Military casualty

“ Considering the sickness and accidents that have happened in the pre- sent year, and others which may be expected before the troops reach home, I may set down the total number of deaths on the American side, caused by the war, at 15,000, and the number of wounded men at 4000. Suppose the army on the average to have consisted of 50,000 men for two years, this gives a mortality of fifteen per cent, each year, which is an enormous loss even for times of war, and one seldom equalled in modern warfare. ”

“ My Coy. is being bombarded at Kut still. They have had 21 casualties out of 180. One of my draft is killed and five wounded and here everyone is parroting about a Merry Christmas. Truly the military man is a pachyderm. ”

“ But through four long years scarcely a family in Great Britain and the Dominions that possessed men on the fighting fronts—and none were finally exempt except on medical or industrial grounds—but was either in mourning for, or in constant fear of death for one or more of its male members, whether by bullet, shell-fire or bomb, or must witness the return to them of husbands, brothers, and sons, more or less injured for life. The total American casualties are 264,000. ”

“ The horrors of modern warfare are illustrated by the notice issued after this disaster by the British Admiralty, which reads in part, “No act of humanity, whether to friend or foe, should lead to neglect of the proper precautions and dispositions of war, and no measure can be taken to save life which prejudice the military situation.” ”

“ Towards the close of the day, when the twilight shadows were creeping over this vast field of carnage, more than one French officer, more than one French soldier wandered here and there, seeking some missing friend or compatriot, beside whom, when found, he knelt endeavoring to restore him to consciousness, to staunch the flow of blood, to dress the terrible wounds, to bind his handkerchief around a fractured limb or to vainly seek for water to quench the agonizing thirst. ”

“ This is war; here are we approaching the place of horror. We have left behind the French villages where peace was still sleeping. Now there is nothing but tumult. And here are direct victims of the war.
The soldiers: blood, mud and dirt. The wounded. Those whom we pass at first are the least suffering—wounds in arms, in hands. In most of them can clearly be seen, in the midst of their fatigue and distress, great relief at having been let off comparatively easily. ”

“ As the caissons bring up the supplies of ammunition, the green-curtained motor ambulances speed on to the hospital with the wounded and the military police direct the congested traffic and keep watch for spies.
VITAL LESSONS
War is force, violence, killing. Whoever tries to disguise its character is a poor soldier and a poorer citizen. ”

“ An eminent military authority recently published a statement to the effect that in our civil war the casualties, in proportion to the number of men engaged, was ten times greater than the proportional casualties now. We do not know that this estimate is accurate, but we do know that our casualties were proportionately greater, in spite of the superior effectiveness of the modern machinery of war. The science of defense has kept pace with the science of destruction. ”

“ The casualty total is roughly 900, with 350 killed and 550 wounded. There are approximately 1,500 men in our army hospitals. For those who unselfishly and heroically gave their lives, for their widows and orphans, I bespeak your heartfelt support and assistance. ”

“ The defence now ended had been carried on at a cost in human life in respect to which reliable statistics were unobtainable. According to one account, deaths on the field of battle and in ambulances amounted among troops of the line and Mobiles to 50,000; to another to 63,000; to a third to 73,000; neither estimate taking into account mortality by281 disease and privation among the non-military inhabitants. On the capitulation of Paris the troops who became prisoners of war numbered about 180,000; the fortress guns “captured” by the enemy 1,500 field pieces and 400 mitrailleuses ”

“ The advance at first was slow and cautious. When an army has for fourteen days been systematically falling back before an enemy, the only casualties within its ken are its own. It may be assumed—and with every right—that there are also killed and wounded among the pursuing force. But they are never seen. Only khaki-clad figures fill the field ambulances; only khaki-clad figures are left behind in the hospitals, and in the cemeteries and roadside trenches. The ever-swelling roll of "missing" is all on one side. ”

“ I can well understand how deeply these casualties are felt by the nation at large, but each daily report shows clearly that they are endured on at least an equal scale by all the combatants engaged throughout Europe, friends and foe alike.
In war as it is today, between civilized nations armed to the teeth with the present deadly rifle and machine gun, heavy casualties are absolutely unavoidable. For the slightest undue exposure the heaviest toll is exacted. ”

“ If a man was shot through the heart, spine, or brain he was, of course, killed instantly; but very few of the wounded died—even under the appalling conditions which prevailed, owing to the lack of attendance and supplies in the field-hospitals with the army. ”

“ Our wounded, that is to say, those men who have come back from that hell, "whose horrors," they say themselves, "are indescribable;" those who have marched beneath "that terrible, moving curtain of iron," to which an officer compared the mass of balls and shells in battle, a mass so compact that it obscured the very daylight on the firing line. Our wounded! Those, in a word, who have brought back in their very flesh the frightful scars of the enemy's iron, those who have cemented with their own blood the human wall that is now our frontier. ”

“ Ignoring many minor cases, the casualties of military operations and the sum of those killed and injured by soldiers' violence, and of those taken away, represents 1 person in 23, or 1 in every 5 families. ”

“ Thus if our casualties at sea, which are mainly of one kind only, be added up, they will probably be found to exceed our deaths on land, which are always much less numerous than other kinds of losses; yet the mortality of our battlefields has been mournful enough, especially among officers—where the death percentage has been higher than in any other war we ever waged. ”

“ 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. ”

“ We are coming back to England in a ship laden with the human wreckage of war—the wounded, the maimed, the sick, who to their graves will carry the maiming of their sickness. There are, amongst these men, those who will crawl about the world lop-sided, incomplete cripples, or those who will be perpetually victims to intermittent or chronic disease ”

