WW1 Infantry Weapons: Rifles, Grenades and Bayonets Explained

The standard weapon of a World War 1 infantryman was a bolt-action magazine rifle in 7.62-8 mm calibre: the British Lee-Enfield, the German Mauser Gewehr 98, the French Lebel and the Russian Mosin-Nagant. All of them were accurate to 500-600 metres, yet in the trench war of 1915-1918 most fighting happened at 20-100 metres, where the grenade, the pistol, the trench knife and the first submachine gun in history, the MP 18, decided the outcome. This guide is for Frontkrieg players and anyone who wants to know what an ordinary soldier of 1914-1918 actually carried and used.

In short: what an infantryman carried in 1914

• Rifle with bayonet: 4.0-4.5 kg, magazine of 5-10 rounds.
• Ammunition: 120-150 rounds in pouches.
• Entrenching tool, water bottle, gas mask (from 1915), field rations.
• Total assault load: 25-30 kg.

The rifle was the symbol of the infantry, but casualty statistics tell another story: artillery caused roughly 60% of all losses, small arms about a third, and the bayonet under 1%. We covered the war's biggest killer in our article on World War 1 artillery.

Rifles of the four major armies

Lee-Enfield SMLE (Britain)

The Short Magazine Lee-Enfield in .303 British held 10 rounds, twice the capacity of its rivals. British training demanded the "mad minute": 15 aimed shots in 60 seconds. At Mons in August 1914 German infantry reported machine-gun fire when in fact they were facing ordinary riflemen with Lee-Enfields.

Mauser Gewehr 98 (Germany)

The Gewehr 98 in 7.92x57 mm loaded from a 5-round stripper clip and weighed 4.09 kg. Its three-lug bolt became the benchmark, copied by dozens of armies over the next century. The drawback was length: 1250 mm is awkward in a trench, so from 1917 troops increasingly carried the short Kar 98a carbine.

Lebel M1886 and Berthier (France)

The Lebel was the world's first service rifle built for smokeless powder, but it kept an archaic 8-round tube magazine under the barrel that had to be loaded one cartridge at a time. That is why France produced the Berthier system in parallel, with a 3-round clip and, from 1916, a 5-round one.

Mosin-Nagant M1891 (Russia)

Chambered in 7.62x54R with a 5-round magazine, the Mosin was simple and durable. The problem was industry, not design: by autumn 1914 the Russian army was short by hundreds of thousands of rifles and placed contracts in the United States with Remington and Westinghouse.

Springfield M1903 (United States)

When the American Expeditionary Forces arrived in 1917, the Springfield M1903 was the standard rifle, but production could not keep pace, so most US troops received the M1917 Enfield instead.

Why the rifle lost the trench

An aimed range of 500-600 metres is no advantage when the enemy parapet is 80 metres away and the attack lasts a few minutes. A rifle with a fixed bayonet reached 1.7 metres and snagged on trench walls, each shot cost seconds of bolt work, and inside a dugout there was no room to swing it. Together with machine guns and barbed wire, this froze the front line; the mechanics of that deadlock are explained in our piece on trench warfare.

The grenade: the real queen of the trenches

The hand grenade became the primary assault weapon. The British Mills Bomb No. 5 appeared in 1915, and over 70 million grenades of that family were produced during the war. The German Stielhandgranate, the "potato masher", flew further thanks to its wooden handle acting as a lever: 35-40 metres against 25-30 for a ball-type grenade.

Assault parties often went in with no rifle at all: a bag of grenades, a pistol and a knife. German Stosstruppen tactics of 1918 were built around exactly that loadout.

Close-quarters weapons: bayonets, knives and clubs

The bayonet stayed in the kit, yet in British army medical records edged-weapon wounds accounted for around 1% of cases. Instead soldiers improvised trench clubs studded with nails, ground entrenching tools into axes and bought trench knives such as the German Grabendolch or the American Mark I with its brass-knuckle grip. A night raid to snatch a prisoner was done with silent weapons, not rifles.

