All these things will avail little to comfort the soldier or his loved
ones if it is in fact true that he is being sent to a certain and
awful death--if his span of life, after reaching France, is limited to
a few weeks, and after reaching the front line trenches to a few hours
or minutes. Let us proceed, then, to weigh this particular fish. We
can do it only approximately, for it is inherent in the nature of
warfare that accurate, dependable statistics are commonly lacking, or
extremely difficult to obtain. The testimony of such as we have,
however, is all in support of the view that never before in civilized
warfare has the individual soldier had so good a prospect of surviving
the term of his enlistment and returning once more to the homeland as
now. It is not contended, of course, that modern war is simply a
pleasant pastime from which all will return unscathed, but merely that
the current impression concerning its having become more awful and
more fatal than in times past is incorrect. According to respectable
authority the casualties in the entire French army in proportion to
mobilized strength amounted, for the first six months of 1915, to 2.39
per cent. Since then the ratio has steadily decreased, the figure for
the last six months of 1916 being 1.28 per cent. At the beginning of
the war, for the battles of Charleroi and the Marne, when the French
suffered more heavily than at any time since, the casualties were 5.41
per cent of the mobilized strength of the army. In other words during
the period of greatest danger in the entire war but five men in every
hundred received wounds, while, of these five, it is a safe
generalization to say that only one died as a result thereof.
In view of the enormous numbers of men in the present war, the
absolute figures of losses are appalling enough. Relatively, however,
the losses are lower than in many previous wars. In no great battle of
the war, probably, has the individual soldier stood so good a chance
of being wounded or killed as did those--to mention a few cases
only--who fought at Fredericksburg or Gettysburg, at Stone River or
Chickamauga, at Waterloo, at Aspern, at Borodino, or Leipsic. At
Fredericksburg, Burnside lost, in a few hours, one-tenth of his army,
the loss in that portion actively engaged amounting to 16 per cent; at
Gettysburg, in three days, one-fifth of the Union army and almost
one-third of the Confederate army were killed or wounded; at
Chickamauga and at Stone River over one-fourth of the Confederate
forces engaged were lost, while the casualties sustained by Grant’s
army in the seven-days’ wilderness battles amounted to the same
appalling proportion. As to the Napoleonic wars, at Waterloo 40 per
cent of the French army--30,000 out of 74,000--were lost in a few
hours’ time; at Austerlitz, the French, although overwhelmingly
victorious, lost almost one-ninth of the army in one day’s fighting,
while the allies lost nearly half of theirs; at Borodino, in a single
day, the victorious French suffered casualties of 22½ per cent, the
defeated Russians casualties of 50 per cent of the armies engaged; at
Aspern, a drawn battle, both French and Austrians lost, in killed and
wounded, over one-fourth of the total armies engaged; at Albuera over
one-fourth of the French and one-fifth of the allied armies were lost,
but the British force, which bore the brunt of the allied fighting,
lost 4,100 men out of a total of 8,000 engaged. In the present war,
because of an unrescinded order, we are told, a Canadian detachment of
800 left 600 men on the field. But this is more than matched on both
sides at Gettysburg, where with no mistake in orders one Confederate
regiment lost 720 men out of 800, while a Union regiment lost 82 per
cent of the men engaged. Sixty-two Union regiments in this war
sustained losses in some single battle in excess of 50 per cent, a
record equalled on the southern side by forty-three regiments. Those
killed in action today are as irrevocably dead as those killed in any
former war; but of those merely wounded (about four-fifths of all
battle casualties) the prospect of recovering is incomparably better
than in any previous war, while the prospect of death from disease
incurred in service is likewise vastly diminished.