World War I was a turning point in history, a conflict that began in the age of empires but was fought with terrifying new technologies—tanks, aircraft, and submarines. Popular history remembers it as a static war of mud, trenches, and mass slaughter, where men went ‘over the top’ to almost certain death. But there is far more to this devastating global conflict than the familiar images of no-man’s land.

From soldiers who fought as though they were already dead to a superstitious statue that held the fate of nations, from steam-powered submarines that were more dangerous to their own crews than to the enemy, to the future Nazi leader whose iconic mustache was shaped by the war—these are the stories that reveal the conflict’s strange and astonishing underbelly.

The potency of modern weapons—machine guns and artillery—forced both sides to dig in, and the trench networks soon stretched for some 25,000 miles from the English Channel to the Swiss border. Between the opposing lines lay no-man’s land, a killing ground where covering fire was scarce and craters from heavy shells became coveted prizes. As British poet Siegfried Sassoon wrote, ‘when all is done and said, the war was mainly a matter of holes and ditches.’

But on the Eastern Front, the war took a turn into the realm of the supernatural. In July 1915, German forces under Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg sought to crush the Russian defenders of the Osowiec Fortress. After failed assaults, von Hindenburg resorted to poison gas, confident that the Russians—lacking gas masks—would be annihilated. When the chlorine cloud cleared, the Germans advanced, expecting no resistance.

Instead, they were met by a horrifying sight: Russian soldiers, many covered in blood and blisters, their faces wrapped in white cloth, coughing up blood and with eyes tinted red, rose from the fort and charged. The Germans, seized by fear, believed they were fighting ghosts. The attack collapsed in confusion, and newspapers later called it ‘the Attack of the Dead Men.’

Superstition also gripped the British troops near the Somme. In the town of Albert, a golden statue of the Madonna atop the basilica was struck by an artillery shell in early 1915 and tipped to a near-horizontal angle. The troops began to see it as a divine omen: as long as the statue remained, the Allies would win; if it fell, the Germans would. In 1918, during the German Spring Offensive, British commanders decided the tower would make an excellent observation post and ordered the Madonna knocked down. The town fell to the Germans shortly after, though it was retaken four months later. The statue was replaced after the war, and the story of the ‘Leaning Madonna’ lives on.

At sea, the British Admiralty had long dismissed submarines as ‘underhand, underwater, and damned un-English,’ but they soon recognized their potential. The Royal Navy envisioned large, powerful submarines that could sail with the fleet—essentially underwater battleships. The result was the K-class, steam-powered behemoths four times the size of earlier submarines. They were plagued with problems: slow to dive, vulnerable on the surface, and involved in a series of deadly accidents. In one incident, two submarines were sunk, three badly damaged, and 105 sailors killed in just 75 minutes. Not a single K-class sailor was killed by the enemy, and the class became known as the ‘Calamity Class,’ spelled with a K.

The Royal Navy’s enthusiasm for aviation produced equally harrowing experiments. To take aircraft to sea, several ships were converted into the first aircraft carriers, among them the battlecruiser HMS Furious. Her forward turret was removed and a flight deck fitted in its place, but the main superstructure and aft turret remained—making her a flattop with a massive obstacle in the middle. Pilots had to approach from astern, fly alongside the ship, and sidestep onto the deck once they passed the superstructure.

On August 2nd, 1917, Squadron Commander Edwin Dunning accomplished this daunting feat, becoming the first pilot to land an aircraft on a moving ship. A few days later he did it again. But on his third attempt, an updraft over the deck caught his port wing and sent his light aircraft over the side and into the sea. Dunning drowned in his cockpit, knocked unconscious during the landing attempt.

It was clear the method was unsatisfactory. Furious underwent another conversion, with the aft turret removed and a second flight deck fitted, plus a gantry of vertical cables to stop aircraft from plowing into the superstructure. But gases from the ship’s funnel disrupted the air over the deck—potentially deadly for the fragile aircraft of the day. The decision was made that Furious would primarily launch aircraft, which then had to land ashore or ditch in the sea near the fleet. This allowed her to carry out the first airstrike launched from an aircraft carrier on July 19th, 1918.

After the war, Furious was rebuilt into a true flattop and served throughout World War II, finally withdrawn from service in 1945.

It is often forgotten that Japan fought alongside the Allies in the First World War. At the dawn of the 20th century, Japan was a burgeoning empire modeling itself on the European powers. In 1902, Japan and Great Britain signed a naval treaty aimed at containing Russian, and later German, naval expansion in the Pacific. Off the back of this cooperation, Japan declared war on the Central Powers on August 23rd, 1914.

Japan’s navy was large, powerful, modern, and combat-proven—having famously defeated the Russian fleet at the Battle of Tsushima in 1905, the first Asian navy to defeat a European one in combat. Japanese warships helped protect British trade routes in the Pacific, freeing the British fleet to concentrate on the Germans in European waters. When the United States joined the war in 1917, Japanese warships took over many patrol duties in the Pacific—including, at one time, protecting a certain US Navy base in Hawaii called Pearl Harbor.

