Rough Notes by an Old Soldier: During Fifty Years' Service, Volume 1

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Page 135 - For he who fights and runs away May live to fight another day ; But he who is in battle slain Can never rise and fight again.
Page 103 - English general, it is said, fixed his eyes attentively upon this formidable man, and speaking as if to himself, said, " Yonder is a great commander, but he is a cautious one and will delay his attack to ascertain the cause of these cheers; that will give time for the sixth division to arrive and I shall beat him.
Page 21 - ... hard battle for their post ; none would go back on either side, and yet the British could not get forward ; and men and officers, falling in heaps, choked up the passage, which from minute to minute was raked with grape from two guns flanking the top of the breach at the distance of a few yards ; thus striving and trampling alike upon the dead and the wounded, these brave men maintained the combat.
Page 30 - Let him consider that the slain died not all suddenly, nor by one manner of death ; that some perished by steel, some by shot, some by water, that some were crushed and mangled by heavy weights, some trampled upon, some dashed to atoms by the fiery explosions; that for hours this destruction was endured without shrinking, and that the town was won at last, let any man consider this and he must admit that a British army bears with it an awful power.
Page 334 - There is no other name given under heaven among men whereby we must be saved, but the name of Jesus.
Page 300 - ... entirely of gold, and Is eighty thousand miles in circumference. All its edifices are composed of jewels. The pillars of this heaven, and all the ornaments of the buildings, are of precious stones. The...
Page 31 - I be understood to select these as pre-eminent, many and signal were the other examples of unbounded devotion, some known, some that will never be known ; for in such a tumult much passed unobserved, and often the observers fell themselves ere they could bear testimony to what they saw ; but no age, no nation ever sent forth braver troops to battle than those who stormed Badajoz.
Page 308 - Nothing, perhaps, so much damps the ardour of a traveller in India as to find that he may wander league after league, visit city after city, village after village, and still only see the outside of Indian society. The house he cannot enter, the group he cannot join, the domestic circle he cannot gaze upon, the free, unrestrained converse of the natives he can never listen to.
Page 33 - Napoleon's troops fought in bright fields, where every helmet caught some beams of glory, but the British soldier conquered under the cold shade of aristocracy; no honours awaited his daring, no despatch gave his name to the applauses of his countrymen, his life of danger and hardship was uncheered by hope, his death unnoticed.
Page 26 - Then the soldiers eagerly made themselves ready for a combat, so fiercely fought, so terribly won, so dreadful in all its circumstances, that posterity can scarcely be expected to credit the tale ; but many are still alive who know that it is true.

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