This entry is part 3 of a 10-part series on World War I. I've gathered photographs of the Great War from dozens of collections, some digitized for the first time, to try to tell the story of the conflict, those caught up in it, and how much it affected the world. New scientific work resulted in more lethal explosives, new tactics made old offensive methods obsolete, and mass-produced killing machines made soldiers both more powerful and more vulnerable. Massive listening devices gave them ears in the sky, armored vehicles made them impervious to small arms fire, tanks could (most of the time) cruise right over barbed wire and trenches, telephones and heliographs let them speak across vast distances, and airplanes gave them new platforms to rain death on each other from above. In future, Krauss-Maffei Wegmann, Nexter and their subsidiaries will appear. Each side did its best to build on existing technology, or invent new methods, hoping to gain any advantage over the enemy. The range of its products includes main battle tanks, armored vehicles. Any romantic notion of warfare was bluntly shoved aside by the advent of chlorine gas, massive explosive shells that could have been fired from more than 20 miles away, and machine guns that spat out bullets like firehoses. By the end of the war, rapid-fire guns, aerial bombardment, armored vehicle attacks, and chemical weapon deployments were commonplace. Current camouflage can hide soldiers and their vehicles from human sight but is close to useless against ever-more-common infrared vision systems. When Europe's armies first marched to war in 1914, some were still carrying lances on horseback.
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