"Awkward squad" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... These latter are set too far back for their bodies to hang horizontally; so, with their fin-like wings hanging down helplessly by their sides, they look ashore, as Fritz said to Eric, "just the very image of a parcel of rough recruits" going through their first drill in the "awkward squad!" ...
— Fritz and Eric - The Brother Crusoes • John Conroy Hutcheson
... yet before a good many of these ones will be soldiers," he, observed, with a disrespectful wave of his thumb towards the awkward squad still manoeuvering its way about over the barren stretch of the parade ground. "They ride like tailors squatting on their press-boards, and they salute like a parrot scratching his head with his hind paw. A soldier is like ...
— On the Firing Line • Anna Chapin Ray and Hamilton Brock Fuller
... shoulders, waist, knees and feet, under the orders of a drill- sergeant, who might, indeed, sugar-coat his phrases with "Your Highness," but whose intonations would say "You must," as plainly as if he were drilling an awkward squad of peasant recruits. If you were the daughter of a hundred earls, you would be mounted on a Shetland pony and shaken into a good seat long before you outgrew short frocks, and afterwards you would be ...
— In the Riding-School; Chats With Esmeralda • Theo. Stephenson Browne
... after all, whose fault was it? I was really the only one to blame; why in the world had I not got away faster? I now changed my plan entirely — there is nothing to be ashamed of in that, I hope — and fell in with the awkward squad; there I was more successful. "All ready? Go!" And go they did. First Hanssen went off like a meteor; close behind him came Wisting, and then Bjaaland and Hassel. They all had ski on, and were driving with a line. I had made up my mind to follow in the rear, as I thought ...
— The South Pole, Volumes 1 and 2 • Roald Amundsen
... as a fault that they are not a discriminating race, and will asseverate that all fish are trout, and the most arrant mutton is venison,—but the immigrant, colonizing society. Cockneys are to be found at every turn, flaunting their banners of the awkward squad, proclaiming to the world with protuberant pride that they are the veritable backwoodsmen,—rather doing it, rather astonishing the natives, they think. And so they are. One squad of such neophytes might be entertaining; but when every square mile echoes with their hails, lost, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 58, August, 1862 • Various |
