Definition of "volunteers" []

• Plural form of volunteer. (noun)

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• "As discipline improved and the men began to feel that they were no longer simply volunteers, but _enlisted volunteers_, the romantic devotion which they had felt was succeeded by a feeling of constraint and necessity, and while the army was in reality very much improved and strengthened by the change, the soldiers imagined the contrary to be the case."
• "And as I sit outside and listen to the siren wail and wonder what it calls the volunteers to face, tradition has me cross myself and then, whoops, I remember: I've already bothered Him or It or Whatever this day, this week, this month, this year."
• "The villains know that there are hundreds of men, friends of the prisoners with whom they have crowded the jails, who would tear them down stone by stone, if they had the power; but in addition to the prison warders -- not the men that used to be there, but men taken from the lowest class in the town -- the prisons are watched by what they call the volunteers, fifteen hundred men belonging to the scum of the city -- the men from the slaughterhouses, the skinners ', and the tan yards Some of these are ever on guard round the prisons, night and day."