Armies doubled in size between the Battle of Waterloo in 1815 and the Battle of Sedan in 1870, and then doubled again by the outbreak of the First World War in 1914. The changes to the power of their weaponry was even greater. The largest artillery pieces of the First World War fired shells that weighed more than Napoleon’s heavy cannons of a century before, and the infantryman’s rifle in 1914 outranged those eighteenth-century horse-drawn artillery pieces.
