Lances, Taxis and Avalanches: WW I You Don't Know

When you think about World War I, you probably picture machine gunners, gas masks, pointy little helmets, Snoopy mercilessly gunning down that Red Baron pizza guy ... but as is so often the case, it turns out that history class presented us with an extremely narrow, kinda boring viewpoint for one of the world's greatest conflicts. See, the Great War was also quite possibly the weirdest. That's because ...

 

Though it's often considered the first modern war, World War I went down while most of humanity still took the word "horsepower" literally. A WWI battlefield was an odd and terrifying blend of the old and the new. Take Germany, for example, which had a reputation of being fairly high-tech at the time: Their army launched into the earliest battles of the war led by Uhlans -- horse-mounted shock troops armed with 10-foot steel lances, then followed by the main units armed with machine guns and artillery.

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