In Literature
- Baroness Orczy wrote in her famous novel The Scarlet Pimpernel: When we find them, there will be a band of desperate men at the bay. Some of our men, I presume, will be put hors de combat. These royalists are good swordsmen, and the Englishman is devilish cunning, and looks very powerful.
- Kurt Vonnegut described himself as hors de combat on the title page of his famous anti-war novel, Slaughterhouse Five: …who, as an American infantry scout hors de combat, as a prisoner of war, witnessed the fire bombing of Dresden…
- Jules Verne, in Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, has Captain Nemo explain: Professor, I am sorry for one of the best vessels in the American navy; but they attacked me, and I was bound to defend myself. I contented myself, however, with putting the frigate hors de combat; she will not have any difficulty in getting repaired at the next port.
Read more about this topic: Hors De Combat
Famous quotes containing the word literature:
“Despite your best efforts, you could not invent a better police force for literature than criticism and the author’s own conscience.”
—Anton Pavlovich Chekhov (1860–1904)
“The newspapers, I perceive, devote some of their columns specially to politics or government without charge; and this, one would say, is all that saves it; but as I love literature and to some extent the truth also, I never read those columns at any rate. I do not wish to blunt my sense of right so much.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)