Sentence Examples:
Having wiped out the batteries the yeomen again answered the call of their leader and swept up a ridge to deal effectively with three machine guns, and having used the white arm against their crews the guns were turned on to the retreating Turks and decimated their ranks.
Thanks to universal suffrage, which it had deceived, and which constituted its faith and its strength at the last moment, thanks to the Left, which it had oppressed, scoffed at, calumniated, and decimated, and which cast on it the glorious reflection of its heroism, this pitiful Assembly died a grand death.
The city lies flat, like the surrounding country, and, owing to this, is insalubrious; stagnant water collects in the cellars of the houses, and engenders a poisonous vapor, which is a fertile source of those destructive epidemics, that, combined with other causes, are annually decimating the white population of the south of the American continent in all parts.
The unhappy kingdom of Bohemia was abandoned to inquisitions and executions; all liberties were suppressed, the nobles were decimated, ministers and teachers were burned or beheaded, and Protestants of every rank, age, and condition were prohibited from acting as guardians to children, or making wills, or contracting marriages with Catholics, or holding any office of trust and emolument.
The nation was visibly diminishing, and the community of free burgesses was resolving itself into a body composed of masters and slaves; and, although it was in the first instance the two long wars with Carthage which decimated and ruined both the burgesses and the allies, the Roman capitalists beyond doubt contributed quite as much as Hamilcar and Hannibal to the decline in the vigor and the numbers of the Italian people.
The streets of Constantinople ran with their blood, and before Abdul Hamid was obliged by foreign civilized Powers to stop those holocausts, he had so decimated the race that not for at least a generation would they conceivably be a menace again even to that zealous guardian of the supremacy in its own dominions of the Ottoman power.
Later its population was decimated by constant Moro attacks, and cattle disease destroyed its draft animals, with the result that the cultivated lands were abandoned to a considerable extent and again grew up to jungle, from which, however, it is easy to redeem them.
The long succession of dreadful wars which had decimated the country had also destroyed, beyond the possibility of immediate repair, that formidable arm which had decided so many battles, and which is peculiarly adapted to the impetuosity of the French character.
They, by heat and explosion, decimated myriad soldiers who either chose to be such to secure a decent livelihood or were conscripted with threats; and yet the Americans melted their bodies in this internecine campaign sending them up amongst the other gasses the way thousands of their civilians had been melted within the World Trade Center towers.
If a whole company or regiment gets into disgrace, it may have to put up with barley instead of wheat for its rations, and if it is guilty of gross insubordination, or of some crime which cannot be sheeted home to the individual, it may be "decimated," or, in other words, every tenth man, drawn by lot, may be condemned to death.
Decimated here also by the steady fire of the French files, and by the discharges of the rear face, they fell away exhausted, leaving heaps of dead and dying on the fronts of the squares, and in their very midst a score of their choicest cavaliers, whose bravery and horsemanship had carried them to certain death amidst the bayonets.
To make the sense terminate at "decimated," he molds a sentence and a half into one, thus: "The Chief Secretary says, that the ministers did wisely in this decision, but I differ from him when I hear, every day, of persons being starved to death, and when he, himself, admits that in many parts of the country the population had been decimated;" the censure on the Government contained in the words immediately succeeding, is omitted.
After this we should have looked for courts civil and martial, breaking of some corps, decimating of others, and all the terrible means which necessity has employed in such cases to arrest the progress of the most terrible of all evils; particularly, one might expect that a serious inquiry would be made into the murder of commandants in the view of their soldiers.
Captain Pierce is fondly beloved and highly respected by his former command, as well as by the younger members of the company, who, having "fallen in" to fill up the ranks which time and death have decimated, are striving nobly to uphold the name and fame of the Continentals.
And to oppose them, an utterly inadequate force, whose bravery and unparalleled endurance held out to the end, although hunger gnawed at their vitals, disease and death daily decimated their ranks, intense anxiety for dear ones exposed to dangers, privations, all the horrors which everywhere attended the presence of the invaders, torturing them every hour.
