Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: July 24, 2025
"Some of the best and bravest men in our army were silk-hatters at home. They were in the ranks, too, a lot of them just like John Ward. And some of the worst cowards and shirkers and slackers that ever lived belonged to our ancient and noble order of the horny-handed sons of toil, that Jake Vodell orates about.
No paternal government had organised the British spirit for patriotic ends; it became now peevish and impatient, like some ill-trained man who is sick, it directed itself no longer against the enemy alone but fitfully against imagined traitors and shirkers; it wasted its energies in a deepening and spreading net of internal squabbles and accusations.
Because of that discovery men who had been timid learnt how to face death gladly, shirkers how to shoulder responsibility, selfish people how to become decent through the fine humanity of sharing. Time-servers learnt how to get up off their bellies and confront misfortune with a laugh.
The conventual system was to him a survival of medievalism, a relic of the dark ages; the last refuge of the shirkers of the world. The communities themselves, if he had thought of them at all, had been regarded as a whole. He had never troubled to consider them as composed of single individuals. Today he thought of them as separate human beings and his intolerance increased.
May I not go further, and vouch for you, as Californians, that the faith of the fathers has not forsaken the sons that you still believe in the possibilities of the good land the Lord has given you, and mean to work them out; that you know what hour the national clock has struck, and are not mistaking this for the Eighteenth Century; that you will bid the men who have made that mistake, the men of little faith, the shirkers, the doubters, the carpers, the grumblers, begone, like Diogenes, to their tubs aye, better his instruction and require these his followers to get out of your light?
A cabin's troubles were its own troubles, and already they had ceased from the exertion of burying their dead. "It's almost weird," Smoke confided to Shorty. "I've met shirkers and loafers, but I never met so many all at one time. You heard what they said. They've never done a tap. I'll bet they haven't washed their own faces. No wonder they got scurvy."
And don't believe it's only what's happened to me, but there's big business men, they say, all of a sudden making a hundred francs a day extra because of the murdering, and them young men an' all, and a lot of toffed-up shirkers at the rear that's ten times stronger than this pack of half-dead Territorials that they haven't sent home even this morning yet, and they have beanos in the towns with their Totties and their jewels and champagne, like what Jusserand tells us!"
I don't want to have to find fault with a young beginner like you; but I don't have no shirkers aboard understand that." For one moment of terrible suspense the skipper's life hung in the balance, then the "Bruiser," restraining his natural instincts by a mighty effort, retreated, growling, to the galley. The skipper's breath came more freely.
When I think of the countless good fellows, married and single, but mainly married, who left all and followed the call of common decency and duty the moment the War broke out most of them now dead or crippled; and when I see this miserable handful of shirkers, holding up vital public business while the pros and cons of their wretched claims to exemption are considered well, I almost wish I had been born a Boche!"
In the warehouse he went about with eyes and ears open, devising in his mind new methods of moving goods, watching the men at work, marking the shirkers, preparing to pounce upon the tall German's place as foreman.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking