World War I: Difference between revisions
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* [[Friend or Foe]]: Everywhere, especially with artillery and between the Austro-Hungarians, who were divided by language.
* [[Gambit Pileup]]: The entire war was a textbook example of this; in some cases the gears had been turning since the ''seventeenth century''.
* [[General Failure]]: On virtually every side and a large part of why the war was as horrible and bloody as it was. Generals, and most senior officers, of the time often had their position from politics rather than competence, having never seen combat in their career, dreamed of glorious victories with lost men as statistics, and often hated other countries ''that were on the same side'' all while refusing to embrace modern tactics.
* [[Go-Karting with Bowser]]: On Christmas, 1914, forces in certain areas took a break from the war to go into No Man's Land and play soccer/football with each other and generally fraternize with the enemy. It was not universal, and ended up being stopped by the higher ups on both sides, but stands out as a bit of heartwarmingness in one of the bleakest periods of the Twentieth Century.
* [[Gray and Gray Morality]]: Unlike [[World War Two|the sequel]], the good-versus-evil battle was far less obvious; as almost all the countries initially involved were motivated by a combination of greed, racism and nationalistic fervor. While the Central Powers did things like [[Fascists' Bed Time|impose extremely nasty measures in the areas they occupied]] and [[Obligatory War Crime Scene|violated several agreements regarding the rules of war that they were party to]], as well as [[What Could Possibly Go Wrong?|giving the Bolsheviks the leg up they needed to seize power]], and the use of genocide to "Germanify" or "Turkify" several regions under their control, [[Dick Dastardly Stops to Cheat|all of which ironically probably led to their defeat.]] The Allies were better, but they still were willing to launch air attacks against civilian targets (though not on the scale of the sequel), blockade Germany and its allies even AFTER the war on the justification that the war was not over until Berlin signed the peace treaty and recalled its holdouts in some of the still-occupied regions, used poison gas, smuggled war materials in neutrally-flagged ships, and (in the case of the Russian government) indulged in anti-semetic paranoia. Nobody descended to QUITE the level [[Those Wacky Nazis]] did, [[Nice Job Breaking It, Hero|but the failure to prosecute war criminals after the war doubtless didn't discourage them.]]
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* [[Redshirt Army]]: Everyone.
* [[Red Shirt Reporter]]: A very enthusiastic war reporter, [[Benito Mussolini]].
* [[Retired Badass]]: General Hindenburg was forced out of retirement to be one of the few generals of the early war who had seen combat. While a lot of his contemporary fame came from more from Russian mass incompetence than his own ability, he was still one of the chillingly few competent generals of the war.
* [[Russian Guy Suffers Most]]: They had the largest death toll, followed by France and Austria-Hungary.
** Debateable: Germany suffered the largest ''confirmed'' death toll at around 2 million. Russian figures may have been higher, but no one is sure. If you include the immediately subsequent Russian civil war, then this trope is played straight.
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