The point is germane, suggests a certain healthy skepticism about stories of intense hand-to-hand fighting in the trenches.
But then, as Jean-North Cru pretty much established, a great many battlefield accounts are fictional. As the American summary of the Civil War data points out, there was very little hand-to-hand combat: “The bayonet and saber were military weapons of little significance,” is how the United States surgeon general put it. The only surprise revealed by these reports is the extremely low incidence of wounds caused by edged weapons-bayonets, knives, and swords. As most of us would expect, the vast majority of wounds were caused by standard infantry weapons: rifles and sidearms. This shift can be seen quite clearly, because, starting with the wars of the 1860s and 1870s, the medical services of many of the combatants began to keep records of their woundeds’ cases. These dramatic and sweeping changes transformed the nature of warfare in a fundamental way. In the decades between 18, there were three successive revolutions in gunnery. The difficulty men like Séré de Rivières faced was unprecedented, however.
The French engineers who designed the forts were well aware that the rifled, breech-loading guns that were increasingly coming into use in the 1870s were far superior to the cannon that Vauban and his followers had in mind when they designed and built their forts.
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