Even where they claim to know the perpetrator of the deeds which they allege, they do not content themselves with executing the culprits summarily, but take advantage of the occasions to decimate the population, to pillage all the inhabitants, and to set fire to them.
Perhaps it would be more correct to say the more real element is the negative one, for those which are least capable of meeting their living foes and the decimating conditions of inorganic nature are the first to die, while the others will be able to prolong the struggle for a longer or shorter period before they too succumb.
Religions being a synthesis of moral aspirations, developed through centuries, are mischievous and untrue except in the circumstances and climates in which they have grown up, and native races are decimated equally by the importation of a religion or a disease.
They warned him at once to stop drinking and smoking and to live with the greatest abstemiousness, for they recognized in him the tertiary symptoms of that dreadful disease which the brainless prudery in England allows to decimate the flower of English manhood unchecked.
Although decimated and driven from fortress to fortress, and from province to province, hampered by the rebellions it was called upon to suppress, and distracted by civil discord, the Assyrian army still remained a strong and efficient force, ever ready to make its full power felt the moment it realized that it was being led by a sovereign capable of employing its good qualities to advantage.
Circumstances in which they would have shown themselves merciless, he seized upon as occasions for clemency, and if massacres and executions are recorded among the events of his reign, at least he does not class them among the most important: the records of his wars do not continually speak of rebels flayed alive, kings impaled before the gates of their cities, and whole populations decimated by fire and sword.
What with the ants and other exterminating forces, the massacre was so great that the colonies of Crickets in my orchard, so numerous at the outset, were so far decimated that I could not continue my observations, but had to resort to the outside world for further information.
They were brave men, whether English or not, and the moment they could see the boarders, they rushed at them by command of their officers; but they pushed forward, as it were, out of a heap of killed and wounded, those who had fallen by the grape-shot intended to decimate the ranks of the loyal band.
And yet the imperishable feeling of kindred was still so strong in his heart that he had dared to brave this journey over the wilds to visit his tribe once more, scattered though perchance it might be, and his family, even should he find it decimated.
Suddenly, from the mouths of forty cannon was hurled against them a cruel storm of grape and canister, which plowed through the advancing column, carrying death and destruction in its course, while the infantry from the Third corps poured into the faces of the desperate foe a terrible hail storm of bullets which almost decimated the heavy column.
If something interposed, or a halt was ordered, the men would throw themselves in the dust, wipe their foreheads, drink from their canteens, gossip, grin, and shout confusedly, and some sought opportunities to straggle off, so that the regiments were materially decimated before they reached the field.
They had been so busily engaged that they were a long time finding out how desperate were their circumstances; but now, wearied with persistent assaults in front, they fell back to the left, only to see four close lines of battle waiting to drive them across the field, decimated.
Before this force, more than decimated by the sharpshooters, could reach the road, however they hurried, the other half of the company had been driven to the verge of the forest; but they realized that they were thoroughly beaten, and that any further resistance meant nothing but slaughter.
He was seated in the bit of grass that was there, his head leaning against this towering icon more uncomfortably than he thought it would, head remaining against hard stone, neck aching, and having to slap and decimate a second set of fire ants that got onto his book and into his sandals stinging his feet.
England would never tolerate for a moment longer than she could help that the firebrand of Europe should once more sit upon the throne of France, and unless the allies had greatly altered their policy in the past ten months and refused England the necessary support, Wellington would be more than a match for the decimated army of Bonaparte.
The history of island colonization by Portugal, Spain, and Holland, forms a continuous record of battle, loot, and persecution, in which the native population was decimated, and even now the inhabitants would be quite insufficient to cultivate and gather the "golden fruit," without the aid of innumerable emigrants from Java.
Enormous fines and contributions were levied on towns and provinces, the country was emptied of all raw material, private property and the produce of the soil were systematically requisitioned, and the population would have been decimated by famine but for the help of the Commission for Relief in Belgium.
