The specific geography of the Holtzwihr battle is worth establishing with more precision, because the terrain constrained what was possible in ways that the citation cannot fully convey.
The Bois de Riedwihr was a rectangular forest, approximately two kilometers by one kilometer, that sat between the villages of Riedwihr to the north and Holtzwihr to the south. The forest was bordered to the east by the Colmar Canal, a navigation canal that ran roughly parallel to the Rhine. The ground between the forest’s southern edge and Holtzwihr was open farmland, which is where the German infantry came from on January 26.
The drainage ditches that Murphy mentions in the account — the ditch his command post occupied, the ditch that the lead M10 slid into, the ditch that a German squad tried to work through to flank his position — are characteristic features of the flat, agricultural Alsatian plain. This is delta-like terrain, reclaimed over centuries, drained by a network of ditches that cut across the fields at regular intervals. The ditches were typically two to three feet deep, narrow, and filled with cold water or ice in January.
The frozen ground that prevented Company B from digging proper foxholes is a specific tactical problem that experienced soldiers will recognize. When the ground freezes to a significant depth, an entrenching tool is essentially useless for creating protective cover. Men trying to dig in winter-frozen soil can chip through a few inches but cannot create the kind of protective position that normal soft earth allows. The company was therefore exposed — lying in the snow or behind whatever natural cover the terrain provided, without the protection of dug-in positions.