Yeah, well, now everybody had machine guns. One of the things we try to remember here at Crash Course is that people both make history and are made by it. World War I brings this fact into stark relief because we know so much about the soldiers who fought in it, and how they wrote about the war really changed our relationship with systemic violence. For most soldiers, there was nothing glamorous or heroic about this war. For the British, for example, the trenches were two things above all, wet and smelly. The dampness came from the fact that the British trenches were in the wettest part of Flanders. The smell was mainly decomposing flesh.