Today is Veterans Day in the United States. Today also marks the ninetieth anniversary of the end of the Great War, in which 9 to 10 million soldiers died. To make that more comprehensible, try 1,303 German soldiers per day on average. By way of comparison, Americans lost 123 soldiers daily on average during the Second World War.1 The numbers are even more startling when all casualties—killed and wounded—are considered for the First World War: 12.4% of the prewar male population in the United Kingdom, 16.1% for France, 19.3% for Germany, 25.2% for Austria-Hungary, and 6.9% for Russia. 2 If it sounds like Russia got off easy by comparison, remember that this war touched off the Bolshevik Revolution, which brought civil war, famine, and Stalin.

  1. Stéphane Audoin-Rouzeau and Annette Becker, 14-18: Understanding the Great War, trans. Catherine Temerson (New York: Hill and Wang, 2002), 21-22. ↩︎

  2. Roger Chickering, Imperial Germany and the Great War, 1914-1918 (Cambridge, GB: Cambridge UP, 1998), 195. ↩︎