The crusades have been castigated as a time of peril, plague, famine, and to some degree, hardship. Those beliefs are unfounded and I can shed some light (light-hearted, that is) comedy on an otherwise bleak and misguided period of fanatical bloodletting.

So, two knights are roaming the desert in search of the fabled city of Antioch, where they are either meeting up with their Crusader buddies or to siege. They come across a shepard, and ask him "Thou knowth where thoth city of Antioch be?" "Milord, I know of which you spake, it is thusly"
And the shepard guided the crusaders towards the horizon.
They eventually come across a small convent in the middle of the desert, no city to be found behind the vast horizon.
"Here we are, milords" The lead knight, noticibly perturbed, unsheathes his broadsword and exclaims "Thou hast forsaken us, thine vile serpent of Hades! Zounds, I dispatch you to join your master in the eternal hellfire from whence you came!"
"Whatever do you mean? I have fulfilled my duty, I have brought you to see my Auntie Oche. Its her birthday!"

Needless to say, the knights fulfilled their oath, smiting all of the inhabitants of the convent and mounting the shepards head on a pike.

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World war 1 harkens back to a time of mechanized combat and astronomical death tolls. The adage was that the contenders employed 19th century tactics with 20th century hardware. Alas, albeit the soft utterance of 'the great war' evokes infinite matrices of crosses in a poppy kudzu superimposed over a bleak moonscape of sepia colored carnage; I submit that the casualty ratios were in sync with those of past and future (i.e. civilized) wars.

One Million, Eighty-Thousand, even a meger Five-Thousand to a victor. These numbers seem absolutely ludicris when appended to human lives. However, the battles, the Somme, and Tannenberg were fought with countless soldiers over entire fronts over long durations.

Battle of Tannenberg:
Russia
416,000 soldiers
78,000 casualties

Tannenberg(1914)	416,000	78,000	20%
Tannenberg(1914) [russians]	416,000	78,000	20%	10	7,800
Tannenberg(1410) [tutonic knights]	27,000	8,000	30%	1
Somme(1813) [all]		1,070,000	26%	145	7,353
Waterloo(1813) [all]	190,000	47,000	26%	1	47,000

The reason that the war gets its name 'the great war' is due to the large scale it was fought on. When the western world dawned on the twentieth-century, technology was on a exponential incline; creating a tremendous amount of factors which led to the progeny: war. A simple thing like refrigeration, would lead to more mouths to feed, which would create more mouths. With more people, and with assembly lines, more weapons, thus more soldiers. States like Britain, whose empire was at its prime, could use its imperial might to drain world-wide resources to create a monolithic army.

Furthermore, these ratios were soon to be eclipsed by the next generations war, World War 2. The point is, that although no war was more petty, nor wasteful with human lives, it was not actually more deadly than the battle of Waterloo.

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Vandals.

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