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Bastion   Listen
noun
Bastion  n.  (Fort.) A work projecting outward from the main inclosure of a fortification, consisting of two faces and two flanks, and so constructed that it is able to defend by a flanking fire the adjacent curtain, or wall which extends from one bastion to another. Two adjacent bastions are connected by the curtain, which joins the flank of one with the adjacent flank of the other. The distance between the flanks of a bastion is called the gorge. A lunette is a detached bastion. See Ravelin.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Bastion" Quotes from Famous Books



... a black, bulging ridge like a bastion upon the right side of the terrible khor up which the camels were winding. At one point it rose into a small pinnacle. On this pinnacle stood a solitary, motionless figure clad entirely in black, save for a brilliant dash of scarlet upon his head. There could not surely be ...
— A Desert Drama - Being The Tragedy Of The "Korosko" • A. Conan Doyle

... rue sans but." At last the red beams struck level across the water, and all the heads of Sercq and the black rocks of Brecqhou were touched with golden fire. I could see the Autelets flaming under the red Saignie cliffs; and the green bastion of Tintageu; and the belt of gleaming sand in Grande Greve; and the razor back of the Coupee; and the green heights above Les Fontaines; and all the ...
— Carette of Sark • John Oxenham

... the other, paying no attention to Captain Applegarth's remark, but speaking with his eyes fixed, as if in a dream and seeing mentally before him the scenes he described. "The moon was shining brightly when we got under way, lighting up the Trinchera bastion and making the mountains in the background seem higher than they were, from the deep shadows they cast over the town lying below. This latter lay embosomed amid a mass of tall cocoanut trees and gorgeous palms, with other tropical foliage, and had a shining beach of white sand immediately ...
— The Ghost Ship - A Mystery of the Sea • John C. Hutcheson

... end the decision to integrate the general service came not from the secretary but from that bastion of military tradition, the Bureau of Naval Personnel. Despite the general reluctance of the bureau to liberalize the Navy's racial policy, there had been all along some manpower experts who wanted to increase ...
— Integration of the Armed Forces, 1940-1965 • Morris J. MacGregor Jr.

... his compliments to the commanding officer of Fort Delaware, and recommends the 10-inch Columbiad in place of the 30-lb. Parrotts on the bastion near the southern angle ...
— Mohun, or, The Last Days of Lee • John Esten Cooke

... down the field, and over the intervening ground, and round the bastion, so that he could no longer even see the tip of her mare's white tail, he was much more deeply moved by emotions concerning her and her welfare than he had been while she was before him. He wildly reproached himself that ...
— A Group of Noble Dames • Thomas Hardy

... that the "ills we suffer have come upon us over several decades. They will not go away in days, weeks, or months, but they will go away . . . because we as Americans have the capacity now, as we've had it in the past, to do whatever needs to be done to preserve this last and greatest bastion of freedom." ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Ronald Reagan • Ronald Reagan

... troop of workmen and projectors at his heels. At length, after a world of consultation and contrivance, his plans of defence ended in rearing a great flag-staff in the center of the fort, and perching a windmill on each bastion. ...
— Knickerbocker's History of New York, Complete • Washington Irving

... found himself placed in front of the walls and gates defended by the French and Germans; Ahmed Pasha was opposed to the Spaniards and Auvergnese; Mustapha Pasha had to contend with the English: Kasim, Beglerbeg of Anatolia, was to direct the attack against the bastion and gates occupied by the natives of Provence; the Grand Vizier, Piri Pasha, was opposed to the Portuguese, and the sultan himself undertook the assault against the defenses occupied ...
— Wagner, the Wehr-Wolf • George W. M. Reynolds

... to show what a very strong place it was in the Middle Ages. Much of the wall where the town was not naturally defended by the high naked rock, forming a frightful precipice that no besiegers would have attempted to scale, has been well preserved. Standing upon some bastion of this rampart, with the deep valley far below him and the sky above him, the wanderer may allow his fancy almost to convince him that he is really standing upon some 'castle in the air.' Of the many rock-perched towns of the South, this is one of ...
— Two Summers in Guyenne • Edward Harrison Barker

... into the ground, standing more than twelve feet above it, and sharp at top, with port-holes cut for cannon, and loop-holes for the small arms to fire through. There are eight six-pound pieces mounted in each bastion, and one piece of four pounds before the gate. In the bastions are a guard-house, chapel, doctor's lodging, and the commander's private store, round which are laid platforms for the cannon and men to stand on. There are several ...
— From Farm House to the White House • William M. Thayer

... leadership; above all, the dense mist which obscured from him the fewness of his opponents. If Canrobert with his fresh troops had followed in pursuit, the Russian's retreat must have been turned into a rout and his artillery captured; if on the following day he had assaulted the Flagstaff Bastion, Sebastopol, Todleben owned, must have fallen. He would do neither; his hesitancy and apparent feebleness have already been explained; but to it, and to the sinister influence which held his hand, were due the subsequent miseries of the ...
— Biographical Study of A. W. Kinglake • Rev. W. Tuckwell

