Word: ypres
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...General Sir Adrian Carton de Wiart, 83, one of Britain's best-known soldiers, the proud possessor of eleven battle wounds and many more decorations for valor, a lanky Oxonian who lost his left eye battling dervishes in Somaliland, and his left hand during a grenade charge at Ypres in 1915, and became Churchill's military envoy to Chiang Kai-shek in World War II; in Killinardrish, Ireland...
...World War I's calamitously costly Ypres offensive, only 49 of 500 Gurkhas in one battalion survived the first day's fighting-but they captured their objective and garnered new laurels, as a laconic British communiqué put it, "at the expense of their existence." Gurkhas were the only regiments to break through the Turkish lines at Gallipoli; in 1919 they chased the Bolsheviks from the Persian border and penetrated deep into the Caucasus before they were called off. In World War II, the 200,000 Gurkhas served with greater distinction in Africa. Burma and Italy-notably Monte...
...four of the combinations involving letters J, K, L, P, R, S, W, X, Y are deemed useless on the ground that no one could countenance a telephone number beginning with something like YPres, YLang, WRath or KRemlin. That leaves only 60. Even with an additional number tacked onto the two-letter code, creating exchanges like PRospect 1 up through PRospect 9, there are still only 540 combinations available. This was more than enough until Direct Distance Dialing came on the scene in 1951. The U.S. is now divided into 105 code areas, each having its own three-digit number...
Slogging toward the front during the third battle of Ypres in 1916, Gilford Dudley Seymour was, as he remembers it, the "youngest, tallest and scaredest" soldier in the Duke of Connaught's Own Rifles. But 17-year-old Private Seymour clung to duty, and duty was delivering his company's rum tot in two glazed-crockery jugs. The officer who was supposed to get the rum turned out to be dead, so Seymour buried the crocks where a hedge crossed a trench...
Along with Sir Douglas Haig, British commander in chief during World War I, mud is the villain of this excellent book. It deals mostly with the British campaign around Ypres ("Wipers" to the troops) in 1917, when British soldiers learned on Belgian soil the dread military truth uttered by Napoleon: "God-besides water, air, earth and fire-has created a fifth element...