The world laughed at the fantastic agreement; but the world noticed, at the same time, that, whilst the neighboring colonies were being drenched in blood and decimated by the barbarity of the Mohicans and the Delawares, the hearths of Pennsylvania enjoyed an undisturbed repose.
Desolate villages and the ruins of human dwellings testified to the fierceness with which the revolution raged, endangering the defenses of the country, wasting its towns, decimating its population, turning its overburdened soil into dust, harassing its people and turning them from decent husbandmen into a mob of beggars and thieves.
When Francisco Solano Lopez, late president of Paraguay, fell on the field on March 1, 1870, at the head of a few hundred followers, the survivors of that courageous army of sixty thousand men with which in 1865 he had begun his five years' struggle, he had left behind him a devastated country, a decimated people and an impoverished population.
In vain did the government of the Queen Regent, persevering in spite of its many reverses, send its best troops and most experienced generals to that corner of the peninsula where civil strife raged: it was only that the troops might be decimated, and the generals forfeit their former reputation in repeated and disastrous defeats.
The country being extremely flat, the drainage is necessarily very bad: and in places like Merida, for example, where a crowding of population exists, and the cleanliness of the streets is utterly disregarded by the proper authorities, the decomposition of vegetable and animal matter is very large; and the miasmas generated, being carried with the vapors arising from the constant evaporation of stagnant waters, are the origin of those scourges that decimate the inhabitants.
A horrible chorus of the rattle of small arms, the harsh, grinding roar of the machine guns, the hurrahs of the defenders, and the cries of rage and agony from the baffled and decimated assailants, rose unceasingly to their ears as they passed over the last battlefield of the Western nations, where the Anglo-Saxon, the Russ, and the Gaul were locked in the death struggle.
During the greater part of that period the foreign quarter was subjected to heavy rifle and artillery fire, and the continuous fighting at close quarters with the hordes of Chinese regulars, as well as Boxers, decimated the scanty ranks of the defenders.
If a large force of picked Spanish troops were decimated and routed in two actions, by a handful of ill-armed and undisciplined men, taken by surprise, we are justified in believing that if an effective force of ten thousand men, comprising the several arms, of cavalry, artillery, and infantry, had been thrown into the island, they would have carried all before them.
The consequences of such a termination of the festivities may easily be imagined; Bonaparte, a rigid judge with regard to all divorces except his own, on receiving the complaint of the insulted town, condemned the officers en masse to be decimated, and the survivors degraded from their rank.
Desolating epidemics, like the Plague, Yellow Fever, and the Cholera, will often visit our great cities, and decimate their people, unless means can be found to cleanse them wholly and incessantly of whatever tends to pollute and render noisome their atmosphere.
The Saxon dominated the path in front, cutting down the foremost with marvelous celerity; whilst on one flank the deadly arrows were being poured into them, and on the other flank the huge stones clashed through their ranks and decimated their numbers.
And indeed, whenever we refer to ancient or modern history, we are continually struck with the analogy which exists between the epidemic diseases signalized by the general name of Plague, and which decimated all the living beings, and those which more recently, and at the present moment, have startled the world by their fatal effects on men and animals.
The progress of the industrial revolution extends also to agriculture: the greed for surplus value (ground rent) leads to enclosure of common lands by the great landlords, the independent yeomanry is decimated, the small proprietor and small tenant are made proletarians.
These clamors, which announced the presence of the Maid, redoubled the energy of the intrepid ones who still held the middle of the moat, although they were being decimated by the stones, the bullets and the arrows hurled at them from the top of the boulevard of the redoubt.
He also exhibited the weakness of supposing that an army that had been beaten and fearfully decimated in vain attempt at the defensive, could successfully undertake the offensive against the army that had so often defeated it, as he said in his speech that Lee would soon resume the offensive, and would drive the Potomac army from its almost impregnable hold on Richmond and Petersburg; but the future showed that this never was accomplished.
