Oh, and also, the technology of the era is so wildly unlike our own; there's something absolutely mind-bending about reading about airplanes trying to coordinate without any form of wireless communication(!!) or balloons being used for observation. I knew about most of this in a general, theoretical sense, at least in terms of when things were invented or became widespread, but it's just such an absolutely different world. It's especially bizarre to think about the first functional airplane literally only having been invented ten years before the outbreak of WWI.