War & Military Books

CHAPTER I A MYSTERIOUS VISITATION "Who's there?" demanded Christy Passford, sitting up in his bed, in the middle of the night, in his room on the second floor of his father's palatial mansion on the Hudson, where the young lieutenant was waiting for a passage to the Gulf. There was no answer to his inquiry. "Who's there?" he repeated in a louder tone. All was as still as... more...

THE DITCH THE BOYan American soldierTHE BOY'S DREAM OF HIS MOTHERANGÉLIQUEFrench childrenJEAN-BAPTISTEFrench childrenTHE TEACHERTHE ONE SCHOOLGIRL WITH IMAGINATIONTHE THREE SCHOOLGIRLS WITHOUT IMAGINATIONHESHETHE AMERICAN GENERALTHE ENGLISH STATESMAN The Time.—A summer day in 1918 and a summer day in 2018[pg 003]FIRST ACT The time is a summer day in 1918. The scene is the first-line trench of... more...

CHAPTER I London lay as if washed with water-colour that Sunday morning, light blue sky and pale dancing sunlight wooing the begrimed stones of Westminster like a young girl with an old lover. The empty streets, clean-swept, were bathed in the light, and appeared to be transformed from the streets of week-day life. Yet the half of Londoners lay late abed, perhaps because six mornings a week of reality... more...

Chapter 1: Fresh from Ireland. A number of officers of O'Brien's regiment of foot, forming a part of the Irish Brigade in the service of France, were gathered in a handsome apartment in the Rue des Fosses, on the 20th of June, 1701, when the door opened, and their colonel entered with a young officer in the uniform of the regiment. "I have asked you here, gentlemen all," he said,... more...

CHAPTER I. THE TWIN EAGLETS. Autumn was upon the world -- the warm and gorgeous autumn of the south -- autumn that turned the leaves upon the trees to every hue of russet, scarlet, and gold, that transformed the dark solemn aisles of the trackless forests of Gascony into what might well have been palaces of fairy beauty, and covered the ground with a thick and soundless carpet of almost every hue of... more...

I Frances Harrison was sitting out in the garden under the tree that her husband called an ash-tree, and that the people down in her part of the country called a tree of Heaven. It was warm under the tree, and Frances might have gone to sleep there and wasted an hour out of the afternoon, if it hadn't been for the children. Dorothy, Michael and Nicholas were going to a party, and Nicky was... more...

PRELUDE It was graduation day at West Point, and there had been a remarkable scene at the morning ceremonies. In the presence of the Board of Visitors, the full-uniformed officers of the academic and military staff, the august professors and their many assistants, scores of daintily dressed women and dozens of sober-garbed civilians, the assembled Corps of Cadets, in their gray and white, had risen as... more...

Preface. As many boys into whose hands the present volume may fall will not have read my last year's book, With Moore in Corunna, of which this is a continuation, it is necessary that a few words should be said, to enable them to take up the thread of the story. It was impossible, in the limits of one book, to give even an outline of the story of the Peninsular War, without devoting the whole... more...

CHAPTER I. MR. FALKIRK. "We may shut our eyes, but we cannot help knowingThat skies are clear and grass is growing." When one has in charge a treasure which one values greatly, and which, if once made known one is pretty sure to lose, I suppose the impulse of most men would be towards a hiding- place. So, at any rate, felt one of the men in this history. Schools had done their secluding work... more...

CHAPTER I AN UNEXPECTED VISITOR "Cornelius!" exclaimed Captain Passford, as a young man of nineteen was shown into the library of the magnificent dwelling of the millionnaire at Bonnydale, on the Hudson. "Cornelius Passford, Uncle Horatio," replied the young man, as the captain rushed to him and extended his hand. "I think there can be no mistake about it; and I should have been no... more...