In many areas where box turtles are abundant, it is the opinion of local residents that the turtles decimate populations of upland game birds by eating the eggs and young of these birds; these opinions result probably from rare encounters such as the one described by Donahue.
The treasury was empty, the population had been decimated by a horribly destructive war during four years, the flourishing coast valleys with their cotton and sugar plantations had been laid under contribution, the mines had ceased to be worked, the guano and nitrate revenue was gone, the country was weighed down with a debt which could never be paid, and foreign creditors pressed for a settlement utterly beyond the abilities of the impoverished country.
Again, the process of elimination does not necessarily mean that the handicapped variants come at once to a violent end, as when rat devours rat, or the cold decimates a flock of birds in a single night; it often simply means that the less fit die before the average time, and are less successful than their neighbors as regards pairing and having offspring.
Gasped the Colonel, breathlessly, as he pressed on with a forlorn hope of veterans to take a knoll of rocks whence a galling fire had been decimating every attack.
And while the Walloons continue the desperate fighting at the breach, he gathers together a company of Flemish swordsmen, the pick of his little army, those who have stuck closely to him throughout the past two days, who have fought every minute, who have been decimated, lost their provosts and their captains, but have never once cried "Halt!"
We hear of it first as a plague, infesting armies and besieged towns; then as a dread disease, decimating the sailors of the navy and of the mercantile marine, and, since the end of the last century, more often as a nutritional disturbance, endangering the health of infants.
An announcement that would, doubtless, have put any young lady into a flutter at a period less disastrous to royalty, but such was the tragic romance of the epoch, that persons of all classes were familiarized to the most startling events and changes; the only source of surprise to honest gentlefolks was, the circumstance of finding their heads safe on their own shoulders in the midst of the horrors of military executions, which nearly decimated that neighborhood.
He exposed the courage and endurance of the garrison who had been at length obliged to capitulate, after having been more than decimated by famine and disease, and he explained that they were still thoroughly loyal, and longed for the success of the Government arms.
When the English had numbered them, setting them in rows, they then decimated them, making every tenth man stand on one side, and striking off the heads of the other nine; and when the tithe so set apart amounted to a considerable number, it was again decimated, and all that was at last saved was this second tithe.
And, saddest of all, I would live over with them that melancholy period when the very few, comparatively, that were left of the noble defenders of our principles, came back, not with buoyant step and victor crown, but with blighted hopes and despondent mien to desolated homes and decimated families.
Of the fact that a plague or sickness did cause the deaths of many Indians within a few days at some encampment in these plains, I received further and reliable confirmation, my informant, who was in the party, stating that the Pampa tribe was decimated.
The mention of the iron crow reminds me that, about two years ago, a rumor rapidly spread in some of the villages that an iron cock was abroad very early in the morning, and upon the first village in which it heard one or more cocks begin to crow it would send a grievous pestilence, and at least decimate the village.
Fatigue, hunger, thirst, decimate the caravans which undertake to traverse them, and the track is marked by whitened skeletons, whose flesh has been devoured by vultures, and which unknown hands have piled up and arranged with a ghastly symmetry of order.
The troops, decimated by this frightful carnage, gradually gave ground; the space they occupied became narrower and narrower, and the moment did not appear distant when they would disappear under the popular flood which continued to ascend, and threatened to engulf them under its irresistible mass.
Vast regions exist in space without stars, regions decimated by time, whence worlds have been successively removed by the attraction of exterior suns.
The king himself, Louis the Thirteenth, as much a puppet as the old descendants of Clovis under their Mayors of the Palace, left the throne he had nominally filled, vacant in the same year; and the heir to the dishonored crown and exhausted country was a boy of five years of age, under the tutelage of an unprincipled mother, and with the old hereditary counselors and props of his throne decimated by the scaffold or impoverished by confiscation.
