All 44 Uses of
perish
in
War and Peace
- The vicomte said that the Duc d'Enghien had perished by his own magnanimity, and that there were particular reasons for Buonaparte's hatred of him.†
Chpt 1 *
- I must look for the commander in chief here, and if all is lost it is for me to perish with the rest.†
Chpt 3
- He rode on to the region where the greatest number of men had perished in fleeing from Pratzen.†
Chpt 3
- But it is a good thing for proprietors who perish morally, bring remorse upon themselves, stifle this remorse and grow callous, as a result of being able to inflict punishments justly and unjustly.†
Chpt 5
- I shall perish of my debauchery if Thou utterly desertest me!†
Chpt 6
- Natasha quieted herself for a moment, but again some instinct told her that though all this was true, and though nothing had happened, yet the former purity of her love for Prince Andrew had perished.†
Chpt 8
- Equally right or wrong is he who says that Napoleon went to Moscow because he wanted to, and perished because Alexander desired his destruction, and he who says that an undermined hill weighing a million tons fell because the last navvy struck it for the last time with his mattock.†
Chpt 9
- O Lord our God, in whom we believe and in whom we put our trust, let us not be confounded in our hope of Thy mercy, and give us a token of Thy blessing, that those who hate us and our Orthodox faith may see it and be put to shame and perish, and may all the nations know that Thou art the Lord and we are Thy people.†
Chpt 9
- "You heard probably of the heroic exploit of Raevski, embracing his two sons and saying: 'I will perish with them but we will not be shaken!'†
Chpt 10
- I from the one side and Prince Bagration from the other are marching to unite our forces before Smolensk, which junction will be effected on the 22nd instant, and both armies with their united forces will defend our compatriots of the province entrusted to your care till our efforts shall have beaten back the enemies of our Fatherland, or till the last warrior in our valiant ranks has perished.†
Chpt 10
- 'Take me away,' says she, 'don't let me perish with my little children!†
Chpt 10
- Russia has perished.†
Chpt 10
- On the contrary, it seemed to her certain that had he not been there she would have perished at the hands of the mutineers and of the French, and that he had exposed himself to terrible and obvious danger to save her, and even more certain was it that he was a man of lofty and noble soul, able to understand her position and her sorrow.†
Chpt 10
- Toward two o'clock the regiment, having already lost more than two hundred men, was moved forward into a trampled oatfield in the gap between Semenovsk and the Knoll Battery, where thousands of men perished that day and on which an intense, concentrated fire from several hundred enemy guns was directed between one and two o'clock.†
Chpt 10
- He boldly took the whole responsibility for what happened, and his darkened mind found justification in the belief that among the hundreds of thousands who perished there were fewer Frenchmen than Hessians and Bavarians.†
Chpt 10
- The French invaders, like an infuriated animal that has in its onslaught received a mortal wound, felt that they were perishing, but could not stop, any more than the Russian army, weaker by one half, could help swerving.†
Chpt 10
- By impetus gained, the French army was still able to roll forward to Moscow, but there, without further effort on the part of the Russians, it had to perish, bleeding from the mortal wound it had received at Borodino.†
Chpt 10
- One word from me, one movement of my hand, and that ancient capital of the Tsars would perish.†
Chpt 11
- There now, the gentry and merchants have gone away and left us to perish.†
Chpt 11
- This man, Vereshchagin, is the scoundrel by whose doing Moscow is perishing.†
Chpt 11
- He alone of all the Russians has disgraced the Russian name, he has caused Moscow to perish," said Rostopchin in a sharp, even voice, but suddenly he glanced down at Vereshchagin who continued to stand in the same submissive attitude.†
Chpt 11
- … Let the traitor perish and not disgrace the Russian name!" shouted Rostopchin.†
Chpt 11
- Many other victims have perished and are perishing for the public good"—and he began thinking of his social duties to his family and to the city entrusted to him, and of himself—not himself as Theodore Vasilyevich Rostopchin (he fancied that Theodore Vasilyevich Rostopchin was sacrificing himself for the public good) but himself as governor, the representative of authority and of the Tsar.†
Chpt 11
- Many other victims have perished and are perishing for the public good"—and he began thinking of his social duties to his family and to the city entrusted to him, and of himself—not himself as Theodore Vasilyevich Rostopchin (he fancied that Theodore Vasilyevich Rostopchin was sacrificing himself for the public good) but himself as governor, the representative of authority and of the Tsar.†
Chpt 11
