10 ways World War I changed the world 100 years ago

29th April 1917: Scottish troops advancing in the attack near Arras, during the Battle of the Somme. British troops suffered record loss of life on the first day of the battle with 57,470 casualties. (Photo by Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

For Americans, it ended on the 11th hour of the 11th day with a ceremonial shot by the doughboys of Battery E, 11th Field Artillery.  

“The men were too exhausted to cheer,” writes Kevin Hymel for ArmyHistory.org, but they were relieved that they had survived some of the toughest fighting ever seen in American military history.” World War I, then known as the Great War, had been a war like no other, for both the Allied and Axis powers, stuck in muddy trenches for four long years — its carnage the prime example of the absurdity of war.  

Technological advances — machine guns and poison gas — maimed and killed in unprecedented numbers. Farm fields were forever turned into cemeteries. Some grounds remain too toxic to use 100 years later. 

Despite the horrific number of deaths — 9.7 million military and 10 million civilians — it wouldn’t turn out to be the War to End All Wars. Instead, it seemed to set in motion a number of events that, like deadly dominoes, would change the course of history. 

In this 1918 photograph provided by the National Museum of Heath, influenza victims crowd into an emergency hospital at Camp Funston, a subdivision of Fort Riley in Kansas. Increasing fears of a bird flu pandemic are forcing U.S. officials to face up to problems with the country’s troubled flu vaccine industry. President Bush sat down with the chiefs of six vaccine manufacturing companies as well as federal health officials Friday, Oct. 7, 2005, urging them to ramp up production to counter the threat of bird flu. (AP Photo/National Museum of Health, File)

In 1918, “World War I and influenza collaborated,” according to Public Health Reports. “The war fostered disease by creating conditions in the trenches of France that some epidemiologists believe enabled the influenza virus to evolve into a killer of global proportions.” Crowded conditions in military camps, even those not in the war zone, allow the flu to spread, and soldiers bring the virus home to all parts of the globe. As many as 500 million people, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates, are infected at some point during the 1918-1919 pandemic. That’s an astounding one-third of the global population. As ghastly as the death count is from the war itself, the flu kills about 50 million, including 675,000 Americans. It remains the worst pandemic of recent history. 

FILE In this file photo, Russia’s last Czar Nicholas II, seated second from left, Czarina Alexandra, center rear, and their family are shown in this undated photo. Bottom row left to right, Princess Olga, Czar Nicholas II, Princess Anastasia, Prince Alexei and Princess Tatiana. Top row left to right, Princess Maria and Princess Alexandra. A Russian Orthodox Church panel looking into the 1918 killing of Russia’s last czar and his family said it’s investigating whether it was a ritual murder _ a statement that has angered Jewish groups. (AP Photo, File)