Grey and ochre

Usage examples of colours.

The Regimienta de la Santa Maria was at Oropesa parading beneath two huge new colours, and Sharpe wondered whether General Cuesta kept a limitless supply to replace the trophies that ended up in Paris.

The man who captured the colours could name his own reward, whether in money, women, or rank, and the Chasseurs tried to break the British resistance with a savage fury.

The Ensigns pulled the leather covers from the South Essex colours, unfurled them, and hoisted them into their sockets.

The French sabres came down right and left, more Spaniards broke from the mass, the colours went down, they were sprinting towards the British square, desperate for its safety.

The committee of the first fifteen consisted of the two old colours who came immediately after the captain on the list.

He would give a man his colours, and inform the committee of it on the following afternoon, when the thing was done and could not be repealed.

On the apparatus, the members of the gymnastic six, including the two experts who were to carry the school colours to Aldershot in the spring, would be performing their usual marvels.

What earthly motive could he have for not wanting Barry to get his colours, bar the fact that Rand-Brown didn’t want him to?

The colours were cased in polished leather and guarded by Sergeants whose halberd blades had been burnished to a brilliant, glittering sheen.

The colours came next, two flags covered in armorial bearings, threaded with gold, tasselled, looped, crowned, curlicued, emblazoned, carried by horsemen whose mounts stepped delicately high as though the earth was scarcely fit to carry such splendid creations.

The Spanish had arrived, their trumpeters in front, their colours flying, the blue-coated infantry straggling behind.

Instead the trumpeters paced their horses onto the bridge, the colours followed, then the gloriously uniformed officers and finally the infantry itself.

Sharpe wondered what they made of the scene in front of them: the Spanish advancing clumsily in four ranks, eight hundred men round their colours marching towards four hundred French horsemen while, at the bridge, another eight hundred infantry prepared to advance.

Sharpe had known as many as ten men to carry the colours in battle, replacing the dead, picking up the flags even though they knew that then they became the enemy's prime target.

More horsemen had been ordered against the remnants of the British square, a huddle of men fighting desperately round the colours, but Sharpe could see more cavalry, standing motionless in two ranks, the French reserve which could be thrown in to sustain the attack or break any sudden resistance from the infantry.