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Now that Von Mackensen had pried the lid off, Brussilov's men in the south encountered enormous difficulties in extricating themselves from the Carpathian foothills, suddenly transformed from comparative strongholds into death-traps and no longer tenable. They suffered severely, especially the Forty-eighth Division.
In 1838, in company with Haliburton, he was on his way to England on the Tyrian, one of the old ten-gun brigs which carried the mails, slow and uncomfortable at the best, unseaworthy death-traps in a storm. As she lay rolling in a flat calm with flapping sails, a few hundred miles from England, a smear appeared on the western horizon.
Residential quarters of this description, given time to loop-hole and barricade them, would form fairly good defensive cover, except against artillery; but unprepared for defence they are mere death-traps. To add to the untenable nature of the position the Residency was completely commanded from several directions, and especially from a high flat-roofed house only eighty yards distant.
It was thus he had outwitted the heady barons of Aquitaine when little more than a lad, and had turned the hill forts into death-traps against their tenants. He had the secret of swift marching by night, of delivering assault upon assault, so that while you staggered under one blow you received another full.
The storekeeper, with excellent forethought, had showered sticky papers, spread with molasses and mucilage, broadcast about the shelves, to ensnare the unwary pests. But though hundreds were lured to their death by sirupy drowning, the attacking host remained undiminished, and the death-traps only succeeded in adding disgusting odors to the already laden atmosphere.
But when the poor Mexican peons set out, they had nothing behind them but the branding iron, or slavery in the mines, if they failed. Yet they sang as they sailed their rickety death-traps, and they laughed as they rowed; and when the tide-rip caught them, they sank without a cry to any but the Virgin. Look at a map of the west coast of the Pacific from the Horn to Sitka.
That such a wonder existed has been known for some years, and three collectors have gone in search of it; two died, and the third has been terribly ill since his return to Europe but he won the treasure, which we shall behold in good time. Those parts of Madagascar which especially attract botanists must be death-traps indeed!
The buildings in case of fire are death-traps; but the law obliges the owners to provide some apparent means of escape, which they do in the form of iron balconies and ladders, giving that festive air to their facades which I have already noted.
Nathan Hornby was to learn that legislative assemblies were death-traps to those whom providence had failed to coach in diplomacy and judgment, that legislation was a game at which none but gamesters might successfully play, a devouring flame singeing the wings of all who failed to distinguish between the light of a common candle and that of a real sun, that it was a nightmare to most, and ticklish business for all.
The curtains of the opposite berths yawned asunder and out came the Germans, astonishingly cured of their sea-sickness, and struggled vigorously into their life-jackets and then into fur coats, and had the fur coats instantly pulled off again by a very energetic steward who ran in and said fur coats in the water were death-traps, a steward so much bent on saving people that he began to pull off the other things the German ladies had on as well, saying while he pulled, disregarding their protests, that in the water Mother Nature was the best.
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