low and loopholed wall. In winter, or rather in the December summer, the slopes are clad in fine golden stubbles, the only spectacle of the kind which this part of the coast affords. Though not more than four hundred feet or so above sea-level, the barracks are free ...
— To the Gold Coast for Gold - A Personal Narrative in Two Volumes.—Vol. I • Richard F. Burton
... spacious and handsome, much of it, including the crypt and tower, coming down from the time of Edward III., with enlargements in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. It is a picturesque yet venerable building, with many gables and curious chimneys, and surmounted by a square tower and loopholed turret. But its chief interest attaches to the two ancient cellars known as the crypt and the dungeon: the crypt is about twelve feet square, excavated in the limestone rock, and having a Gothic vaulted ...
— England, Picturesque and Descriptive - A Reminiscence of Foreign Travel • Joel Cook
... the Col of Vizzavona, nearly 4000 feet above the level of the sea, we find a loopholed barrack, surrounded by a ditch, where a small force of the gendarmerie is stationed to operate against the brigands. Standing among bare rocks, with the precipices of Monte d'Oro frowning above it, the position is most dismal. Fancy that bleak barrack in the ...
— Rambles in the Islands of Corsica and Sardinia - with Notices of their History, Antiquities, and Present Condition. • Thomas Forester
... itself was an oblong square, and required three hundred men to man its walls; it was built of mud, with a large bastion at each angle three and four stories high, and loopholed. It had but one gate, on which the nature of the defences afforded means for concentrating a heavy fire. Immediately facing the gate, and detached from buildings of inferior importance, was the Khan's own residence, and some low flat-roofed houses lining the inside of the ...
— A Peep into Toorkisthhan • Rollo Burslem
... up late on the 14th to the fact that loopholed barricades had been everywhere begun on our streets, as effective bars to the inrush of savage torch-bearing desperadoes, each Legation doing its own work; and that the Chinese Government, with its likes and dislikes, would have to be seriously and cynically disregarded if we ...
— Indiscreet Letters From Peking • B. L. Putman Weale
... an utterly different state of things and people—to a rougher, coarser time. Their towers and walls, where the jackdaws build in the ivy; their moats, where the hoary carp bask and fatten; their drawbridges and heavy doors and loopholed windows,—these all tell of the unrest, the semi-war-like state of feudal days, when each great seigneur was a petty king in his own county, with his private as well as public feuds, and his little army of men-at-arms ready to do his bidding, to sally forth ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 26, August, 1880 - of Popular Literature and Science • Various
... Marie which the Jesuits built on Isle St Joseph was in the nature of a strong fort. Its walls were of stone and cement, fourteen feet high and loopholed. At each corner there was a protecting bastion, and the entire structure was surrounded by a deep moat. It was practically impregnable against Indian attack, for it could not be undermined, set on fire, or taken by assault. A handful of men could hold it against ...
— The Jesuit Missions: - A Chronicle of the Cross in the Wilderness • Thomas Guthrie Marquis
... walls behind us, we found all the roads guarded by French troops and barred by elaborate obstructions. Every two or three minutes we were brought to a stop by little gated forts built across the highway, which were loopholed for rifles and commanded the road in both directions. These were designed to retard German scouting parties or halt German mitrailleuse automobiles. The barriers were built of an extraordinary variety of material: trees, paving-stones, barrels, carts, hen-coops, sandbags, boxes, and fence-rails. ...
— The Note-Book of an Attache - Seven Months in the War Zone • Eric Fisher Wood
... time, sir," answered Dolly Venn, wisely. "They can never get below if you cover the door; and I can keep the sea. It's lucky Czerny loopholed this place, anyway. If ever I meet him I shall quote poetry: 'He nursed the pinion which impelled the steel.' It would about ...
— The House Under the Sea - A Romance • Sir Max Pemberton
... converted into a stronghold. The windows were high up in the walls, and a platform had been erected inside for the sailors to fire from the windows, which were partially blocked with sandbags. The houses on the outside of the village had all been loopholed, and had been connected by breastworks of earth. Other defenses had been thrown up further back in case the outworks should be carried. The mission house in the main street and the huts which surrounded it formed, with the church, the ...
