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General staff   /dʒˈɛnərəl stæf/   Listen
General staff

noun
1.
Military officers assigned to assist a senior officer in planning military policy.






WordNet 3.0 © 2010 Princeton University








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"General staff" Quotes from Famous Books



... mathematics, he entered the Polytechnic School at Paris, was commissioned two years afterwards in the corps of Engineers, and served in the later campaigns of Napoleon, where he rose to the rank of captain. He afterwards entered the Swiss Federal service, in which he became colonel, chief of the general staff, and quartermaster-general. At later periods he has held the less active, but equally responsible and honorable positions of superintendent of the triangulation of Switzerland on which the topographical ...
— Atlantic Monthly,Volume 14, No. 82, August, 1864 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various

... time, it became a part of the plan of the general staff to strike hard in Flanders and in the Cambrai sector, while the Germans were busily engaged elsewhere. It would, indeed, be ...
— The Boy Allies with Haig in Flanders • Clair W. Hayes

... Confederation, to send the junior members of their families—the young men—to Berlin for a time, in order to complete their military education under the eyes of the kaiser, and to be in touch with that general staff which is virtually the Supreme Council of ...
— The Secret Memoirs of the Courts of Europe: William II, Germany; Francis Joseph, Austria-Hungary, Volume I. (of 2) • Mme. La Marquise de Fontenoy

... called it, was a riot. We didn't talk of anything but fights at Gaza—the surprise at Nazareth, when the German General Staff fled up the road on foot in its pyjamas—the three-day scrap at Nebi Samwil, when Australians and Turks took and retook the same hill half a dozen times, and parched enemies took turns drinking from one flask while the shells of both sides burst ...
— Affair in Araby • Talbot Mundy

... Only the general staff-the officers in their headquarters far behind the lines, who receive reports as to how this division or corps is retreating or advancing—can have any real conception of the big battle, and these persons may see it only ...
— Air Service Boys in the Big Battle • Charles Amory Beach

... rank of colonel on the general staff of the school. He was plumply pleased by salutes on the street from unknown small boys; his ears were tickled to ruddy ecstasy by hearing himself called "Colonel;" and if he did not attend Sunday School merely to be thus exalted, certainly he ...
— Babbitt • Sinclair Lewis

... person should have an ambition to belong to the French army; and why, belonging to it, he should be proud of that; and why, having got down that far, he should want to go on down, down, down till he struck the bottom and got on the General Staff; and why, being stripped of this livery, or set free and reinvested with his self-respect by any other quick and thorough process, let it be what it might, he should wish to return to his strange serfage. But no matter: the estimate put upon these things by the fifteen hundred and sixty millions ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain

... the General Board be by law turned into a General Staff. There is literally no excuse whatever for continuing the present bureau organization of the Navy. The Navy should be treated as a purely military organization, and everything should be subordinated to the one object of securing military efficiency. Such military efficiency can only be guaranteed ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various

... many a starry night on the hills above Folkestone digging trenches and building dug-outs according to General Staff instructions, and many a rainy one we came home, covered with mud, but happy in the thought that we were approximating, as nearly as could be, the experience of the boys at the front. Bomb-throwing squads were formed, ...
— Kitchener's Mob - Adventures of an American in the British Army • James Norman Hall

... were dim, I could see something glittering in the hand of the person mentioned, who was impersonating for the evening a dashing young captain of the general staff. My fingers strayed toward my pocket and my own revolver. Then I pried them away, temporarily, and ...
— The Firefly Of France • Marion Polk Angellotti

... returns during the night, highly commends them, and confirms the promise of the "agreed wages." On the following any at noon, he again returns, congratulates them more warmly, allows each one twenty francs, and urges them to keep on.[3174]—In the mean time, Santerre, summoned to the general staff headquarters by Roland, hypocritically deplores his voluntary inability, and persists in not giving the orders, without which the National Guard cannot move.[3175] At the sections, the presidents, Chenier, ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 3 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 2 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine

... General Staff, as we are informed, has already taken those measures imposed by the situation. The Generals, Frank and Potiorek, have been recalled and will be probably court-martialed. And it seems that the "brilliant" Servian victories are the beginning of the ...
— Current History, A Monthly Magazine - The European War, March 1915 • New York Times

... Edwin to follow him into the shop. Several hours of miscellaneous consultative pottering had passed between Darius and his compositors round and about the new printing machine, which was once more plumb and ready for action. For considerably over a week Edwin had been on his father's general staff without any definite task or occupation having been assigned to him. His father had been too excitedly preoccupied with the arrival and erection of the machine to bestow due thought upon the activities ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett

... plans were the work of Von Moltke, chief of the general staff, who was without a superior in military science. They were carried out with astonishing precision and celerity. On June 15 Prussia required Saxony, Hanover, and Hesse to disarm, to remain neutral, and to send ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher

... preliminary political and strategical investigation—of the Germans in the present campaign has not been such a success as might have been expected from a scheme so wonderfully organised as it has been. With the vast sums spent upon it, the German General Staff might reasonably have obtained men in a higher position in life who could have gauged the political atmosphere better than was done by their agents immediately before ...
— My Adventures as a Spy • Robert Baden-Powell

... well-mannered, open-minded and well-read gentleman, with a somewhat scientific turn of mind and a rare freedom from military prejudice. Hollanders are not a military people in the German sense, and fire-eaters and military fanatics are rare, but they are rarest amongst the officers of the General Staff, the Royal ...
— Dutch Life in Town and Country • P. M. Hough

... understood that ironical "railway" proviso of a harassed general staff. We had been reviewed the day before, and the good practice of our guns had been praised by the inspecting officer. Now was our chance, we thought. Nevertheless, we had to live on that guarded ...
— In the Ranks of the C.I.V. • Erskine Childers

... Albania General Staff Headquarters, Land Forces Command (Army), Naval Forces Command, Air Forces Command, Doctrine and Exercises Command, Logistics ...
— The 2004 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency

... were ten thousand dead German soldiers left before that salient of the English army, and consequently there was no Sedan. In Germany, a country ruled by scientific principles, the Great General Staff decided that the contemptible English must have employed shells containing an unknown gas of a poisonous nature, as no wounds were discernible on the bodies of the dead German soldiers. But the man who knew what nuts tasted like when they ...
— The Angels of Mons • Arthur Machen

... battle-ax and lance. The recent conflict in Asia shows that it is as important to get wounded men cured and back on the firing line as it is to punish the other side. A nation that would now enter into armed conflict without a general staff or some similar body of men would be hurling its soldiers, however brave, ...
— The Young Man and the World • Albert J. Beveridge

... figures before me I worked out what I considered the best plan of campaign in the circumstances and submitted it to my General Staff for criticism. Then I dispatched it to England. That document likewise is among the State papers at Windsor awaiting the serenely ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War from the Beginning to March 1915, Vol 1, No. 2 - Who Began the War, and Why? • Various

... Frau Lieutenant Beyer, our neighbour in the house, whose husband was on the general staff, asking: "How is it possible? Everything was ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers

... Sarajevo removed the chief restraining force in the councils of the Monarchy and placed the fate of Europe at the mercy of a group of gamblers in Vienna, Budapest, and Berlin. The military party, under Konrad von Hoetzendorf, chief of the Austrian General Staff (who a year ago was seriously speculating as to the collapse of Austria-Hungary), joined hands with the Magyar extremists, whose political monopoly was threatened by the advancing Slavonic tide, and with the inner ring of Prussian diplomacy, which believed ...
— The War and Democracy • R.W. Seton-Watson, J. Dover Wilson, Alfred E. Zimmern,

... was not all in Berlin. I spent most of my time there at Koenigergratzerstrasse 70 and at the Zeughaus, the great museum of the German General Staff. But there were side trips to the big government works at Kiel and Wilhelmshafen. There I was taught every detail of the mechanics of naval construction and I was not pronounced equipped until I could talk intelligently about every unassembled ...
— The Secrets of the German War Office • Dr. Armgaard Karl Graves



Words linked to "General staff" :   military, war machine, armed forces, armed services, staff, military machine



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