poltroonery

What has not ended — what seems endless — is Republican bad faith and poltroonery.

Leopold’s war record was vilified by both the French prime minister Paul Reynaud and the former British prime minister David Lloyd George, who claimed that in the “black annals of the most reprobate Kings of the earth” there was not “a blacker and more squalid sample of perfidy and poltroonery than that perpetuated by the King of the Belgians”.

This cannot be far from the truth, as it seems to be free from the exaggerations in which Tichburne dealt, when recounting the numerical strength of his and the enemy’s forces, ascribing to the latter poltroonery and cowardice in action, and crediting them with excessively heavy losses.

Still he hesitated, though he told himself that it was not by boggling at trifles that men arrived at great ends--nor by poltroonery.

Franz plucked up a spirit; and considering that his shoulders had at all events the score to pay, his poltroonery passed into a species of audacity.