Mostly machine gun and rifle bullets. Deaths from gas were quite rare, relatively speaking, although it caused a lot of non-fatal casualties. By "soldiers' deaths" I meant combat deaths, not illnesses, which in almost all wars in history killed more people than actual combat.

Fun fact: in both world wars, Germany was absolutely dependent upon Swedish iron ore to produce high-quality steel. In WWI, it was only the High Seas Fleet of battleships and battlecruisers that prevented the Royal Navy from sailing into the Baltic and choking off this supply and ending the war (an under-appreciated reason for Germany building all those capital ships in the first place while being generally unwilling to risk losing them all in a major fleet engagement). In WWII, it was Hitler's quick occupation of Norway and the Luftwaffe that preserved the supply of Swedish ore.

Germany was also critically dependent upon Swedish ball-bearings, but at least Sweden sold those to both sides.

Germany was one of the world leaders in science and technology in the early 1900s all the way up to WWII

One of the greatest ironies of WWI is that going into the war, British and French propellants and explosive charges for artillery made extensive use of synthetic chemicals purchased from Germany, while German artillery propellants relied on guano from South America. The British Navy immediately choked off German supplies of foreign guano (and obviously France and Britain could no longer purchase German chemicals) leading to the so-called "shell crisis" that afflicted all sides with severe artillery shortages after the first few months of the war exhausted their stockpiles.

"Fortunately," all the combatants quickly found substitutes and ramped up production, allowing them to slaughter each other in enormous numbers for years more. Another fun fact: during WWI, approximately 260 artillery shells were fired for each soldier killed (and only about 2/3 of all dead soldiers were killed by artillery).

I'm not allowed to work from home and it seriously pisses me off. Whenever I complain about this to my boss, she always gives me shit like "you're a school bus driver".

that’s when I told her about the escorts.

Jesus Christ, never admit that you drove a Ford.

Somewhat tangential, but my sister-in-law insists that people use "latinx" whenever she hears someone say latino or latina. This despite the fact that latinos overwhelmingly prefer the terms "latino" or "hispanic" to describe themselves; in fact most have never even heard the term latinx and most of those who have are offended by that, not by latino or hispanic. I like pointing out to my (very white) sister-in-law that there is nothing more white than telling other ethnicities what they should or should not be called.

Not exactly the same, but I once attended a work call when I was staying with my Dad after he had a knee replacement. He had decided to "tough it out" and not take painkillers, and during the call he started screaming "kill me! oh god kill me!" because of the pain, quite loud enough to be heard by everyone on the call. My boss said "it's OK, ChickenLady, this call isn't that important. Go ahead and kill your father."

I started working as a school bus driver a couple of years ago, and my first run was picking up a wheelchair-bound teenage girl with cerebral palsy and driving her to school. After a couple of weeks my boss called me into the office and told me that the girl's father had called her about me. I thought I was in trouble for some reason, but my boss told me that the father had wanted to commend me just because I talked to the girl every morning like a normal person. This actually depressed me because it meant that none of the other drivers had ever talked to her for the years she'd been going to this school. It's like the bare fucking minimum decent thing you can do for someone in a tough situation, and they couldn't be bothered.

Unfortunately, the run was in demand because it took so long to get to her school (I'd only been given it briefly because we had so many drivers out with COVID-19) and I was soon replaced by a more senior driver - who never acknowledged the girl's existence, as her father related to me when I ran into him at the local farmers market.

I still fondly remember my friend Bob Niederider from high school in the '80s. One day an Army recruiter came to talk to our history class, and at the end he asked if anybody had any questions. Bob raised his hand and said "yeah I have a question: does napalm still stick to kids?" I didn't really appreciate this at the time - and the recruiter certainly didn't, either.

I have a coworker who is vehemently anti-immigrant. One of the reasons she gives for this stance is that they come to this country unvaccinated and spread disease. Guess who is also anti-vax?

I'm a school bus driver and by far the weirdest experience (which I have regularly) is driving a busload of middle school or high school girl athletes (almost all white) somewhere and listening to them sing along to music with the n-word in it. They do not skip the n-word.

Most of the climate change predictions I've heard in my lifetime have talked about stuff that would happen by 2050 or 2100. It's always been bullshit, just a way of pushing out the consequences beyond a timeframe we can actually conceive of effectively. In reality this shit is already hitting us and accelerating hard.