What is "breastworks"

Usage examples of "breastworks".

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.

Manuel and I follow the sound of the shooting, and finally we come upon a large number of characters behind a breastworks made out of sandbags, and they all have rifles in their hands, and are shooting now and then at a big stone building on a high hill about three blocks away, and from this building also comes a lot of firing, and there are occasional bur-ur-ur-ups on both sides that I recognize as machine guns, and bullets are zinging about the sandbags quite some.

But about two blocks from the breastworks, and on a rise of ground almost as high as the hill the building is on, there is a field-gun, and this is also firing on the building about every fifteen minutes, and I can see that it seems to be doing some real damage, at that, what with knocking off pieces of the architecture, and punching holes in the roof, although now and then it lets go a shell that misses the mark in a way that will never be tolerated by the character who commands the battery I serve with in France.