... in the air, was as terrific as the gleam of the bayonets, and the crowd retired precipitately behind the second barricade. The first was now speedily torn down, and the head of the column advanced. The second was a more formidable affair, in fact, a regular bastion, behind which were packed in one dense mass an immense body of desperate men, reaching down the street, till lost in the darkness. It seemed now that nothing but deadly volleys would answer. One of the city officers advised Colonel Stevens to retreat, but, instead of obeying, he ordered ...
— The Great Riots of New York 1712 to 1873 • J.T. Headley

... evening of the 2nd, a mountain of ice with a high encircling bastion passed to starboard. It rose to a peak, flanked by fragments toppling in snowy ruin. The pyramidal summit was tinged the palest lilac in the waning light; the mighty pallid walls were streaked and blotched with deep azure; ...
— The Home of the Blizzard • Douglas Mawson

... the worn stones. Even the scrapers are sleek with blacklead, and it is not easy to find a window without spotless curtains. At high tide the sea comes half-way up the steep opening between the coastguards' quarters and the inn which is built on another bastion, and in rough weather the waves break hungrily on to the strong stone walls, for the bay is entirely open to the full force of gales from the east or north-east. All the way from Scarborough to Whitby the coast offers no shelter of any sort ...
— Yorkshire Painted And Described • Gordon Home

... the bastions was lined with stone; additional light was thrown on this controversy, by the inspection of a deed of agreement, bearing date at Fort St. Louis, 19th October, 1646, exhumed from the Court House vaults, and signed by the stonemasons who undertook to revetir de murailles un bastion qui est au bas de l'allee du Mont Caluaire, descendant au Fort St. Louis, for which work they were to receive from Monsieur Bourdon, engineer and surveyor, 2,000 livres and a puncheon ...
— Picturesque Quebec • James MacPherson Le Moine

... which could scarcely afford cover to twenty men, much less to the numbers who thronged into it, and who were so closely jammed that they could not move; and so the outside portion were exposed to the fire from the left bastion of the town, which completely out-flanked them, and from which the matchlock-men kept pouring in a cool and most destructive fire upon this dense mass with the utmost impunity; while a wide, broken-down doorway in the centre exposed ...
— Campaign of the Indus • T.W.E. Holdsworth

... near neighbourhood of man) and flew over the channel towards a little copse. Almost suddenly the creek wound round under a low chalk cliff, and in a moment Felix found himself confronted by another city. This had no wall; it was merely defended by a ditch and earthwork, without tower or bastion. ...
— After London - Wild England • Richard Jefferies

... top of a bastion-like terrace, thrust avalanche-wise and immense between its pinnacled mountain walls; the site is not only of great beauty, but of great natural strength, like nearly all the other considerable settlements we saw on this journey. The two mountain walls approach ...
— The Head Hunters of Northern Luzon From Ifugao to Kalinga • Cornelis De Witt Willcox

... promontory of gravel has, within a century, suffered much from floods; but the remains of the earthwork on the crest of the cliff, some fifty feet above the present river-stage, are still easily traceable throughout. The fort was about forty yards square, with a bastion at each corner; there are the remains of an unstoned well near the center; the ditch surrounding the earthwork is still some two-and-a-half or three feet below the surrounding level, and the breastwork ...
— Afloat on the Ohio - An Historical Pilgrimage of a Thousand Miles in a Skiff, from Redstone to Cairo • Reuben Gold Thwaites

... house, or room, was of logs like the half-dozen others within the fort, which mounted only four guns of small calibre, of which one was on the bastion behind my cabin. Looking westward over this gun, you could see a small island at the confluence of the two rivers Ohio and Monongahela whereon Duquesne is situated. On the shore opposite this ...
— The Virginians • William Makepeace Thackeray

... he has of his father, she holds Ascanius on her lap, if so she may steal the love she may not utter. No more do the unfinished towers rise, no more do the people exercise in arms, nor work for safety in war on harbour or bastion; the works hang broken off, vast looming walls and ...
— The Aeneid of Virgil • Virgil

... all withdrawn. A few were left in the houses and gardens, but the greater part fell back behind the Viaduct, which afforded them shelter. Somehow or other, the troops in the sap that had been pushed forward to within fifty yards of the gate must have come to the conclusion that the bastion was not tenanted, and trying the experiment, found themselves inside the wall without a shot having been fired. More must have followed them, at any rate a considerable force must have gathered there before the Communists found out they had ...
— A Girl of the Commune • George Alfred Henty

... upon the breach of a bastion which our troops had recently taken by assault, in sight of the most majestic of rivers, of the magnificent valley which it fertilizes, of the frightful desert of Lybia, of the colossal pyramids of Gizeh; it was in presence of twenty populations ...
— Biographies of Distinguished Scientific Men • Francois Arago