First the decimated remnant of the savage heroes of Galloway recoiled, and spread confusion through the second line, and then the outward hem of mixed troops, who had never struck blow, wavered and broke; and the battle of the Standard was lost and won.
The overgrown males now all sally forth from their cells, and disport themselves on the combs; and so crowded does the too prosperous city become that hundreds of belated workers, coming back from the flowers towards evening, will vainly seek shelter within, and will be forced to spend the night on the threshold, where they will be decimated by the cold.
The missions were reestablished, the Advocate was revived, and the work of civilization was again taken up, though under great difficulties, as continued removals and persecutions, with the awful suffering and mortality of the last great emigration, had impoverished and more than decimated the Nation and worn out the courage even of the bravest.
He was thrilled when he actually saw a rush made by an attacking party of Germans, to be met with volleys that must have sadly decimated their ranks, for as Billy gazed with bated breath he saw the remnant of the gallant band reel back and vanish amidst their own trenches.
The forces of the expedition had been decimated by sickness and death, their supplies were nearly exhausted, their rigging and sails destroyed by wind and weather, the vessels more or less unseaworthy, and East Siberia drained and devastated by famine; only Bering's great powers of perseverance could have collected the vanishing forces for a last endeavor.
At other places round the northern extremity of the cove the boats were drifting in, and along the broader shore were grounding on the beach, only to be shattered and the whole parties in them decimated by the machine guns in Fisherman's Hut and the low hills above this enemy post.
While the former were cheerful, healthy, progressive, industrious, and multiplying rapidly in numbers, the latter are declared by their white neighbors to be a social nuisance, depressed by indolence and poverty, decimated by hereditary diseases, and tending rapidly to extinction.
It was William who was maintaining, Philip who was destroying; and the monarch who was thus blasting the happiness of the provinces, and about to decimate their population, was by the same process to undermine his own power forever, and to divest himself of his richest inheritance.
The main Confederate army, which had now reached the field, and Jackson's worn and decimated corps were now contesting the field with a brave army of superior numbers; but a change of conditions must come, and again the psychological moment arrived and was availed of by the Confederates, pressed to the last inch of endurance.
And despite the efforts of both soldiers and priests, the savages continued to ravage the settlements, to repel pioneering, to decimate the herds and murder the vaqueros who sought to protect them, to plunder everything portable and ambuscade punitive parties, and even to engage in open hostilities.
Tonight let's also recognize that there are communities in this country where no matter how hard you work, it is virtually impossible to get ahead: factory towns decimated from years of plants packing up; inescapable pockets of poverty, urban and rural, where young adults are still fighting for their first job.
He and Grant had reckoned that the decimated brigades of the South could not stand at all before him, but just as on the first day they came on with the fierce rebel yell, hurling themselves upon superior numbers, taking the cannon of their enemy, losing them, and retaking them and losing them again, but never yielding.
The first regiment at double-quick rushes through and past our broken and decimated ranks, not stopping until they come close to the confederate line; then halting abruptly, deliver a well directed volley in the face of the enemy, fall and reload, while the next regiment rushes over them only to repeat what those had done who had gone before.
His decision thus formed had to be followed by rapid action, for sickness at the end of summer and beginning of autumn was literally decimating the European force before Delhi week by week; and even each day as it passed appreciably lessened the fighting strength.
This snipe associates in large flocks, is very easily whistled, flies in dense and compact bodies over the decoys, and is so gentle that, after half the flock has been cut down by the volleys of the lurking gunner, the remainder will frequently alight, and walk about demurely among their dead companions and the illusive decoys, until the pieces are reloaded, and the survivors decimated by a fresh discharge.
It may seem surprising that the assailed classes, holding most of the great offices of State and owning a large portion of the land of the country, should have found so few defenders, though so many eloquent voices have pleaded their cause since they have been conquered, decimated, ruined.
