What is "breastwork"

Usage examples of "breastwork".

Wilberforce in righteous indignation, her massive breastworks rising under the flopping brown boucle dress like unscalable fortifications.

The arms were soon again in evidence, however, as the machines spun deftly about the rock clearing, first erecting the tent then piling a breastwork of boulders around it.

Koreel trotted his horse forward and called upward to a guard standing behind the timber breastwork that topped the unmortared sixteen-foot stone wall.

Spanish trochas were military lines cut through the woods and across the island from side to side, and defended by barbed-wire fences, while the felled trees were piled along both sides of the roadway, making a difficult breastwork of jagged roots and branches.

He also threw up log breastworks through the heavily wooded country, and his lines, bristling with artillery and defended now by six score thousand men, extended along a front of six miles.

There were breastworks and other lines of defense running far through the forest, positions that were formidable, but not manned at this moment by riflemen or cannoneers.

The Union gunners willingly exposed themselves to death to save their army, and from their breastworks sixty thousand riflemen sent vast sheets of bullets.

The Northern army, its breastworks carried by storm, was driven out of Chancellorsville and, defeated but not routed, began its slow and sullen retreat.

But know this, the upper breastworks and towers have long since fallen, and all that remains are the underground tunnels.

We passed a single line of breastworks of bare yellow sand, but the scrubby pines in front were not cut away, and there were no signs that there had ever been any immediate expectation of use for the works.

Springing over the front of their breastworks, they drove back with a withering fire the force assailing them in the rear.

Our boys were alternately behind the breastworks firing at Rebels advancing upon the front, and in front of the works firing upon those coming up in the rear.

They had some breastworks on a ridge in front of us, and we had a pretty sharp fight before we drove them off.

They had ten pieces of artillery, and more men behind the breastworks than we had in line, and the fire they poured on us was simply withering.

We first crossed a line of breastworks, then in succession the Fernandina Railroad, the Jacksonville Railroad, and pike, moving all the time nearly parallel with the picket line.