He knows my weakness; he was afraid that if I got hold of them I might, as usual, make smoke of them.
— from Meditations by Emperor of Rome Marcus Aurelius

I told you of it truly when I first knew it myself, and urged my suit till I had a definite answer.
— from The Bertrams by Anthony Trollope

A Roman division under Lucius Hortensius occupied Thessaly and made incursions into Macedonia; another under Munatius stationed itself before Chalcis, to keep off the enemy's corps under Neoptolemus in Euboea; Sulla himself formed a camp at Eleusis and Megara, from which he commanded Greece and the Peloponnesus, and prosecuted the siege of the city and harbour of Athens.
— from The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) by Theodor Mommsen

He seemed to understand what I meant, and unbuckled my straps and took everything off me, very gently, too, and whipped out my bandage and was putting it on my shoulder with considerable skill, I thought, and certainly with a gentle hand—when the order came from their officer to move us on, for the shells were falling all around us.
— from Three Times and Out Told by Private Simmons, Written by Nellie L. McClung by Mervin C. Simmons

Starving and sickening, fighting and falling, the haggard boys watched; yet so faultless was the maiden's art that when in a fury of affright at the risks of time she one day forced their commander to see her heart's starvation for him the battery saw nothing, and even to him she yet appeared faultless in modesty and utterly, marvelously, splendidly ignorant of what she had done.
— from Kincaid's Battery by George Washington Cable

That army which was not--as a European army is--a mere chance collection of men divided from each other in the beginning and end of life, associated loosely with each other in its middle, and using military service as a make-shift; but, to a great extent, a guild, following the profession of arms by hereditary custom from the cradle to the grave.
— from On the Face of the Waters: A Tale of the Mutiny by Flora Annie Webster Steel