Oh, yeah. Note the above. Notes for WWI research: Louis Sheehan 24
CHAPTER VIII
THE WORLD AT WAR
Let us try to grasp the colossal facts of the present war. Since the beginning of the conflict there has been a daily attrition of more than 25,000 in killed, wounded, or prisoners every twenty-four hours. At the opening of the fourth year of the war the number killed was over 5,000,000. This does not include those who have perished in the devastated nations. Not less than 6,000,000 men are now in the military prisons of Europe, some of whom have undergone great suffering, both physical and mental. More than 6,000,000 lie wounded today in the military hospitals, not to speak of several times that number who have been patched up and sent back into the line to face death again, or have been rejected as unfit for further service, often left crippled or maimed, blinded, or deformed for life.
Mere numbers or statistics cannot measure the sacrifice and suffering of these lives. If we could know the infinite value of the unit of personality, or compute the preciousness and potentiality of a single life destroyed, we might then hope to multiply it by the million. If human scales could weigh the sorrow of a widow's heart, could compute the anguish of a mother's loss, could prophesy the deprivation of an orphan's lot, or know the good which might have been done by even one man who has now been killed, we would then be in a position to begin to estimate the casualty list.
There are today nearly 40,000,000 men with the colors. If we add to these the 5,000,000 already killed, the 6,000,000 prisoners and the large number discharged as unfit for further service, we have a total of far more than 50,000,000 who have been with the colors in the first three years of the war. We can better realize the significance of this statement if we remember that in no previous war have more than 3,000,000 men faced each other in conflict. According to Gibbon, Rome's great standing army was not over 400,000 men. Napoleon's grand army did not exceed 700,000, and in the Battle of Waterloo less than 200,000 men were engaged. In the American Civil War less than 3,000,000, and in the Russo-Japanese War only 2,500,000 men were employed. Indeed, if we sum up the twenty greatest wars of the last one hundred and twenty-five years, from the Napoleonic Wars to the present time, less than 20,000,000 men were engaged, while in this war nearly twice that number are now under arms. Britain alone has enrolled over 5,000,000 for the army, with 1,000,000 more from the overseas dominions, and about 500,000 for the navy. Germany has called some 12,000,000 and Russia more than 12,000,000 to the colors.
By the end of 1917 nearly 6,000,000 men will have been killed. Less than 5,500,000 were killed in the twenty greatest wars of the last century and a quarter, all combined. In the Battle of Gettysburg only 3,000 were killed. England's casualty list during a vigorous offensive averages over 3,000 every day. In the first ten days alone of the battle of the Somme, the British lost 200,000 in killed or wounded. France as a whole has lost even more heavily, while Germany's casualty list during the great battles of the Somme and in Flanders has averaged 200,000 a month. When our own relatives are at the front, and our own boys are in the line, we realize what these statistics mean. In Germany alone the number of men killed now totals far over 1,000,000. Think of the many millions of mothers and wives in the nations of Europe scanning that crowded page of the newspaper, with several thousand names on the casualty list every day, each looking to see if her boy's name is there.
During that fateful day of July 1st when the great drive on the Somme began, when the English along a front of twenty-five miles and the French on a front of ten miles leaped out of the trenches and sprang forward in that terrible charge, men were mowed down like ripened grain. Regiments on both sides were cut to pieces. The writer's brother-in-law, a young colonel, went in with 1,100 men of his battalion—only 130 came out. Only one officer was unscathed and he has since been killed. The young colonel was shot within an inch of the heart and fell into a shellhole. Two of his men fell dead on top of him. There he lay under a terrible fire for sixteen hours, and finally at midnight gained strength to struggle from under the two bodies that lay upon him, and crawled on his hands and knees for over a mile back to the nearest dressing station. In the first year of the war he lost nearly half his men with trench foot, the men's feet being frost-bitten or frozen in the muddy trenches. In the second year he was wounded in seven places by shrapnel, and later, after recovery, was almost killed. He has now again returned to the service.
Another red-cheeked boy told the writer that his battalion had gone in with 960 men and had come out with only eighty. In another battalion all the officers were killed or wounded and the remaining handful was left with a lance-corporal in command: the colonel, the majors, captains, lieutenants, sergeants, and corporals had all been killed or wounded. At Bradford the writer was told that their favorite sons in the "Bradford Pals" had to be sacrificed, and every man that went into action in this battalion was either killed or wounded within a few hours. An unusual proportion of British officers have fallen. The university students and the flower of the land who have gone into the officers' training corps have oftentimes been among the first to fall.
Let us now turn from the numbers of killed, wounded, and prisoners and estimate if we can the cost of the conflict. The present war, more than any in previous history, has been a warfare of attrition, that is, by the killing and maiming of men and the destruction of resources to attempt to wear out the enemy.
Already the cost of the war has mounted to over $130,000,000 a day, or more than $100,000 every minute of the twelve hours that the sun shines upon us. Contrast, for instance, the total cost, the lives lost, and the numbers of men called to the colors in the twenty principal wars during the last century and a quarter, from the Napoleonic Wars of 1793, with the figures for the present war to August 4, 1917, at the end of the third year of the conflict.[1]
| Twenty previous years | Present War | |
| Total cost | $26,123,546,240 | $75,000,000,000 |
| Total killed | 6,498,097 | 5,000,000 |
| Called to the colors | 18,562,200 | 40,000,000 |
We have said that the cost of the war has now risen to the almost unbelievable total of over $130,000,000 a day.[2] That is more than the total cost of the whole war between Russia and Turkey in 1828. In a single great day in the battles on the Somme, or in Belgium, the British have used as much ammunition as they were able to manufacture in the entire first ten months of the war in 1914.