... Baseless senfundamenta. Basement subetagxo. Baseness perfideco. Bashful modesta. Basin pelvo. Basis fundamento. Basket korbo. Bass (music) baso. Bastard bastardo. Baste surversxi. Bastion bastiono. Bat (animal) vesperto. Bath banilo. Bathe bani sin. Baths (place) banejo. Battalion bataliono. Battery (milit.) baterio. Battle batalo. Battle, fight a batali. Battledore pilkraketo. Bauble bagatelo. ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes

... of that grievance for their own advantage, and teaching the English Government how to rule Ireland by a system of concession to them and to their friends. Now, however, we begin to perceive that to assault that heavy bastion of Saxon intolerance, we must have spies in the enemy's fortress, and for this we send in so many members to the Whig party. There are scores of men who will aid us by their vote who would not risk a bone in our cause. Theirs is a sort of subacute patriotism; but it ...
— Lord Kilgobbin • Charles Lever

... bastion of the Girondists all they have to do is simultaneously in all sections to do what they used to do separately in each section: substituting themselves, by fraud and by force, for the Veritable people, they are able to conjure ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 3 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 2 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine

... plain, the Pyrenees rose, range behind range, a white wall in the moonlight. At their feet the walls of the ramparts, bastion below bastion, broken and crenelated, a triumph of mediaeval fortification, faded into the shadow where ...
— The Velvet Glove • Henry Seton Merriman

... raised, parallel to the warehouse; we cut a great quantity of pickets in the forest, and formed a square, with palisades in front and rear, of about 90 feet by 120; the warehouse, built on the edge of a ravine, formed one flank, the dwelling house and shops the other; with a little bastion at each angle north and south, on which were mounted four small cannon. The whole was finished in six days, and had a sufficiently formidable aspect to deter the Indians from attacking us; and for greater surety, we organized a guard ...
— Narrative of a Voyage to the Northwest Coast of America in the years 1811, 1812, 1813, and 1814 or the First American Settlement on the Pacific • Gabriel Franchere

... Roller had seen his friend safely housed, and had made himself presentable, he hastened back to the Peter Gate, which seemed, as he approached it, to be all in flames. The wood and twigs the Swedes had piled against the defensive works before the bastion, had been set on fire. The rising flames cast a dreadful glare around, destroyed several of the works in question, and set fire to parts of the tower above the gate, which, falling into the covered gallery in rear of the bastion, ...
— The Young Carpenters of Freiberg - A Tale of the Thirty Years' War • Anonymous

... bunk. It was a six-foot drop to the cement floor below. The mattress, though irregularly dented and bulged, was upon the whole convex, and not over two feet wide. A vertical fence or bastion, six or eight inches high, along the outer brink of this precipice would have averted the danger of rolling off in the night; but nothing of the sort had been provided. One must remember not to roll, even in the nightmare. Convicts educate the subliminal self to a ...
— The Subterranean Brotherhood • Julian Hawthorne

... It is as impossible for us to get out of our trenches and exterminate the enemy as it is for the enemy to attack us. Doubtless the cavalry brigades will show what they are made of in Egypt or Persia. This business in France is all Artillery work and mines. The blowing up of the Chitoree Bastion when Arjoon went to Heaven waving his sword, as the song says, would not be noticed in the ...
— The Eyes of Asia • Rudyard Kipling

... 257th is in three places: at bastion 14; at the Saint Benoit barracks; and at Fort Vieux—which are you ...
— A Nest of Spies • Pierre Souvestre

... headquarters of the Metropolitan Police Force, and the architecture is singularly well in keeping with its object. The building is of red brick, with the tower floors cased in granite. It is in the form of a square, built round an inner courtyard, and has an immense bastion at each exterior angle. Besides the offices of the police force, the Lost Property Office, the Public Carriage Office, and the Criminal Investigation Department are here. The building communicates directly by telephone with the Horse Guards, Houses of Parliament, British Museum, and ...
— Westminster - The Fascination of London • Sir Walter Besant

... immediately under the shadow of the vast Tartar Wall as if it had been fully expected when they were called into being that they would never justify their existence, and that the crushing weight of the great bastion of brick and stone surrounding the capital would soon prove to them how futile it was for such palpable intruders to aspire to national control. Under Yuan Shih-kai, as under the Manchus, they were an exercise in ...
— The Fight For The Republic In China • B.L. Putnam Weale

... 4, 1804] 4th of December Tuesday 1804 a Cloudy raw Day wind from the N. W. the Black Cat and two young Chiefs Visit us and as usial Stay all Day the river rise one inch finish the main bastion, our interpetr. we discover to be ...
— The Journals of Lewis and Clark • Meriwether Lewis et al

... of these young men, leaders of the Companions of Jehu, were executed at Bourg, on the Place du Bastion." ...
— The Companions of Jehu • Alexandre Dumas

... you shall hear presently. During the siege I served as bombardier, There in St. Angelo. His Holiness, One day, was walking with his Cardinals On the round bastion, while I stood above Among my falconets. All thought and feeling, All skill in art and all desire of fame, Were swallowed up in the delightful music Of that artillery. I saw far off, Within the enemy's trenches on the Prati, A Spanish ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

