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 wars        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.