A breastwork erected during a siege.
In the West, Grant was bogged down in his protracted siege of VicksBurg.
But as the siege of the White House intensifies, his task gets ever harder.
The mood across Lebanon is bleak, as people recall Israel's siege of Beirut 24 years ago.
Unlike them, he had no siege mentality, and needed no Berlin Wall to huddle behind.
Despite the once successful Save the Rhino project, rhinos are under siege.
It has burrowed its way out of Israel's siege, with a web of tunnels from Gaza into Egypt.
The problem is that the outpouring of global sympathy generated by the siege helps Hamas even more.
In Misrata, which withstood a three-month siege and is the country's third city, similarly sturdy groups have been formed.
But after a fierce but short shoot-out, lasting around half an hour, the siege was over.
Chechen group involved in the Beslan school siege in 2004 took responsibility and its leader promised more attacks.
One is a love letter written by a boy to a girl he met in a convoy of vehicles while being evacuated from Sarajevo under siege in 1992.
Although some gangsters escaped the siege via storm-water drains, others are reported to have been ferried out in police cars.
Now gather thyself in troops, O daughter of troops: he hath laid siege against us: they shall smite the judge of Israel with a rod upon the cheek.
Noordin who's believed to have been involved in all recent major Islamist attacks in Indonesia died in a 17-hour-siege in central Java.
Shelling by forces loyal to Colonel Qaddafi during the siege that lasted from March to May demolished much of the town. Real repairs have yet to begin.
Captain Charles Elliot, RN, the British Government's representative as Superintendent of Trade, was shut up with the rest and authorised the surrender of 20283 chests of opium after a siege of six weeks.
And there was a Greek story to the effect that the sentinels at the siege of Troy changed their guard according to the vertical or horizontal positions of the tail of the Great Bear.
The alternative course, and the one he put forward this week, is to slog it out. That may be realistic but it also suggests a siege that could outlast Troy's.
In May 1992, less than a month after Dr Karadzic and General Mladic began the siege of Sarajevo, Yugoslav troops inside the city were themselves surrounded by Bosnian forces.
