Note 2 — Chapter III · COURCELLES, SPICHEREN, AND GRAVELOTTE.

I observe it has been asserted that the French in those earlier battles did not resort to rifle-pits. Anybody asserting this who was in sight of the operations must have been stone-blind. I have been in dozens of them. The story of 800 and odd corpses having been found in one after the battle of the 14th of August must have been a “goak” perpetrated by some youngster on the staff eager to feed Germany with sensationalism. There were two varieties of what the Germans call schützen-graben. Of one the churchyard at Point du Jour is a good example—a triangle surrounded with a low wall, which had been loopholed, and with a trench inside for additional cover. The other pattern consisted of a small half-moon excavation—the convexity toward the enemy—the earth from the hole breasted up in front, over which the marksmen fired in a kneeling position. The maximum garrison of one of these rifle-pits must have been about twelve men, half of them firing while the other half rested behind the shelter. To have packed throngs of men into large rifle-pits would simply have been to provide so many charnel-houses. Doubtless numbers of the little half-moons are still to the fore on the battle-fields. It is easy to tell the French works from the German by the objective of their convexity. The Germans, however, converted many of them.