“ The stretcher-bearer sees all the horror of war written in blood and tears on the shell-riven battlefield. The wounded man, thank heaven! has only his own pain to endure, although the most extreme agony which flesh is heir to is written large on the field of fight.
Several times that day I asked myself the question, "Why are all soldiers not allowed to carry morphia?" How much pain it would save! How many pangs of pain might morphia alleviate! ”

“ With only 8000 men engaged in the fiercest battles, the Marine Corps casualties numbered 69 officers and 1531 enlisted men dead and 78 officers and 2435 enlisted men wounded seriously enough to be officially reported by cablegram, to which number should be added not a few whose wounds did not incapacitate them for further fighting. However, with a casualty list that numbers nearly half the original 8000 men who entered battle, the official reports account for only 57 United States marines who have been captured by the enemy. ”

“ The lives lost on the battle-field are not the only ones; militia, being unaccustomed to exposure, and unable to supply their own wants with certainty and regularity, contract diseases which occasion in every campaign a most frightful mortality. ”

“ Wounded men everywhere. Crawling about, delirious with pain and agony; lying prone and almost motionless, staring up into the blue sky, dying slowly and making no sign; shrieking, groaning, cursing, praying, imploring help, begging for a bandage, for water, lying quietly, laughing even,—wounded men everywhere. In hospitals, under trees, in tents, in houses, in stables, with surgeons probing and cutting and carving and sawing and clumsily bandaging; in ambulances jolting off towards Springfield; limping along to hide and escape another hurt—wounded men everywhere. ”

“ The British casualties in the first 12 months of the Great War amounted to 365,000. In this war, I am thankful to say, British killed, wounded, prisoners and missing, including civilians, do not exceed 92,000, and of these a large proportion are alive as prisoners of war. Looking more widely around, one may say that throughout all Europe, for one man killed or wounded in the first year perhaps five were killed or wounded in 1914-15. ”

“ But in this war the bulk of the dead—of the western Allies, at any rate—have been killed by machinery, the wounds have been often of an inconceivable horribleness, and the fate of the wounded has been more frightful than was ever the plight of wounded in the hands of victorious savages. For days multitudes of men have been left mangled, half buried in mud and filth, or soaked with water, or frozen, crying, raving between the contending trenches. ”

“ The shudder with which we heard the first report that three thousand of our men were slain was but the sign of the blow that our hearts received. But there must be no shrinking from the prospect of the death of our soldiers. Better than that we should fail that a million men should die on the battle-field. ”

“ The wounded man who comes down to the dressing-station after his fight sees only the men around him at the time, and it is a personal adventure of pain limited to his own suffering, and relieved by the joy of his escape. But we see the many wounded who stream down month after month from the battlefields—for three and a half years I have watched the tide of wounded flowing back, so many blind men, so many cripples, so many gassed and stricken men—and there is something staggering in the actual sight of the vastness and the unceasing drift of this wreckage of war. ”

“ There is waste enough in war that cannot be avoided; the British army sees to it that there is none that is avoidable.
But it was not only that sort of wreckage, that sort of driftwood that was being carried back to be made over. Presently we began to see great motor ambulances coming along, each with a Red Cross painted glaringly on its side—though that paint was wasted or worse, for there is no target the Hun loves better, it would seem, than the great red cross of mercy. And in them, as we knew, there was the most pitiful wreckage of all—the human wreckage of the war. ”

“ On the Northern side, two million seven hundred thousand men bore arms at some period of the war. Of these there died in battle, or in hospital of wounds received in battle, ninety-six thousand men. There died in hospital of disease, one hundred and eighty-four thousand. Many went home wounded, to die among the scenes of their infancy. ”

“ Aeroplanes, zeppelins, artillery, various types of trench mortars, mining, machine-guns, poisonous gases, liquid fire, and the many other means of killing and disabling our enemies have rendered this war the most horrible and terrifying in history. Yet it is rare at the front to see officers or men exhibit cowardice. With few exceptions all face death in its many forms with a smile on their lips, bearing at the same time indescribable hardships of mud, dirt, lice, work and weather with unbeatable stoicism. ”

“ And is it not better to consume life rapidly, and attain results quickly, than to await events, when all history shows that a protracted war, of immobile armies, always engulfs more men in the grave from camp fevers than usually fall in battle during the most active operations in the field? ”

“ From the standpoint of individuals, even of those few who have lost nothing personally, who are alive and safe, who have never been near the trenches, never watched an air-raid, or so much as seen the inside of a hospital, the War is a monstrous and irreparable tragedy. ”

“ Taking the lowest of our three estimates of industrial accidents, the total number of casualties suffered by our industrial army in one year is equal to the average annual casualties of our Civil War, plus those of the Philippine War, plus those of the Russian-Japanese War. ”

“ And he told me how on the night he had his own wound French and German soldiers not yet dead talked together by the light of the moon, which shed its pale light upon all those prostrate men, making their faces look very white. He heard the murmurs of voices about him, and the groans of the dying, rising to hideous anguish as men were tortured by ghastly wounds and broken limbs. In that night enmity was forgotten by those who had fought like beasts and now lay together. A French soldier gave his water-bottle to a German officer who was crying out with thirst. ”

“ Duty now recalled me to my patients at the hospital.
My hands and dress and feet were bloody, and I felt sick with horror.
As I was recrossing the battle-field accompanied by Dr. Welford, of Virginia, the same terrible scenes were presented to the view. The ground was littered with the accoutrements of soldiers,—carbines, pistols, canteens, haversacks, etc. Two cannon lay overturned, near one of which lay a dead Federal soldier still grasping the rammer. Beneath the still struggling horses lay human forms just as they had fallen. ”