By 1917, the Central Powers’ submarines were inflicting shocking losses on the Allies. Britain requested that Japan deploy warships to the Mediterranean. On March 11th, 1917, Admiral Sato Kozo aboard the cruiser Akashi, along with eight destroyers, sailed west from Singapore, arriving in Malta on April 13th. Known as the Japanese Navy’s Second Special Squadron, the Asian fleet provided escort for Allied convoys and earned the respect of their European counterparts. Two of the squadron’s destroyers were torpedoed by enemy submarines, but despite heavy damage and loss of life, they remained afloat.

Sadly, that respect did not last. After the war, the United States grew alarmed by the effectiveness of Japanese naval forces and made efforts to limit Japanese naval strength in postwar arms limitation agreements. This bred resentment in Japan, whose leaders began to fear their empire in Asia was being eroded by the ungrateful Americans and British—who weren’t even native to their continent.

And one more figure from the trenches would leave a mark on history far darker than any of them. Adolf Hitler, an Austrian-born soldier in the German army, sported a style of facial hair known as the Kaiser mustache—grown out past the corners of the lips and styled upwards, mirroring the German Kaiser himself.

But as poison gas saw widespread use on the battlefield, Hitler and his comrades were expected to carry gas masks. The long mustache got in the way of a safe seal on his face. He was therefore ordered by his commanders to shave it off—something he did not relish. He decided instead to restyle it into the now-familiar toothbrush style, which had been introduced to Germany by American businessmen and travelers in the years before the war. He kept it until his suicide in his Berlin bunker in 1945. The style became so affiliated with the Nazi leader that it quickly fell out of fashion in America—despite being very popular in the 1920s and 30s.

Yet the trenches produced stranger legacies still. Among the soldiers of the British Expeditionary Force was a young officer named Henry Tandey, who would later claim a moment that haunted him for the rest of his life. At the Battle of Marcoing in September 1918, Tandey reportedly had a wounded German soldier in his sights—but chose to lower his rifle and let the man go. The man he spared, Tandey later believed, was Adolf Hitler himself. The story has never been verified, and historians have long debated its truth, but Tandey’s own regiment believed it enough to repeat it, and the tale became one of the war’s most unsettling ‘what-ifs.’

If the trenches shaped the men who fought in them, they also shaped the ground beneath them. The sheer volume of shellfire at battles like Verdun and the Somme churned the earth so violently that entire villages were erased from the map—not just damaged, but obliterated so completely that they were never rebuilt. Places like Beaumont-Hamel and Pozières ceased to exist as anything but names on a memorial. Some 25,000 miles of trench, and yet whole communities vanished into the mud.

The war also introduced the world to weapons that seemed to belong to science fiction. The flamethrower, the poison gas, the tank—each was a horror that soldiers had to learn to face with no precedent to guide them. And yet, amid the slaughter, there were moments of bizarre humanity. On Christmas Eve of 1914, along stretches of the Western Front, soldiers on both sides laid down their rifles and climbed out of their trenches to exchange cigarettes, sing carols, and bury their dead in the frozen ground between the lines.

For a few hours, the war paused. Men who had been trying to kill each other the day before shook hands in no-man’s land. Commanders on both sides were furious, and the truce was never repeated on such a scale—but the memory of it endured, a strange light in the middle of the darkness.

And there was another weapon that terrified soldiers more than gas or shells: the sound of the mines. Beneath the trenches, both sides dug tunnels toward enemy lines, packing them with explosives. When those mines detonated, the earth itself seemed to open. At the Battle of Messines in June 1917, nineteen massive mines were detonated beneath the German lines in a single moment—the largest man-made explosion in history up to that point. The blast was reportedly heard in London and Dublin. Some of the mines failed to detonate, and one of them sat undiscovered beneath a Belgian field for over a century.

The war that was supposed to be over by Christmas had become something no one had imagined—a conflict fought underground, underwater, and in the air, by men who sometimes wondered if they were still human at all.

When the guns finally fell silent on November 11th, 1918, the world counted its dead—some seventeen million soldiers and civilians, a scale of loss that defied comprehension. The empires that had begun the war were gone: the Austro-Hungarian, Ottoman, Russian, and German empires all collapsed, redrawn into new nations by treaties signed in Paris. The map of Europe was rewritten in ink still wet with blood.

Yet the strangest legacies endured far beyond the armistice. The K-class submarines kept sailing—and kept sinking—until 1931, long after the war that built them had ended. The golden Madonna of Albert was rebuilt, and pilgrims still climb her tower. And the men who had survived the trenches carried their memories home, where they would shape the century to come in ways no one could have foreseen.

Perhaps that is the true lesson of the Great War: that history is never only made by generals and treaties, but by superstitions, accidents, and the small, strange choices of ordinary men. What other hidden stories from the trenches do you know—and which one shocked you most?