Before i get into technology. This is the ammount of deaths a war (other then the American Civil War) would have had before WW 1, around 50,000-200,000. World War 1 had almost 11 million deaths. Since WW 1 proposed new machine guns that were smaller and faster and could hold much more bullets then the earlier machine guns, it could take a load of lives. Because of the machine guns, the soldiers had to "dig in" (dig trenches and stay there) to avoid the machine gun fire. When the Germans launched chemical warfare in 1915 with Chlorine Gas, the average WW 1 soldier started to have to carry around a gas mask. In 1916 when France and Britain started using tanks, the trenches of WW 1 started to be deaper, and have huge mounds built around them to stop the tanks from advancing. When scouting air planes began to become bombers, other planes started to have to have machine guns built on them to stop the planes from bombing, thus the dog fights (airplanes fighting in the sky) were born.
