We just fired into them. At the Somme, the British lost 60,000 men in the first day of fighting. Remember the old colonialist verse, whatever happens, we have got the maxim gun and they have not? 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.