Rice was given leave in 1877 to demonstrate his trowel bayonet to several nations in Europe. Ten thousand were eventually issued, and the design saw service during the 1877 Nez Perce campaign. Besides its utility as both a fixed bayonet and a digging implement, the Rice trowel bayonet could be used to plaster log huts and stone chimneys for winter quarters sharpened on one edge, it could cut tent poles and pins. From 1870, the US Army issued trowel bayonets to infantry regiments based on a design by Lieutenant-Colonel Edmund Rice, a US Army officer and Civil War veteran, which were manufactured by the Springfield Armory. The trowel or spade bayonet was another multipurpose design, intended for use both as an offensive weapon as well as a digging tool for excavating entrenchments. The German army discontinued use of the sawback bayonet in 1917 after protests that the serrated blade caused unnecessarily severe wounds when used as a fixed bayonet. The sawback proved relatively ineffective as a cutting tool, and was soon outmoded by improvements in military logistics and transportation most nations dropped the sawback feature by 1900. Later German sawbacks were more of a rank indicator than a functional saw. The original sawback bayonets were typically of the heavy sword-type, they were issued to engineers, with to some extent the bayonet aspect being secondary to the 'tool' aspect. It was initially adopted by the German states in 1865 until the middle of WWI approximately 5% of every bayonet style was complemented with a sawback version, countries such as Belgium in 1868, Great Britain in 1869 and Switzerland in 1878 (the latter introduced their last model in 1914). The sawback bayonet was intended for use as a general-purpose utility tool as well as a weapon the teeth were meant to facilitate the cutting of wood for various defensive works such as barbed-wire posts, as well as for butchering livestock. One of these multipurpose designs was the 'sawback' bayonet, which incorporated saw teeth on the spine of the blade.
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