Sentence examples for breastwork from inspiring English sources
noun
A fortification consisting of a breast-high bulwark; a parapet.
Whitney, a Massachusetts Yankee visiting a friend in the South, learned of the problem and quickly solved it with a device that pulled the cotton through a set of wire teeth mounted on a revolving cylinder, the fibre passing through narrow slots in an iron breastwork too small to permit passage of the seed.
Early in the war, General Robert E. Lee adopted the frontier rifleman's breastwork composed of two logs on the parapet of the entrenchment, and many of Lee's victories were the result of his ability to use hasty entrenchments as a base for aggressive employment of fire and maneuver.
When the Zouaves and policemen entered the house they found Garnier and Vallet crouching behind a breastwork of mattresses and furniture.
As Tom Hiney points out, the early missionary was only incidentally an imperialist, and his position in the breastwork of European empire was ambivalent.
No wonder, then, that Marcus Garvey developed close friendships with white separatists and that today white separatists often simply borrow from the rhetoric of black separatists, as black separatist leaders had previously done with their "defensive breastwork against whites".
European nations tried numerous arrangements of guns and armour, such as centreline turrets, a central armoured citadel with large guns on turntables at each corner, lightly armoured big guns topside in barbettes (open-top breastworks), torpedoes in even the largest vessels, and substitution of high speed for armour.
For, as designed, these breastworks take every advantage of the terrain and give us positions for a devastating enfilade.
He is not charging the breastworks.
That evening Thomas requested reinforcements to form a new defensive line and set up breastworks.
Prodded by Bragg, Polk had renewed his assault, slowly driving the four federal divisions from their breastworks.
During the 1864 campaigns in Virginia, General Lee rode along along the breastworks encouraging the men, turned retreating troops and chased down stragglers.