Pistols and the first submachine guns

• Luger P08, 9x19 mm, 8-round magazine: the status weapon of officers and stormtroopers.
• Webley Mk VI, .455, 6-shot revolver: the British standard from 1915.
• Colt M1911, .45 ACP, 7 rounds: the American pistol that stayed in service until 1985.
• MP 18/I, 9x19 mm, 32-round snail drum: the first mass-produced submachine gun, adopted in 1918.

The MP 18 arrived a few months too late to change tactics before the Armistice. The Treaty of Versailles specifically restricted its production, which says a great deal about how seriously the victors rated it.

Light machine guns and rifle grenades

A new class appeared between the rifle and the heavy machine gun: the light machine gun you could carry forward in an attack. France built roughly 262,000 Chauchat CSRG M1915s, the most numerous light machine gun of the war despite its poor reputation for jamming in mud. The British Lewis Gun weighed 13 kg instead of the 30+ kg of a Vickers on its tripod. For the heavy systems that stopped the war of movement, see our separate article on World War 1 machine guns.

Rifle grenades deserve a mention too: a cup discharger on the muzzle gave every platoon its own pocket artillery out to 150-200 metres, decades before underbarrel grenade launchers.

How infantry weapons changed in four years

• 1914: rifle and bayonet dominate, grenades are scarce, submachine guns do not exist.
• 1915: mass-produced grenades (Mills No. 5, Stielhandgranate), the first Flammenwerfer flamethrowers, gas masks become standard kit.
• 1916: Lewis and Chauchat light machine guns reach every platoon, rifle grenades appear.
• 1917: short carbines replace long rifles, trench knives and clubs become routine.
• 1918: the MP 18 and the assault squad; for the first time a platoon is a mix of weapon systems rather than a line of riflemen.

In four years the infantry section changed from a uniform group of marksmen into a small combined-arms system, and that structure is still with us today.

How this shows up in Frontkrieg

In Frontkrieg infantry is the cheapest and most basic branch, and it behaves much as it did historically: cheap, numerous, slow, strong on defence and helpless against armour without support. Individual rifles are not modelled, but the counter system reproduces the central lesson of 1914-1918: infantry without artillery breaks its teeth on fortifications, while artillery without an infantry screen dies to the first raid. The full interaction table is in our guide to unit types and counters, and the role of gas is covered in chemical weapons of World War 1.

A new match starts every day on a map of 4,800 provinces with up to 500 players and 70 AI nations. Frontkrieg is free, runs in the browser with no download, and has no pay-to-win shop.

Frequently asked questions

What was the best rifle of World War 1?

All round, the British Lee-Enfield SMLE: a 10-round magazine and a fast bolt gave the highest practical rate of fire, 15 or more aimed shots per minute. The Mauser Gewehr 98 was the better pure design and more accurate, which is why its action was copied worldwide after the war.

Did many soldiers die from bayonets?

No. British army medical statistics put edged-weapon wounds at roughly 1% of cases. Artillery shell fragments caused about 60% of casualties, with most of the rest from bullets and grenades.

What was the main weapon of trench fighting?

The hand grenade. A Mills Bomb or a Stielhandgranate could reach an enemy around a corner of the trench where no rifle could be aimed. Assault teams frequently carried grenades, a pistol and a knife instead of a long rifle.

When was the first submachine gun invented?

In 1918. The German MP 18/I with its 32-round magazine was the first mass-produced submachine gun. It reached the front in the final months of the war and had no time to affect the outcome.

Conclusion

World War 1 infantry weapons are a study in the gap between what armies prepared for and what they got. A long, accurate rifle was designed for open manoeuvre warfare, but the fighting happened at grenade-throwing distance. Out of that gap came assault squads, submachine guns and essentially all twentieth-century infantry tactics.

Want to see infantry and artillery work together on the scale of an entire continent? Start a match in Frontkrieg or browse more articles on the blog.

Source: World War I - Wikipedia