... as Ryan and Terence were sitting down in an angle of the bastion to eat their supper, there was a tremendous roar; accompanied by so terrible a shock that both were thrown prostrate upon the ground with a force that, for the moment, half stunned them. A broad glare of light illuminated the sky. There was the rumble and roar of falling buildings ...
— Under Wellington's Command - A Tale of the Peninsular War • G. A. Henty

... (Komenda or Komani) and Elmina now stand. At the latter place they built a fort and factory just one century before it was occupied by the Portuguese. The Frenchman declares that one of the Elmina castles was called Bastion de France, and 'on it are still to be seen some old arithmetical numbers, which are anno 13' (i.e. 1383); 'the rest being defaced by weather.' This first factory was afterwards incorporated with the modern building; and in 1387 it ...
— To the Gold Coast for Gold - A Personal Narrative in Two Volumes.—Vol. I • Richard F. Burton

... Like a bastion frowning over converging valleys, that Alpine tract dominates the basins of the Po, the Inn, the Upper Rhine, and the Upper Rhone. He who holds it, if strong and resolute, can determine the fortunes of North Italy, Eastern France, South Germany, and the West of ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose

... post-captain saw opposite him a corner made by two walls meeting at right angles. Even in summer, they were stout, heavy walls; but, now, with twenty feet of snow muffling and locking them in an unshakable grip, they were monstrous. Above the walls, a bastion of squared logs, looped-holed for four- and six-pounders, rose. There was another one at the opposite corner of the square, and together they commanded ...
— The Wilderness Trail • Frank Williams

... from the ditch back into the ravine, where, at least, there was a prospect of supplying themselves with more serviceable weapons from among their slain comrades; but the ditch was deep and slimy and the difficulty of ascent great. Before they could accomplish it, the Americans opened a fire from a bastion, the guns of which, loaded with slugs and musket balls, raked the trench from end to end, and swept away all that came within its range. This was the first check given to the division of the unfortunate Cranstoun. Many of the ...
— The Canadian Brothers - or The Prophecy Fulfilled • John Richardson

... demi-bastion of the Magazine, crenelled for musketry, commands, with the aid of a couple of good field-glasses, an excellent and secret view of the arena on which the redoubted O'Flaherty and the grim Nutter were about to put their metal to the proof. ...
— The House by the Church-Yard • J. Sheridan Le Fanu

... of his sword, tilted the point up, and exclaimed: "Hullo, my master! you want perhaps to make me cross blades with you?" I faced round in great fury, for the man had stirred my blood, and cried out: "It would be less trouble to run you through the body than to build the bastion of this gate." In an instant we both set hands to our swords, without quite drawing; for a number of honest folk, citizens of Florence, and others of them courtiers, came running up. The greater part of them rated the captain, telling him that he ...
— The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini • Benvenuto Cellini

... under my command has this morning beaten the enemy commanded by Lieutenant-General Drummond, after a severe conflict of nearly three hours, commencing at 2 o'clock this morning. They attacked us on each flank, got possession of the salient bastion of the old Fort Erie, which was regained at the point of the bayonet, with a dreadful slaughter. The enemy's loss in killed and prisoners, is about 600; near 300 killed. Our loss is considerable, but ...
— The Medallic History of the United States of America 1776-1876 • J. F. Loubat

... wide; at one end was the principal, at the other, a minor fort. The first consisted of a thick round tower, flat at top, where their largest gun was mounted. This was surrounded by a low wall, with two small bastions at different angles; the other was a square building, with a bastion at one corner, containing, I believe, the stores. All over the island were the tents of the soldiers—that of the commander distinguished by a red flag. I think I counted about forty. The Montenegrians declared they had in the island five hundred men. Not one was visible however, the whole ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 57, No. 351, January 1845 • Various

... the summary mode in which Turkish justice was administered; he was not unfamiliar with the dark stories that were told of sunken bodies about the outer bastion of the palace where its walls were laved by the Bosphorus. He knew very well that an unfaithful wife or rival lover was often sacrificed to the pride or revenge of any titled or rich Turk who happened to possess the power to enable him to carry out his purpose. ...
— The Circassian Slave; or, The Sultan's Favorite - A Story of Constantinople and the Caucasus • Lieutenant Maturin Murray

... face the giant sin; Shafts of thought, truth-headed clear, Temper'd all in Pity's tear, Every point and every tip, In the blood of Jesus dip; Pierce till the monster reel and cry, Pierce him till he fall and die. Yet cease not, rest not, onward quell, Power divine and terrible! See where yon bastion'd Midnight stands, On half the sunken central lands; Shoot! let thy arrow heads of flame Sing as they pierce the blot of shame, Till all the dark economies Become the light of blessed skies. For this, above in wondering love, To ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various

... long passage, we are arrived; and it is as I suspected—the ministers at Naples know nothing of the situation of the island. Not a house or bastion of the town is in possession of the islanders; and the Marquis de Niza tells me, they want arms, victuals, and support. He does not know, that any Neapolitan officers are in the island; perhaps, although I have their names, none are arrived; and it is ...
— The Letters of Lord Nelson to Lady Hamilton, Vol. I. - With A Supplement Of Interesting Letters By Distinguished Characters • Horatio Nelson