As they came nearer, our guns in front crumbled and decimated the leading ranks with grape and canister, while other batteries farther away to the right and left still plowed red furrows with shot and shell; but the human torrent, although shrinking and diminishing, flowed on.
What a contrast do they make by the side of the idle and nonchalant Liberians, expecting everything from the State, subject to every kind of congenital disease, and in particular to tuberculosis, never washing themselves, nourishing themselves with food which a native slave would not accept, decimated by a considerable mortality, having generally very few children, of whom, moreover, the greater part are born scrawny, weak, devoted beforehand to an early death!
Long intervening years have sufficed to reconstruct these miserable habitations almost after their first type, and to re-exemplify all the evils which belong to them; so completely indeed, that if the infection of that same plague should light again amongst us, I scarcely know why it might not traverse the City and decimate its population as quickly and as virulently as before.
While an invading army is being decimated by sickness and wounds, and demoralized by the heavy loss of officers and the delay of any glorious victory, the home population will be sunk in misery by the growth of economic burdens, the stoppage of trade and industry.
All noticed the cheerfulness of his manner and bearing in, the charge across Wash Common; every hedge in the neighborhood was lined by the Parliamentary Musketeers, and the guns on the heights in front of them were doing their utmost to decimate the troop.
We have all heard of the fatalism of the East; and strange stones have become familiar, of soldiers selling cartridges to their enemies, of villagers refusing to drain the swamp that was decimating them by its malaria, or even to desist from poisoning their own springs with foul water.
Carson was, however, disappointed that season, and he could not at first understand why the Blackfeet had left him so severely alone; but he found out, later, that the smallpox had decimated them, and they were only too glad to retire to their mountain fastnesses, completely humbled, and hide in terror hoping to escape further attacks of the dreaded disease.
For a frightful pestilence, arising from the marshes of this unhealthy district, in a few weeks decimated his troops, and the survivors were so debilitated by sickness and scanty fare, that they might have been driven into the river almost without the power of resistance.
The augmentation of the profitable variations follows as a necessity from the more frequent survival of the best-adapted individuals, and this 'more frequent survival' will be not only a relative one, due to the fact that the better adapted individuals will be less decimated, it will also be absolute, because more individuals of the species will survive than before.
In this interval the growing tyranny of Christophe forced a flood of emigration from his realms into the territories of the republic, and the very household troops of the monarch began to desert in large numbers from the service of a sovereign whose cruelty decimated their ranks at the instigation of his caprice.
We can readily understand this from the point of view of adaptation to particular conditions, since the young wasps which emerge from their galls in winter, or in the middle of a raw spring, are exposed to many dangers and are terribly decimated before they can succeed in laying their eggs in the proper place on the plant.
Its decimated armies, too exhausted from loss of blood to longer pull the trigger, too weak from starvation to charge the enemy, too footsore and too proud to run, stacked their old, bent and battered muskets in the anguish of defeat and went limping back to their ruined homes in Dixie.
The American Indian usually preferred to do battle against Europeans in loose formation and at long range, resorting to hand-to-hand combat only in surprise attacks or when he believed that the enemy had been sufficiently decimated and disorganized by his sniping tactics.
The crew, however, strictly objected, saying that in the memory of man they had never paid dues upon their goods, and they would not pay them now; but Otto and his knights jumped on deck, followed by their squires, and having asked for the bill of lading, decimated all the goods, as a priest collecting his tithe of the sheaves.
Bounty, defined by some sentimentalist as a "bribe to Neptune," for a while made a stronger appeal; but, ranging as it did from five to almost any number of pounds under one hundred per head, it proved a bribe indeed, and by putting an irresistible premium on desertion threatened to decimate the very ships it was intended to man.
Churches were turned into stables, palaces were burned, works of priceless value were destroyed, the relics of martyrs were desecrated, the most fruitful provinces were overrun, the population was decimated, the land was overgrown with forests, cultivation was suspended, and despair and fear seized the minds of all classes.