noun
definition
A person who has physically removed him- or herself from the control or direction of a military or naval unit with the intention of permanently leaving
Examples of deserter in a Sentence
Toward dawn, Count Orlov-Denisov, who had dozed off, was awakened by a deserter from the French army being brought to him.
The Dissenters were by no means satisfied with Forster's "conscience clause" as contained in the bill, and they regarded him, the ex-Quaker, as a deserter from their own side; while they resented the "25th clause," permitting school boards to pay the fees of needy children at denominational schools out of the rates, as an insidious attack upon themselves.
We all profess the Christian law of forgiveness of injuries and love of our neighbors, the law in honor of which we have built in Moscow forty times forty churches--but yesterday a deserter was knouted to death and a minister of that same law of love and forgiveness, a priest, gave the soldier a cross to kiss before his execution.
From the point of view that belief and knowledge, based on experience or reasoning, are separate domains with an unexplored sea between and round them, Pascal is perfectly comprehensible, and he need not be taken as a deserter from one region to the other.
A deserter announced his arrival to Vespasian, who rejoiced (Josephus says) that the cleverest of his enemies had thus voluntarily imprisoned himself.
During his long service as a lieutenant he took part in the bombardment of Tripoli, and on a subsequent occasion showed great firmness in resisting the seizure of a seaman as an alleged deserter from the British navy, his ship at the time lying under the guns of Gibraltar.
But Frenchmen, always touchy on such a point, regarded Voltaire as something of a deserter; and it was not long before he bitterly repented his desertion, though his residence in Prussia lasted nearly three years.
A revival of Irredentism in connection with the execution of an Austrian deserter named Oberdank, who after escaping into Italy endeavoured to return to Austria with explosive bombs in his possession, and the cordial references to France made by Depretis at Stradella (8th October 1882), prevented the French government from suspecting the existence of the alliance, or from ceasing to strive after a Franco-Italian understanding.
The beginnings of this rupture, as well as a sharp affray between his volunteers and the townsfolk of Ajaccio, may have quickened Bonaparte's resolve to return to France in May 1792, but there were also personal and family reasons for this step. Having again exceeded his time of furlough, he was liable to the severe penalties attaching to a deserter and an émigré but he saw that the circumstances of the time would help to enforce the appeal for reinstatement which he resolved to make at Paris.