... even more indebted for its signal successes in Mexico, than to the high military character of this population-no young aspirant for glory, fresh from this useful school, could have greater delight in laying out his first bastion, or counter-scarp, or glacis, than Corporal Flint enjoyed in fortifying Castle Meal. It will be remembered that this was the first occasion he was ever actually at the head of the engineering department Hitherto, it had been his fortune to follow; but now it had become ...
— Oak Openings • James Fenimore Cooper

... wild. High on a mound th' exalted gardens stand, Beneath, deep valleys, scoop'd by Nature's hand. A Cobham here, exulting in his art, Might blend the general's with the gardener's part; Might fortify with all the martial trade Of rampart, bastion, fosse, and palisade; Might plant the mortar with wide threat'ning bore, Or bid the mimic cannon ...
— The Natural History of Selborne • Gilbert White

... a handsome promenade on an elevated bastion which overlooks the city and lakes. While enjoying the cool morning breeze and listening to the stir of the streets below us, we were also made aware of the social and friendly politeness of the people. Those who passed by, on their walk around the rampart, greeted us, almost ...
— Views a-foot • J. Bayard Taylor

... fosse ni bastion Ni demi-lune ni Dongeon, Ni beaux dehors de structure nouvelle, Mais bien une antique Tourelle Flanquant d'assez, vieux batimens Dont ...
— A Year's Journey through France and Part of Spain, Volume II (of 2) • Philip Thicknesse

... the more amazed to see no moving creature in the landscape. The moon, as the saying is, shone bright as day; and nowhere, under the whole arch of night, was there a growing tree, a bush, a farm, a patch of tillage, or any evidence of man, but one. From the corner where I stood, a rugged bastion of the line of bluffs concealed the doctor's house; and across the top of that projection the soft night wind carried and unwound about the hills a coil of sable smoke. What fuel could produce a vapour ...
— The Dynamiter • Robert Louis Stevenson and Fanny van de Grift Stevenson

... the fort. Soldiers and citizens, stirred by deep sympathy, thronged the ramparts to take one last look at the two boys. Even the stern and cruel Tippoo himself was moved, and found it difficult to repress his emotion as, standing on the bastion above the great entrance, ...
— The Junior Classics • Various

... the French, and make little enough of the Dey, though they do send home Moors who fall into their hands. Did you see a ruined fort on a promontory? That was the Bastion de France. The old King Louis put it up and garrisoned it, but these rogues contrived a surprise, and made four hundred prisoners, and ever since they have been neither to have nor to hold. Well for you, young gentleman, that you did not fall into their hands, but those of the country ...
— A Modern Telemachus • Charlotte M. Yonge

... idle spectator of the wrongs offered to his son, in the dishonourable use, I understand, you made last night of his unguarded hours. I therefore insist upon your making immediate restitution of the booty which you so unjustly got; otherwise I expect you will meet me upon the ramparts, near the bastion de la Port Neuve, to-morrow morning at daybreak, in order to justify, with your sword, the finesse you have practised upon the friend of ...
— The Adventures of Ferdinand Count Fathom, Complete • Tobias Smollett

... alert, "and who is that lord-high-mighty, with his red cheeks and his airs, Maren? You know, as it is always, every man in the post already. It is not so with the women, I'll wager. For instance, who lives in the tiny house there by the south bastion?" ...
— The Maid of the Whispering Hills • Vingie E. Roe

... hopeless, but he did not despair, leaving the bazaar at last, and climbing the hill to the old town beyond the Bastion. Here he again questioned every passer-by. "Had the Effendi seen a tall Excellency dressed in black who carried an umbrella? He, Stefan Thomasevic, had sold the Excellency some sheep and goats, but the Excellency had not yet paid all of that which he owed. ...
— The Secret Witness • George Gibbs

... 12, 1781.—Nothing remarkable. Very warm weather, and a bad odor from the markets. There is some talk in the city of rebuilding the burned district. Two new cannon have been mounted in the southwest bastion of the fort (George). I shall report caliber and ...
— The Reckoning • Robert W. Chambers

... was that which was made by the English and Dutch upon the point of the advanced counterscarp, between the gate of St. Nicolas, which inclosed the great sluice or water-stop, where the English were terribly exposed to the shot of the counter-guard and demi-bastion of St. Roch: The issue of which hot dispute, in three words, was this; That the Dutch lodged themselves upon the counter-guard,—and that the English made themselves masters of the covered-way before St. Nicolas-gate, notwithstanding the gallantry of the French officers, who exposed ...
— The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman • Laurence Sterne

... a diversion, Grover put in the 12th Maine, supported by the remaining fragment of his division, reduced to the 13th and 25th Connecticut, against the partly exposed west face of the bastion that formed the left of the finished portion of the Confederate earthworks. The point of attack is shown at X. and XI., and the position whence Grover moved ...
— History of the Nineteenth Army Corps • Richard Biddle Irwin

