The machine gun

It is an automatic repeating rifle; it seems that very primitive machine gun specimens had been used since about 1860, during the American Civil War.

Being, with the offensive weapons then in use, an almost insurmountable weapon, he determined the construction of those labyrinths of trenches which, in turn, to be dismantled, required the invention of the bombs, howitzers and, in mountainous areas, mines.

The machine gun, together with the gases, is the real protagonist of the First World War and helped to determine its brutality.