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If you should get all your part, the ten thousand, it would be only a small sum and easily spent. What do you want to do with so much just now?" "I told you I had bills to pay," she says, pettishly, "and dresses to get." Then she lights upon what seems to her a withering sarcasm. "I have no one to take me to Madame Vauban's and pay no end of bills.
We are triumphantly told that neither Clive nor Wellington could have passed the test which is prescribed for an aspirant to an engineer cadetship; as if, because Clive and Wellington did not do what was not required of them, they could not have done it if it had been required. If it be only meant to inform us that it is possible to be a great general without these things, so it is without many other things which are very useful to great generals. Alexander the Great had never heard of Vauban's rules, nor could Julius Cæsar speak French. We are next informed that book-worms, a term which seems to be held applicable to whoever has the smallest tincture of book-knowledge, may not be good at bodily exercises, or have the habits of gentlemen. This is a very common line of remark with dunces of condition; but, whatever the dunces may think, they have no monopoly of either gentlemanly habits or bodily activity. Wherever these are needed, let them be inquired into and separately provided for, not to the exclusion of mental qualifications, but in addition. Meanwhile, I am credibly informed that in the Military Academy at Woolwich the competition cadets are as superior to those admitted on the old system of nomination in these respects as in all others; that they learn even their drill more quickly, as indeed might be expected, for an intelligent person learns all things sooner than a stupid one; and that in general demeanor they contrast so favorably with their predecessors, that the authorities of the institutions are impatient for the day to arrive when the last remains of the old leaven shall have disappeared from the place. If this be so, and it is easy to ascertain whether it is so, it is to be hoped we shall soon have heard for the last time that ignorance is a better qualification than knowledge for the military, and,
His voice sounded sharp, and unnaturally loud. "Who are you, and what do you want? I know you; is it Nortier, Lireux?" "Hush, fool; dost not hear the tread of Vauban's men outside? You will call them down upon us with your babble." They were stamping through the passage as I spoke. "Ah!" and there was a world of relief and incredulity in his lowered tone. "Then you are not with Vauban?
But what would the great general have said, could be have seen his citadel thus dwarfed into insignificance by Vauban's magnificent fortifications? and what would be Vauban's amazement could he behold the stupendous works of modern strategists?
In a fortnight's close and painful application, which, by the bye, did my uncle Toby's wound, upon his groin, no good, he was enabled, by the help of some marginal documents at the feet of the elephant, together with Gobesius's military architecture and pyroballogy, translated from the Flemish, to form his discourse with passable perspicuity; and before he was two full months gone, he was right eloquent upon it, and could make not only the attack of the advanced counterscarp with great order; but having, by that time, gone much deeper into the art, than what his first motive made necessary, my uncle Toby was able to cross the Maes and Sambre; make diversions as far as Vauban's line, the abbey of Salsines, &c. and give his visitors as distinct a history of each of their attacks, as of that of the gate of St.
A crumbling block of masonry, the story of which is quite unknown, a round chapel dating from the days when Christianity was young among the Slavs and still found ready martyrs in its cause even among princes, and an enceinte of brick fortifications, stone-faced and in Vauban's best style, battered by Frederick the Great's guns, are all that Vyšehrad has to show by way of relics of a stormy past.
There stood also the Sieur de Lery, the King's engineer, charged with the fortification of the Colony, a man of Vauban's genius in the art of defence. Had the schemes which he projected, and vainly urged upon the heedless Court of Versailles, been carried into effect, the conquest of New France would have been an impossibility.
Several persons were killed in the trenches at the side of the king, and among these Mr. Godfrey, deputy-governor of the bank of England, who had come to the camp to confer with his majesty about remitting money for the payment of the army. On the thirtieth day of July the elector of Bavaria attacked Vauban's line that surrounded the works of the castle.
From ground near the old city of Arras I saw the preliminary bombardment when the Vimy Ridge was blasted by a hurricane of fire and the German lines beyond Arras were tossed up in earth and flame. From one of old Vauban's earthworks outside the walls I saw lines of our men going up in assault beyond the suburbs of Blangy and St.-Laurent to Roclincourt, through a veil of sleet and smoke.
A beginning was made with Tournai, an enormously strong place, and reckoned to be of the best of all Vauban's works. Marlborough employed stratagem, and it succeeded as usual. He made a pretence of advancing, and Villars, to strengthen his force, withdrew a number of troops from Tournai. Then the Duke, with a swift night movement, invested the town.
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