... a prosperous bastion of welfare capitalism, featuring a combination of free market activity and government intervention. The government controls key areas, such as the vital petroleum sector (through large-scale state enterprises). The country is richly ...
— The 2005 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency

... of fairy St. Phyllis. There were such left, even in my time, between Paris and St. Denis, (see the prettiest chapter in all the "Mysteries of Paris," where Fleur de Marie runs wild in them for the first time), but now, I suppose, St. Phyllis's native earth is all thrown up into bastion and glacis, (profitable and blessed of all saints, and her, as these have since proved themselves!) or else are covered with manufactories and cabarets. Seven years old she was, then, when on his way to England from Auxerre, St. Germain passed a night in her village, ...
— Our Fathers Have Told Us - Part I. The Bible of Amiens • John Ruskin

... insatiable rapacity, caused by the headstrong rivers? What can I say? Certainly I do not feel myself equal to such a demonstration, yet by experience I will try to relate the process of ruin of the rivers which destroy their banks and against which no mortal bastion can prevail. ...
— Thoughts on Art and Life • Leonardo da Vinci

... abattis^, abbatis^; vallum^, circumvallation^, battlement, rampart, scarp; escarp^, counter-scarp; glacis, casemate^; vallation^, vanfos^. buttress, abutment; shore &c (support) 215. breastwork, banquette, curtain, mantlet^, bastion, redan^, ravelin^; vauntmure^; advance work, horn work, outwork; barbacan^, barbican; redoubt; fort-elage [Fr.], fort-alice; lines. loophole, machicolation^; sally port. hold, stronghold, fastness; asylum &c (refuge) ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget

... in the scene was an isolated flat-topped hill, having all the appearance of a bastion or fortress, rising abruptly from the surrounding plain, to an elevation of 650 feet, the upper part being a line of cliffs, greatly adds to the appearance it presents, that of a complete fortification. It bore North 85 degrees East, fourteen miles from Fossil ...
— Discoveries in Australia, Volume 2 • John Lort Stokes

... into the town. But we were in a trap, and soon felt that we were discovered, by a heavy discharge of musketry from the rampart. We had now only to return on our steps, and I had just given the word, when the firing was renewed on a bastion, round which we were hurrying in the twilight. I felt a sudden shock, like that of electricity, which struck me down; I made a struggle to rise on my feet, but my strength wholly failed me, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 349, November, 1844 • Various

... the Leonoren bastion as strongly as possible, stir not from the spot, and make constant use of the best glass to observe what movements are going on among the forces of ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No. 6, December 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various

... Bennett Peak towered hot in the sun, a row of bastion hills leaning against its base. But hills and mountains on that side showed bare and heated, though beautiful with the sunburnt tawniness ...
— The Valley of the Moon • Jack London

... black cattle, whereof they have plenty. Beyond the Company's ground the natives have their houses, in number about fifty or sixty. There are forty or fifty soldiers belonging to this fort, but I know not how many guns they have; for I had only opportunity to see one bastion, which had in it four guns. Within the walls there is a neat little church ...
— A Continuation of a Voyage to New Holland • William Dampier

... was forced with comparatively little difficulty, although a terrible fire of artillery and musketry was kept up, from the walls on either side of the road, and from the bastion commanding it. The assailants pressed so hotly, upon the defenders of the second gate, that they gained the third before the enemy had time to ...
— At the Point of the Bayonet - A Tale of the Mahratta War • G. A. Henty

... face shone mystical and grand Against the breaking day; And lo, the shard the potter cast away Was grown a fiery chalice crystal-fine Fulfilled of the divine Great wine of battle wrath by God's ring-finger stirred. Then upward, where the shadowy bastion loomed Huge on the mountain in the wet sea light, Whence now, and now, infernal flowerage bloomed, Bloomed, burst, and scattered down its deadly seed,— They swept, and died like freemen on the height, Like freemen, and like men of noble breed; And when the battle ...
— Gloucester Moors and Other Poems • William Vaughn Moody

... view of the village, clinging as it seemed to the steep at the base of a huge bastion of stark jurassic rock. Facing it was another barren hill, and in the valley beneath were mamelons of dark clay and stones partly conquered by the great broom and burning with its flame of gold. When I reached the village I felt that I had ...
— Wanderings by southern waters, eastern Aquitaine • Edward Harrison Barker

... Ferrara to inspect that renowned work of defence. Thither accordingly he went; nevertheless, he believes that Niccolo did this in order to get him out of the way, and to prevent the construction of the bastion. In proof thereof he adduces the fact that, upon his return, he found ...
— The Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti • John Addington Symonds

... friend, that caused my grief, To see thee blast this life's supremest bliss With thine own hand. Ah! what had been my fate, Had I been forced to follow some proud lord, Some ruthless despot, to his gloomy keep! Here are no keeps, here are no bastion'd walls To part me from a ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. III • Kuno Francke (Editor-in-Chief)

