Notes on Training for Rifle Fire in Trench Warfare

This is April 1917. America has just entered the Great War, and the Army needs soldiers who can shoot straight from the bottom of a trench. What you hold is not a memoir or a history book - it is the actual training manual that young draftees would have studied in camp before crossing the Atlantic, before the mud, before the wire, before the machine guns. It is spare, methodical, and utterly devoid of romance. The manual walks soldiers through the mechanics of effective rifle fire in conditions that defy imagination: firing from the prone position while shrapnel screams overhead, snap-shooting at fleeting targets in No Man's Land, rapid fire for when the moment demands volume over precision. It includes guidance on volley fire by units, targeting enemy officers as they appear, and keeping a rifle functioning when it's choked with mud and filth. The language is stripped to commands and procedures. There is no room for flourish when you're teaching a man to stay alive. For historians, military scholars, and anyone drawn to primary sources, this document offers something rare: the unmediated voice of 1917, when an army was being rebuilt from scratch for the most industrialized slaughter in human history.