"Firing line" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the seventy Americans at Villingen wished themselves anywhere outside the prison camp, and most of all back on the firing line, helping to win. ...
— Winning a Cause - World War Stories • John Gilbert Thompson and Inez Bigwood
... army had not served an apprenticeship between the shafts of the rickshaw, they must at least have passed through some training equally severe. On the expedition to Pekin they carried with them a number of light calibre guns, which they pulled into action, without horses, right into the firing line. In every detail of their camp equipment, food-supply, and field hospital corps, there was a neatness of packing and arrangement which apparently resulted in their carrying all their requirements in about a third less space than any of the others. The simple fare of ...
— Impressions of a War Correspondent • George Lynch
... "comparatively few of our men were injured." Captain Capron at this time received his mortal wound and the firing became so terrific that the last remaining troop of the reserve was absorbed by the firing line, and the whole regiment ordered to advance very slowly. The Spanish line yielded and the advance soon showed that in falling back the enemy had taken a new position, about three hundred yards in front of the advancing regiment. ...
— The Colored Regulars in the United States Army • T. G. Steward
... people behind the firing line should give one confidence. I had heard that the Italians were a nervous people. It does not apply to this part of Italy. As I approached the danger spot I saw rows of large, fat gentlemen with long thin black cigars leaning ...
— A Visit to Three Fronts • Arthur Conan Doyle
... at any rate, we're a very comfortable distance behind the firing line. This has been the advanced base for the Kut show. By river we are 130 miles above Basra and about the same below Kut. The action there on the 27th and 28th was a great success, but the pursuit was unfortunately hung up and prevented our reaping quite the ...
— Letters from Mesopotamia • Robert Palmer
... to New Orleans with a message to General Jackson that the war with England had ceased and a treaty of peace had been signed. How different now! We reached General Miles, in Porto Rico, and he was able through the military telegraph to stop his army on the firing line with the message that the United States and Spain had signed a protocol suspending hostilities. We knew almost instanter of the first shots fired at Santiago, and the subsequent surrender of the Spanish forces was known at Washington within less than an hour of its consummation. The first ...
— The Art of Public Speaking • Dale Carnagey (AKA Dale Carnegie) and J. Berg Esenwein
... intervals, and then only to a slit, to catch a fleeting glance of—nothing. He realized vaguely that he was riding north, because the cattle would head for water, but that was all, save that he was animated by a desperate eagerness to gain the firing line, to join Pete and Billy, the two men who rode before that crazed mass of horns and hoofs and who were pleading and swearing and yelling in vain only a few feet ahead of annihilation—if they were still alive. A stumble, a moment's indecision, and the avalanche would roll over them ...
— Bar-20 Days • Clarence E. Mulford
... him most gracious. Alford was his soldier ideal, type of the best the battlefield may know. And, even if all this admiration did have in it much of youthful sentimentalism, it took nothing from his efficiency when he came to his place on the firing line. ...
— Winning the Wilderness • Margaret Hill McCarter
... piece of work was the establishing of an infectious Hospital for peasants and soldiers in Volhynia, sixty miles behind the firing line in Galicia. This was done at the urgent request ...
— Women and War Work • Helen Fraser
... After two weeks here and less than two months from enlistment, we are actually going at last to the firing line. By the time you receive this we shall already perhaps have had our 'bapteme de feu'. We have been engaged in the hardest kind of hard work — two weeks of beautiful autumn weather on the whole, frosty nights and sunny days and beautiful coloring on the sparse foliage that breaks here ...
— Poems • Alan Seeger
... hissing sound. It struck the man square in the breast, then reeling out of ranks he made a few strides towards where I was marching, his pocket-book in hand, and fell dead at my feet without a word or groan. He was the only man killed during the day in the brigade, and not even then on the firing line. Of course all will say these are only "coincidences," but be what they may, I give them as facts coming under my own eyes, and facts of the same nature came to the knowledge of hundreds and thousands of soldiers during every campaign, which none endeavor to explain, ...
— History of Kershaw's Brigade • D. Augustus Dickert
... tree with other belts, and when all was ready the ensign stepped aside to give the word. Just here there came a little pause prolonged beyond the moment of completed preparation. I knew not why they waited, having other things to think of. I saw the firing line drawn up with muskets leveled. I marked the row of weather-beaten faces pillowed on the gun-stocks with eyes asquint to sight the pieces. I remember counting up the pointing muzzles; remember wondering ...
— The Master of Appleby • Francis Lynde |