... my friend's portfolio was taken in the recess of a bastion, and it required some manœuvring to interpose our Corsican friend's portly person between the sketcher and the French sentry, as he passed and repassed—an office which our patriotic guide performed with ...
— Rambles in the Islands of Corsica and Sardinia - with Notices of their History, Antiquities, and Present Condition. • Thomas Forester

... occupied a Roman site; for, in 1800, in the rear of the house, in a bastion of the City Wall, was found a sepulchral monument dedicated to Claudina Martina by her husband, a provincial Roman soldier; here also were found a fragment of a statue of Hercules and a female head. In front of the Coffee-house immediately west of ...
— All About Coffee • William H. Ukers

... the north-west bastion, letting early night make its impressions on her. Her motionless figure, in indistinct garments, could not be seen from the river; but she discerned, rising up the path from the water, one behind the other, a row of peaked hats. Beside the hats ...
— The Chase Of Saint-Castin And Other Stories Of The French In The New World • Mary Hartwell Catherwood

... yawn arches and caverns of ancient masonry. This grassy solitude was once the "Dunkirk of America;" the vaulted caverns where the sheep find shelter from the ram were casemates where terrified women sought refuge from storms of shot and shell, and the shapeless green mounds were citadel, bastion, rampart, and glacis. Here stood Louisbourg; and not all the efforts of its conquerors, nor all the havoc of succeeding times, have availed to efface it. Men in hundreds toiled for months with lever, spade, and gunpowder in the work of destruction, ...
— Montcalm and Wolfe • Francis Parkman

... you'll willingly forgive the omission; for if I made you the most exact description of all the ravelins and bastions I see in my travels, I dare swear you would ask me, What is a ravelin? and, What is a bastion? ...
— Letters of the Right Honourable Lady M—y W—y M—e • Lady Mary Wortley Montague

... ceased drifting and become more or less solidly covered with turf. The pavilion stood on an even space: a little behind it, the wood began in a hedge of elders huddled together by the wind; in front, a few tumbled sand hills stood between it and the sea. An outcropping of rock had formed a bastion for the sand, so that there was here a promontory in the coast line between two shallow bays; and just beyond the tides, the rock again cropped out and formed an islet of small dimensions but strikingly ...
— The Lock And Key Library - Classic Mystery And Detective Stories, Modern English • Various

... upon the beach at the northern angle of the city, and a third (Santiago) defends it towards the south. A circular bastion, with heavy pieces of ordnance, sweeps the plain to the rear, commanding it ...
— The Rifle Rangers • Captain Mayne Reid

... may Time with happy haste Bring wail and triumph to a waste, And war be done; The battle flag-staff fall athwart The curs'd ravine, and wither; naught Be left of trench or gun; The bastion, let it ebb away, Washed with the river bed; and Day In ...
— Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War • Herman Melville

... while digging foundations for houses on the north-east side of Aldermanbury Postern, the workmen came on a portion of the Roman wall strengthened by blind arches. All that now substantially remains of the old fortification is a bastion in St. Giles's Church, Cripplegate; a fragment in St. Martin's Court, off Ludgate Hill; another portion exists in the Old Bailey, concealed behind houses; and a fourth, near George Street, Tower Hill. Portions of the wall have, however, been also broached ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury

... North-east view, a picturesque if not important point. The reader will remember, if he has not enjoyed, the splendid terrace on the north; this is now continued on the eastern side. The fine tower at the eastern end of the north terrace, (at the angle,) is Brunswick Tower, with a projecting bastion in its front containing the apparatus for heating the orangery, with rooms for the attendants; it is octagon shaped, and has a most commanding appearance, the height being 120 feet above the level of ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 19. Issue 539 - 24 Mar 1832 • Various

... said the doctor; "the disease knows its old place; it has gone back to the foot like a shot; and if you can keep it there, the patient will live; he's not the sort of patient that strikes his colors while there's a bastion ...
— A Perilous Secret • Charles Reade

... at any rate the Kronenburg Gate and Roseneck bastion of Strasburg were actually constructed in ...
— Albert Durer • T. Sturge Moore

... friends how to make my escape, I effected it on August the 8th, at five o'clock in the evening. I let myself down to the bottom of the bastion, which was forty feet high, with a rope, while my valet de chambre treated the guards with as much liquor as they could drink. Their attention, was, moreover, taken up with looking at a Jacobin friar who happened ...
— The Memoirs of Cardinal de Retz, Complete • Jean Francois Paul de Gondi, Cardinal de Retz

... of the three days, in which Rotgier had promised to return, passed by; then three and four, yet no retinue made its appearance at the gates of Szczytno. Only on the fifth day, well-nigh toward dark, the blast of the horn resounded in front of the bastion at the gate of the fortress. Zygfried, who was just finishing his vesper prayer, immediately dispatched a page to see who ...
— The Knights of the Cross • Henryk Sienkiewicz

