Body count reports and “estimates” give the total number of human beings murdered in the four year period as 8,538,315. (The legal definition of “murder” is killing, not accidentally but with the intention of taking life.)

This figure of 8.5 million murdered human adults, most of them in the prime of life, refers to the murdered bodies that were recovered and disposed of.  In addition there were “prisoners” and “missing.”

As the 1914-18 war proceeded it became less a series of combats between human beings; more and more it was a war of machines such as battleships, tanks, big guns and by war’s end, of airplanes.  Human beings drew up the plans, made the blueprints, shifted the gears, pushed the buttons.  Their efforts were supplemented and multiplied by the killing power of physics, chemistry and mechanics brought to the task of wholesale murder, which produced 8.5 million dead human bodies.

“Prisoners and missing” accounted for 7,750,000 additional human beings.  Many of them were torn to shreds and smithereens by the gigantic concentration of mechanical and explosive power, designed, constructed and transported to the European battlefields for the express purpose of carrying on this month-long and year-long collective endeavor to take as much life as possible and destroy as much property as possible while war declarations authorized and legalized mass murder and wholesale destruction.

Not all victims of the hideous 1914-18 blood bath were killed.  “Wound casualties” numbered 12.8 million among the Allies; 8.4 million among the boys, young men and adults mobilized by the Central Powers.  Some of the wounded were crippled for life.  Some were less severely injured, but all 22.2 million were more or less severely handicapped when they stood up to face the rigors of civilian life at war’s end.  All were denied the possibility of living normal, productive, creative, satisfying lives.

Wars are fought on battlefields.  In the war of 1914-18 many of the battlefields included villages, towns, cities.  These complex institutions, occupied by men, women and children were smashed and burned wholesale.

The figures which I have used in listing the 1914-18 war losses were compiled by the United States War Department.  They are more or less accurate, but they underline the fact that for years on end the centers of western civilization concentrated their energies and devoted every means at their disposal to cripple or destroy fellow human beings and their habitations.

When we read of the destruction of the Roman Empire we console and perhaps try to fool ourselves by saying that the immense network of civilization which the Romans and their Greek associates spread across Eurasia and Africa during the historical period that began about 700 B.C. was destroyed by hordes of migrating “barbarians.”  When we turn to our own civilization, however, there are no barbarian hordes to take the blame.  The wholesale destruction which took place in Europe from 1914 to 1918 and which was repeated and multiplied during the wars of 1936-1945 was carried on officially by spokesmen for the most advanced, most highly developed, most civilized countries of the western world.