— By Sheer Pluck - A Tale of the Ashanti War • G. A. Henty
... Adige at Zevio, so as to make a dash on Mantua, and in order to protect his flank he had sent a detachment of Croats to hold Arcola. These now stoutly disputed Augereau's progress, pouring in from the loopholed cottages volleys which tore away the front of every column of attack. In vain did Augereau, seizing the colours, lead his foremost regiment to the bridge of Arcola. Riddled by the musketry, his men fell back in disorder. In vain did Bonaparte himself, dismounting from his charger, ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose
... workingmen. The drill in street firing—a quite new feature in the training of the American militiaman, and a most ominous one—became the prominent test of efficiency. Stone and brick armories, fortified against attack, loopholed for musketry and mounted with guns to sweep the streets, were erected at the strategic points of the large cities. In some instances the militia, which, after all, was pretty near the people, had, however, shown such unwillingness to fire on strikers and such symptoms ...
— Equality • Edward Bellamy
... survivors ran back, five of the Guards, Colonel Macdonnell, Captain Wyndham, Ensign Gooch, Ensign Hervey, and Sergeant Graham, by sheer strength, closed the gate again, in spite of the efforts of the French from without, and effectually barricaded it against further assaults. Over and through the loopholed wall of the courtyard, the English garrison now kept up a deadly fire of musketry, which was fiercely answered by the French, who swarmed round the curtilage like ravening wolves. Shells, too, from their batteries, were falling fast into the besieged place, one of which ...
— The Fifteen Decisive Battles of The World From Marathon to Waterloo • Sir Edward Creasy, M.A.
... been out from before daybreak with the Imperial Light Horse and the battery of the Natal Volunteer Artillery reconnoitring towards Elandslaagte. The armoured train—slate-colour plated engine, a slate-colour plated loopholed cattle-truck before and behind, an open truck with a Maxim at the tail of all—puffed along on his right. Elandslaagte is a little village and railway station seventeen miles north-east of Ladysmith, where two days ...
— From Capetown to Ladysmith - An Unfinished Record of the South African War • G. W. Steevens
... the docks were sufficiently defended by the factories, like Ringsend and Boland's bakery, vast straggling buildings on either side of the railway approach, and which were not only occupied, but stored with food and ammunition and loopholed and sandbagged to stand ...
— Six days of the Irish Republic - A Narrative and Critical Account of the Latest Phase of Irish Politics • Louis Redmond-Howard
... the customary sort, the fronts of which were open so that mounted customers from the country might ride in to make their purchases. Crowning two commanding eminences just outside the village limits were the loopholed fortinas, where for months past the ...
— Rainbow's End • Rex Beach
... sail-arms about seventy-five feet long, which occupied a commanding position, and had been taken possession of by a company of about thirty men, who called themselves the Le Sueur Tigers, most of whom had rifles. They barricaded themselves with sacks of flour and wheat, loopholed the building and kept the savages at a respectful distance from the west side of the town. A rifle ball will bury itself in a sack of flour or wheat, but will not penetrate it. During the battle the men dug out several of them, and brought them ...
— The History of Minnesota and Tales of the Frontier • Charles E. Flandrau
... as they always are at night. The shutters are heavy and strongly barred, and we have but to draw the chains across the doors. They will find it hard work to fire the house, for the logs are wet from this morning's shower. There is ammunition enough, and the shutters are loopholed. If we were in force, we might hold out, but, my God! what can we do? Even with the overseers whom we must manage to call to us, if we can do so without arousing suspicion, we are not enough to defend one face of ...
— Prisoners of Hope - A Tale of Colonial Virginia • Mary Johnston
... fell before the advancing Germans, and made no stand till they got to the Faubourg St. Nicholas, the northeast suburb of Dijon. The greater number of the Germans stationed themselves on the embankment, but the walls of the vineyard, plentifully loopholed, pressed them hard with shot. Toward evening the second battalion of the 61st, to which Wilhelm belonged, received the order to advance. Over pleasure-gardens and vineyards they went, through poor people's deserted houses the four companies ...
— The Malady of the Century • Max Nordau
... how it was: a spring of clear water rose almost at the top of a knoll. Well, on the knoll, and enclosing the spring, they had clapped a stout log-house, fit to hold two-score people on a pinch, and loopholed for musketry on every side. All round this they had cleared a wide space, and then the thing was completed by a paling six feet high, without door or opening, too strong to pull down without time ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 6 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... cliff and the river front, not far from the market place of Quebec City to-day, workmen began clearing the woods for the site of the French habitation. The little fort was palisaded, of course, with a moat outside and cannon commanding the river. The walls were loopholed for musketry; and inside ran a gallery to serve as lookout and defense. Houses, barracks, garden, and fresh-water supply completed the fort. One day, as Champlain {46} worked in his garden, a colonist begged to speak with ...
— Canada: the Empire of the North - Being the Romantic Story of the New Dominion's Growth from Colony to Kingdom • Agnes C. Laut |