... chateau built by Jeanne d'Albret, mother of Henry the Fourth. It stands upon the summit of a high and precipitous hill, and almost overhangs the town beneath. The French Revolution has completed the ruin that time had already begun; and nothing now remains, but a broken and crumbling bastion, and here and there a solitary tower dropping slowly to decay. In one of these is the grave of Jeanne d'Albret. A marble entablature in the wall above contains the inscription, which is nearly effaced, tho enough still remains to tell the curious traveler that there ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 4 (of 10) • Various

... the western hills. As the last beams faded from the gilded vane of Christ Church, they heard the beating of drums and the shrill piping of boatswain's whistles on the decks of the warships. A cannon flashed on the bastion of the Castle, and the boom of the gun rolled far away as the Cross of St. George descended from flagstaff and topmast to be ...
— Daughters of the Revolution and Their Times - 1769 - 1776 A Historical Romance • Charles Carleton Coffin

... we reached the farther end of the basin and anchored under a remarkable range of hills; which, from their appearance, were called the Bastion Hills; the latitude of this station is 15 degrees 29 minutes 38 seconds South. The gulf, which had now assumed the character of a river, trended to the South-West, and at the distance of three or four miles disappeared among some high ...
— Narrative of a Survey of the Intertropical and Western Coasts of Australia - Performed between the years 1818 and 1822 • Phillip Parker King

... fast, and hunger presently drove him into the town. But within half an hour he was at his post again. A glance at the Royaumes' house showed him that nothing had happened, and, resuming his seat in the deserted bastion, he began a watch that as long as he lived stood clear in his memory of the past. The day was cold and bright, and frosty with a nipping wind. Mont Blanc and the long range of snow-clad summits that flanked it rose dazzlingly bright ...
— The Long Night • Stanley Weyman

... of war in all its filth and shambles. But was it Victory? I knew then that it was only a breach in the German bastion, and that on the left, Gommecourt way, there had ...
— Now It Can Be Told • Philip Gibbs

... Joan had sent them by herald she now repeated in person, mounting a bastion and bidding the English, in a loud voice, to begone, else woe and shame ...
— Historical Tales, Vol. 6 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality. French. • Charles Morris

... Jesuits sent out to win the new domain for the cross.[5] As ignorant as children of the hardships ahead, the other treasure-seekers kept up nonchalant boasting that roused the irony of such seasoned men as Radisson and Groseillers. "What fairer bastion than a good tongue," Radisson demands cynically, "especially when one sees his own chimney smoke? . . . It is different when food is wanting, work necessary day and night, sleep taken on the bare ground or to mid-waist in water, with an empty stomach, weariness ...
— Pathfinders of the West • A. C. Laut

... schoolfellow; and these are my boys, whom I have brought to see all that remains of him. Oh! Sir! they did not conquer him, although the murderers shot him on the bastion; but, as he wrote to Pulher—his friend and mine—it was indeed 'in the name, and by the help of the Lord, ...
— A Love Story • A Bushman

... as he rounded the sloping green bastion which flanks the peak to the south, the man's keen eyes lighted upon a small cabin which squatted almost unnoticeably against a gray ledge some five hundred feet higher than the rock whereon he stood. The door of this hut ...
— They of the High Trails • Hamlin Garland

... enemy, upon the Isle of Rhe,— while the Council of Plymouth were selling their title to the lands of Massachusetts Bay,—at the very crisis of the terrible siege of Rochelle, and perhaps during the very hour when the Three Guardsmen of Dumas held that famous bastion against an army, the heroine of our story was born. And she, like the Three Guardsmen, waited till twenty years after ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Number 9, July, 1858 • Various

... the Porte Narbonnaise, a magnificent gate, flanked with towers thick and tall, defended by elaborate outworks; and these two apertures alone admit you to the place—putting aside a small sally-port, protected by a great bastion, on the quarter that looks toward ...
— A Little Tour in France • Henry James

... bare-chested, his face dark and fierce, strode into the bastion which was connected with the blockhouse. It was a small shedlike room, and with portholes opening to the river and the forest. This bastion had seen the severest fighting. Five men had been killed here. As Silas entered four haggard and powder-begrimed ...
— Betty Zane • Zane Grey

... And then I meandered back, and began to ask myself, had Marryat aught to do with the sponsorship of this outpost of the British Empire? Shingle Point, Blackstrap Bay, the Devil's Tower, O'Hara's Folly, Bayside Barrier, and Jumper's Bastion—the names were all redolent of the Portsmouth Hard; and I almost anticipated a familiar hail at every moment from the open door of "The Nut," and an inquiry as to ...
— Romantic Spain - A Record of Personal Experiences (Vol. II) • John Augustus O'Shea

... forward the Indians to ambush themselves on both sides of the fort. In the morning he followed with his Frenchmen; and as the glittering ranks came into view, defiling between the forest and the river, the Spaniards opened on them with culverins from a projecting bastion. The French took cover in the forest with which the hills below and behind the fort were densely overgrown. Here, ensconced in the edge of the woods, where, himself unseen, he could survey the whole extent of ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 85, November, 1864 • Various



Words linked to "Bastion" :   defence force, defence, fortification, kremlin, stronghold, defense force, defense



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