"Debacle" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... N. {ant. 161} destruction; waste, dissolution, breaking up; diruption[obs3], disruption; consumption; disorganization. fall, downfall, devastation, ruin, perdition, crash; eboulement[French], smash, havoc, delabrement[French], debacle; break down, break up, fall apart; prostration; desolation, bouleversement[Fr], wreck, wrack, shipwreck, cataclysm; washout. extinction, annihilation; destruction of life &c. 361; knock-down blow; doom, crack of doom. destroying &c. v.; demolition, demolishment; overthrow, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... imagination rushing with him down the valley of Virginia on the heels of our flying army, or gloomily toiling back to the Potomac after the bloody days at Gettysburg, or watching the last grand debacle on the road from Richmond to Appomattox. They would have sat there till sunset if Carrington had not at length insisted that they must go, and then she rose slowly with a ...
— Democracy An American Novel • Henry Adams
... police car was waiting outside, and they headed for it. Bruce Gordon looked at the debacle left behind the drunken, looting mob. Most of the barricades were down. Here and there, a few citizens were rushing about trying to restore them, keeping wary eyes on the mobsters who had passed ...
— Police Your Planet • Lester del Rey
... casualties were endless. A thousand a night often along the French front—and yet no real advance. The far-flung battle was practically at a stand-still. And beyond, the chaos in the Balkans, the Serbian debacle! No—the world was full of lamentation, mourning and woe; and who could tell how Armageddon would turn? His quick mind travelled through all the alternative possibilities ahead, on fire for his country. But ...
— Missing • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... penetratingly, she avoided my eye as she talked and interrupted everything I had to say; she kept stabbing fiercely at the cushions of her sofa with a long hat-pin and pretending she was overwhelmed with grief at the DEBACLE she was deliberately organising. ...
— The New Machiavelli • Herbert George Wells
... his fellows, was wholly charmed with the prospect of playing, and the old piano was assailed with a diligence reminiscent of the youthful Haendel. So it happened that Harry was practising in mid-afternoon on the day when Leofwin Balch called, something over a week after the debacle of Nancy's social ...
— Tutors' Lane • Wilmarth Lewis
... nothing short of a debacle. He had pulled out the keystone of an invisible edifice which had come tumbling about their ears, leaving him in safety. Without knowing how or why, he knew he had got the better of them all. The grins died out of the upturned faces. They looked at him ...
— The Dark House • I. A. R. Wylie
... sat on the road we began to see the French stragglers—men without arms, wounded men, teams, wagons, civilians, refugees—some by the roads, some across country, all talking, shouting—the very picture of debacle. I must say they were the "tag enders" of a fighting line rather than the line itself. They streamed on, and shouted to us scraps of not too inspiriting information while we stood and took our medicine, and picked out gun positions in the fields in ...
— In Flanders Fields and Other Poems - With an Essay in Character, by Sir Andrew Macphail • John McCrae
... Lord John Russell set the example. Personally the Minister was to be kindly treated; politically he was negligible; he was there to be put aside. London and Paris imitated Lord John. Every one waited to see Lincoln and his hirelings disappear in one vast debacle. All conceived that the Washington Government would soon crumble, and that Minister Adams would ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams
... corpse upon his shoulders, and the course of the war during the first three months would seem to confirm this view. So far as Austria-Hungary is concerned, its two outstanding features have been the signal failure of the "punitive expedition" against Serbia and the debacle of Auffenberg's army in Galicia. Friendly observers were prepared for a break-down in the higher command and were aware that many Slav regiments could not be relied upon, but they had expected more from the German and Magyar sections of the army and from the very efficient officers' ...
— The War and Democracy • R.W. Seton-Watson, J. Dover Wilson, Alfred E. Zimmern,
... placed his courier and his private omnibus at our disposal, in after years one of my cousins, the late Montague Vizetelly, accompanied Russell to South America. I still have some letters which the latter wrote me respecting Zola's novel "La Debacle," in which he ...
— My Days of Adventure - The Fall of France, 1870-71 • Ernest Alfred Vizetelly |
