Original Item: One-of-a-Kind. This is an outstanding original Austro-Hungarian WWI spring-handle trench raiding mace purchased directly from the personal collection of David F. Machnicki, author of At Arm's Length: Trench Clubs & Maces, Volume II. A near-identical example is illustrated and described on page 32 of Volume II. A printed copy of the page in Volume II will accompany the mace for reference. The page image is copyrighted material and is reproduced with permission of the author.

Machnicki’s Volume II is a recognized specialist reference devoted specifically to WWI trench clubs and maces. The Australian War Memorial holds a copy of the work in its library collection and catalogs it as a monograph on 20th-century weapons and combat history.

This is one of the most distinctive Austro-Hungarian trench club patterns, featuring a robust pear-shaped iron head mounted on a flexible steel spring handle, with a carefully turned wooden grip and original leather wrist lanyard.

The entry in Volume II reads:

“The trench club (Nahkampfkeule) illustrated above is of similar design to the example discussed on the preceding page. This club has a length of approximately 436mm and a mass of 699 grams. Its pear-shaped iron head is mounted atop a 14mm diameter steel spring handle. This flexible steel spring passes completely through the wood grip and was anchored by an 8-millimeter thick convex pommel cap to the base of its grip. The varnished wood grip exhibits a graceful design to its construction. The top of the grip begins smoothly and then tapers quickly to form the center double convex section having 21 regularly spaced, 0.5mm-deep grooves turned about its circumference. Located at the bottom of the grip is an egg-shaped pommel bearing a 9.0-mm wide groove within which a leather lanyard has been wrapped and affixed by a double-rivet. There is a 19-mm long disk-shaped steel ferrule “pressure fitted” atop the grip, which was designed to strengthen and protect the junction for the steel spring and the wood grip. A 23mm diameter steel cap covers the rounded heel for the pommel and may double as a “skull-cracker”. The trench club has no known manufacturer’s markings.

This example is very similar to the example in Volume II, with some minor differences. The grip has 25 regularly spaced grooves instead of 21, and the leather lanyard is stitched closed rather than using rivets.

This example has a small crack on both sides of the rivet in the grip, so caution should be used when handling this mace. There are also some very minor woodworm holes in the grip, only about 4. The mace measures roughly 16 ⅞” long.

A version of this distinctive spring-handle Austro-Hungarian trench mace also appears among the melee weapons represented in the WWI video game Battlefield 1, where an “Austrian Trench Mace” is included among the game’s modeled weapons.

With its pear-shaped iron head, flexible steel spring shaft, 25-groove turned wooden grip, surviving stitched leather lanyard, direct provenance from the collection of David F. Machnicki, and close published comparison in At Arm’s Length: Trench Clubs & Maces, Volume II, this is an exceptionally compelling example of Austro-Hungarian WWI trench fighting equipment. Its documented reference connection gives the piece considerably stronger collector context than an otherwise anonymous trench club.