- Like a monkey which puts its paw into the narrow neck of a jug, and having seized a handful of nuts will not open its fist for fear of losing what it holds, and therefore perishes, the French when they left Moscow had inevitably to perish because they carried their loot with them, yet to abandon what they had stolen was as impossible for them as it is for the monkey to open its paw and let go of its nuts.†
Chpt 11
- Like a monkey which puts its paw into the narrow neck of a jug, and having seized a handful of nuts will not open its fist for fear of losing what it holds, and therefore perishes, the French when they left Moscow had inevitably to perish because they carried their loot with them, yet to abandon what they had stolen was as impossible for them as it is for the monkey to open its paw and let go of its nuts.†
Chpt 11
- He must remain in Moscow, concealing his name, and must meet Napoleon and kill him, and either perish or put an end to the misery of all Europe—which it seemed to him was solely due to Napoleon.†
Chpt 11
- "Yes, alone, for the sake of all, I must do it or perish!" he thought.†
Chpt 11
- That army, like a herd of cattle run wild and trampling underfoot the provender which might have saved it from starvation, disintegrated and perished with each additional day it remained in Moscow.†
Chpt 13
- The plight of the whole army resembled that of a wounded animal which feels it is perishing and does not know what it is doing.†
Chpt 13
- At Austerlitz he remained last at the Augezd dam, rallying the regiments, saving what was possible when all were flying and perishing and not a single general was left in the rear guard.†
Chpt 13
- From the time he received this news to the end of the campaign all Kutuzov's activity was directed toward restraining his troops, by authority, by guile, and by entreaty, from useless attacks, maneuvers, or encounters with the perishing enemy.†
Chpt 13
- …placed Russians it seemed rather disgraceful to fight with a cudgel and they wanted to assume a pose en quarte or en tierce according to all the rules, and to make an adroit thrust en prime, and so on—the cudgel of the people's war was lifted with all its menacing and majestic strength, and without consulting anyone's tastes or rules and regardless of anything else, it rose and fell with stupid simplicity, but consistently, and belabored the French till the whole invasion had perished.†
Chpt 14
- He did not see and did not hear how they shot the prisoners who lagged behind, though more than a hundred perished in that way.†
Chpt 14
- 'You are perishing because of me, Daddy,' he says.†
Chpt 14
- The French army melted away and perished at the same rate from Moscow to Vyazma, from Vyazma to Smolensk, from Smolensk to the Berezina, and from the Berezina to Vilna—independently of the greater or lesser intensity of the cold, the pursuit, the barring of the way, or any other particular conditions.†
Chpt 14
- And Napoleon, escaping home in a warm fur coat and leaving to perish those who were not merely his comrades but were (in his opinion) men he had brought there, feels que c'est grand, *(2) and his soul is tranquil.†
Chpt 14
- Still more senseless would have been the wish to capture army corps of the French, when our own army had melted away to half before reaching Krasnoe and a whole division would have been needed to convoy the corps of prisoners, and when our men were not always getting full rations and the prisoners already taken were perishing of hunger.†
Chpt 14
- …cannot be maintained, when men were taken into that region of death where discipline fails, not for a few hours only as in a battle, but for months, where they were every moment fighting death from hunger and cold, when half the army perished in a single month—it is of this period of the campaign that the historians tell us how Miloradovich should have made a flank march to such and such a place, Tormasov to another place, and Chichagov should have crossed (more than knee-deep…†
Chpt 14
- When seeing a dying animal a man feels a sense of horror: substance similar to his own is perishing before his eyes.†
Chpt 15
- The French did not need to be informed of the fact that half the prisoners—with whom the Russians did not know what to do—perished of cold and hunger despite their captors' desire to save them; they felt that it could not be otherwise.†
Chpt 15
- The French perished from the conditions to which the Russian army was itself exposed.†
Chpt 15
- The longer the French remained the more these forms of town life perished, until finally all was merged into one confused, lifeless scene of plunder.†
Chpt 15
- They abused the police and bribed them, made out estimates at ten times their value for government stores that had perished in the fire, and demanded relief.†
Chpt 15
Definition:
-
(perish) to die -- especially in an unnatural way
or:
to be destroyed or cease to existeditor's notes: You may encounter an informal expression, "Perish the thought." It means that the speaker hopes the thought will cease to exist and the thing it represents will never happen.