Hey, history lovers. I'm Mike Rosenwald with Retropod, a show about the past, rediscovered.

World War I. It was known back then, a hundred years ago, as the Great War.

But there is nothing great about war, especially this war. Still, without any other words to describe

it, the world somehow settled on great. It lasted from the summer of 1914 to November 11,

1918. Tens of thousands of brave American warriors died. For those who survived, the scars,

physical and emotional, were in many ways as painful as death. For the wounded,

nighttime in the jaw ward of Red Cross hospitals was the worst the doughboys

as soldiers were called in those days would take out their small trench mirrors and survey the damage

to their faces noses shot off chins destroyed, mouths torn apart.

The nurses would stop by their bedsides at night and talk to them about anything but war.

Get them off the subject, one nurse remembered, invariably you'd get them to sleep.

Why was this particular war so heinous?

It was, as the late art critic Robert Hughes put it, industrialized death.

The weapons were absolutely horrific.

Flamethrowers, machine guns, fosting gas.

America's doughboys knew what they were getting into when they left for war.

By the time the U.S. entered the war in 1917,

five million soldiers from other countries had already died.

Many American soldiers raised their hands proudly to serve, like Sergeant Arnold S. Hoke.

He was a veteran who served on the Mexican border in 1916. After being honorably discharged,

Hoke re-enlisted after the United States entered the Great War. Between all the shooting,

he talked with his men about what they would do when they got home. Hoke planned to go to the

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