Its strange, you reply with the appearance of disagreeing but then say things that don't refute anything I've said and that I broadly agree with.

For sure and even before machine guns, there's examples of that like the seige of Badajoz which, for its time, was brutal (Napoleonic - like 5k in an hour or something).

To me though, and apologies if you know already, at the Battle of the somme the British army believed the germans to already be dread after days of shelling. As well as this, the many of the british troops were so poorly trained that they ordered mass sections to literally March, with their arms locked out in front of them with the barrel of their rifle pointing upwards, right at German machine guns hoping to charge at the end. Thats literally napoleonic tactics, only they were all "rifles" or light infantry, so they formed skirmishers lines instead of columns. The British artillery stopped shooting for the advance, so that they didn't shoot their own troops.

By the end of the war, soldiers huddled behind tanks advancing behind a rolling barage. The germans just did it on mass and had the armour more concentrated. One of the reasons they jumped so far ahead is the hard lessons they had suffered towards the end of the war. I mean, it was still a blood bath for everyone but for them it was an even worse blood bath. So, I agree very much with what you're saying.

My only point I'm making about the speed of change in warfare, to my understanding, is even greater still in ww1.