. . "Broadly put, the term \"Infantry\" refers to warriors or soldiers in an army who walk or run on the battlefield. By the late Medieval Age infantry began to carry guns. Guns continued to develop and by the Second World War Infantry wielded machine guns. While the concept of the infantryman is as old as humanity itself, it was not until the First World War that the modern concept of the infantryman \u2014 a unit that can fight as part of a team our outside of one \u2014 first appeared in military thought. Up to the middle point of the First World War, most infantry had been envisioned as fighting in physically tight formations, keeping any gaps closed (to prevent enemies, particularly mounted ones, from sneaking through) or in the case of early firearms, mass together sufficent guns to reach fire superiority. The experiences of fin de si\u00E8cle industrial warfare changed all that, for dense formations were now vulnerale to scatter-shot ranged weapons as well as artillery and mass-produced obstacles (such as razor wire), as well as the intensification of trench warfare during the tow World Wars. The emergence of armoured cavalry units soon effectively put an end to mass formations, so a new approach towards infantry was now embraced by various nations \u2014 first by the Germans, and then by their Western Entente adversaries as the First World War reached its end. Infantry no longer were taught to march and fire in single formation companies. Instead, a more fluid style of combat, relying on soldiers to make individual decisions yet fight as a single group was now developed in the form of fireteams armed either with semi-automatic rifles or state-of-the-art submachine guns (or machine pistols), such as the British Sten, the American Grease Gun or even the German-made MP18 and MP40."@en . . "Infantry/History"@en . . "Broadly put, the term \"Infantry\" refers to warriors or soldiers in an army who walk or run on the battlefield. By the late Medieval Age infantry began to carry guns. Guns continued to develop and by the Second World War Infantry wielded machine guns."@en .