Word: musket
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...fighting was often bitter-end, even by modern standards: American volunteer suicide squads were killed or wounded almost to a man in breaching the British defenses at Stony Point; Americans, Indians and British troops, their flintlocks useless from rain, milled in wild combat with knife, musket butt and tomahawk at Oriskany in the New York wilderness. Cowpens, Brandywine, Germantown-all were bloody. The revolution pitted strange adversaries. At Eutaw Springs, the American force was heavily loaded with British deserters, the British force with American deserters. Kilted Scottish-American settlers fought for the king with broadswords at Moore's Creek...
...addressed many of his loveliest lyrics to her. She starred in his play, Cathleen ni Houlihan. Very tall (6 ft.), wearing her Paris clothes carelessly in those days, she was, in George Bernard Shaw's words, "outrageously beautiful." She wore a clasp in which was set an English musket ball that had killed a Frenchman fighting for Ireland. Yeats's love turned to despair when he found that neither spiritualism nor poetry could purge her mind of the British, and he wrote sadly...
Several merchantmen sighted the bedraggled schooner, and came alongside to help, but were driven off by musket fire. Twice the Africans went foraging ashore, while the isolated yeomen of Long Island barricaded themselves behind locked doors. In the end, the Amistad was captured off Montauk Point by the Navy surveying brig Washington...
...parallel to Pentagon red tape was the drill for loading, firing and reloading a musket in the British army in the 17th century. The drill was designed to eliminate individual error and to achieve uniform rate of fire. Its 31 orders, as recorded by Robert Graves in Sergeant Lamb's America: "March with your rest in your hand! March, and with your musket carry your rest! Unshoulder your musket! Poise your musket! Join your rest to your musket! Take forth your Match! Blow off your coal! Cock your match! Try your match! Guard, blow, and open your priming...
...Revolution should have been cut by at least 200 pages; at times, Author Ward seems intent on recording every musket shot between' 1775 and 1782, and when he gets lost in minor southern skirmishes, it does not -always seem certain that he will ever find his way to Yorktown. But the book is saved by Ward's gift for narrative and by his lucidity in presenting military problems. His perspective is not as broad as Freeman's in George Washington, but he is a better writer...