Unit 8: Vocabulary from Readings 3

It would be still more foolish to lose heart and courage or to suppose that well-trained, well-equipped armies numbering three or four millions of man can be overcome in the space of a few weeks, or even months, by a scoop, or raid of mechanized vehicles, however formidable.

We may look with confidence to the stabilization of the Front in France, and to the general engagement of the masses, which will enable the qualities of the French and British soldiers to be matched squarely against those of their adversaries.

For myself, I have invincible confidence in the French Army and its leaders.

The Armies must cast away the idea of resisting behind concrete lines or natural obstacles, and must realize that mastery can only be regained by furious and unrelenting assault.

I am sure I speak for all when I say we are ready to face it; to endure it; and to retaliate against it—to any extent that the unwritten laws of war permit.

I have received from the Chiefs of the French Republic, and in particular from its indomitable Prime Minister, M. Reynaud, the most sacred pledges that whatever happens they will fight to the end, be it bitter or be it glorious.

Now the prosaic woman, looking about her, was more perplexed than she knew by everything that she saw...

Her reluctance to look again at the letter came from the fact that she felt intruded upon—and by someone contemptuous of her ways.

She felt so much the change in her own face that she went to the mirror, polished a clear patch in it and looked at once urgently and stealthily in.

She could not have plighted a more sinister troth.

Resuming work at the chest she set about making up a number of parcels in a rapid, fumbling-decisive way.

She remembered with such dreadful acuteness that the twenty-five years since then dissolved like smoke and she instinctively looked for the weal left by the button on the palm of her hand.

Across the open end of the square two buses impassively passed each other; women, a perambulator, cyclists, a man wheeling a barrow signalized, once again, the ordinary flow of life.