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.