Even before the end of 1915 the five great powers had more than doubled their national debts. When will these debts be paid? Great Britain, the wealthiest of the nations of Europe, after one hundred years of peace still owes much of the debt incurred in the American Revolution and all of the debt incurred in the Napoleonic Wars. The whole cost of the American Civil War was only $5,000,000,000, and of the Napoleonic Wars $6,000,000,000, while this war will cost over six times the amount of either during this single year.
Great Britain's war debt at the end of the third year has reached the enormous total of more than $20,000,000,000, or twenty times the national debt of the United States at the beginning of the war, yet even this does not begin to exhaust her resources. At the close of the Napoleonic Wars Great Britain's debt was one-third of her national resources. She can almost double her present enormous war debt before utilizing a third of her wealth.
We have not in this calculation reckoned on the economic value of the lives destroyed. That would average about $3,000 for each man. Five million men killed means an economic loss to the countries concerned of $15,000,000,000. But the economic value of the lives destroyed represents only a small fraction of their potentiality—socially, morally, and spiritually. No human brain can calculate, no heart can fathom the cost or loss of this terrible conflict.
The cost of less than one month of the present war would equal that of the entire Franco-Prussian War of 1870. Another month would pay for the whole Russo-Japanese War; twelve days would pay for the Boer War, while the cost for three days would dig the Panama Canal. At the beginning of 1918 the war debts of the warring countries will exceed $90,000,000,000, or more than one-fifth the wealth of all the warring nations of Europe. The daily cost of the war is equal to half the earning power of these European nations, and the interest on their war debts will be equal to one-half their budgets as they stood at the beginning of the war. The wealth of more than twenty nations is being rapidly drained, and the world's financial reserves are being consumed in this vicious and sinful struggle which an autocratic militarism has forced upon the world.
Although late in entering the war, America's expenditure has been out of all proportion to that of any other nation. Upon arrival in this country the writer finds the statement in our press that the nation will have spent or sanctioned before the end of 1917, the enormous total of $19,000,000,000. That is more than twenty per cent of the entire cost of the war to date for all the European nations. That sum is as great as Germany spent on land and sea for the conduct of the first three years of the war. It represents more than twice our total wealth in 1850, and one-twelfth of our present national wealth of $328,000,000,000.
In order to estimate further the cost and realize the suffering of the war, let us turn for a moment to the nations devastated in Europe. In Belgium and Northern France 9,500,000 were being fed by the Commission for Relief in Belgium until Germany forbade it. Of 7,000,000 inhabitants of Belgium, 3,000,000 were early left destitute by the war and were drawing daily one meal consisting of the equivalent of three thick slices of bread and a pint of soup. Mr. F. C. Wolcott writes:
"I have seen thousands of people lined up in snow or rain, soaked and chilly, waiting for bread and soup. I have returned to the distributing stations at the end of the day and have found men, women, and children sometimes still standing in line, but later compelled to go back to their pitiful homes, cold, wet, and miserable. It was not until eighteen weary hours afterward that they got the meal they missed. The need will continue to be great for many months after peace is declared. Factories have been stripped of their machinery. There is a complete stagnation of industry. It will take months to rehabilitate these industries and to start the wheels again."
In Serbia more than 4,000,000 people were deprived of their living by the war. In Poland the suffering has been more terrible than in either Belgium or Serbia. The population fleeing behind the retreating Russians were not able to keep up because of the women and children, the aged and the sick. They were overtaken by the German army and left in the charred remains of their burned dwellings. Some 200 cities and 15,000 towns and villages were destroyed in Poland. Already 2,000,000 have died of starvation there. In some districts all the children under six years of age have perished.
Armenia has suffered relatively more than any of the other nations. Mr. Henry Morgenthau, the American Ambassador to Turkey, said: "One million of these people have either been massacred or deported and unless succor reaches them shortly, those remaining will be lost." In all history there is no record more sad than that of the persecution and extermination of the Armenians. University professors educated in the United States have had their hair and nails torn out by the roots and have been slowly tortured to death. Women and girls were outraged and brutally killed. Little children perished of hunger. It is said that probably 1,000,000 of the 2,000,000 Armenians in Turkey have been slain, or have been driven into the country to starve, or have been forced to accept Islam.
The American Committee for Armenian and Syrian Relief reports:
"Men in the army were the first to be brutally put to death. These and civilians, after being subjected to horrible tortures, were shot. Even priests were made victims of brutal murder. Women, children, the sick and aged, were forced at a moment's notice to start on foot on a journey of exile. Mothers, torn from their children, were compelled to leave the little ones behind. Women giving birth to children on the road were forbidden to delay, but, under the whiplash, were made to continue their march until they dropped from exhaustion to die. A United States Consul reported that he saw helpless people brained with clubs, while children were killed by beating their brains out against the rocks. Other children were thrown into rivers and those who could swim were shot down as they struggled in the water. Crimes that have been, and are being, practiced upon Armenian women are too cruel and horrible for words. The mutilated corpses of hundreds bear testimony to this inhuman reign." [3]
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