When sport-lovers go from home for a day to play a competition in another city or province, they go, play the game and then go back home to continue the ordinary life routine. In the case of the project we are now considering they left home in July, 1914 and returned months or years later. Many never got back home because they were killed in battle or died of wounds; many were "missing"; they disappeared.
If casualties in the 1914-18 war had been numbered in dozens, or scores or even in hundreds, the communities from which they came could have gone on without them--handicapped perhaps but not seriously disrupted. But when they were numbered in thousands and tens of thousands it was a quite different story. Actually, they were numbered in millions.
Mobilized to carry on the war were 42.2 million on the Allied side. On the side of the Central Powers, 22.8 millions. The total: 65 million. 12 million of those mobilized were Russian, 11 million were Germans, 8.4 million were French, 8 million were from the British Empire. From Austro-Hungary came 7.8 million, from Italy, 5.6 million. Turkey furnished 2.9 million, Bulgaria 1.2 million; 4.4 million came from the United States; 0.8 million from Japan. Lesser numbers came from other countries.
Except for Spain, the largest contributions of war conscripts came from the countries with the largest populations. With the exception of Spain, all of the great powers of Europe provided the "cannon fodder"; the human beings which Europe's "great powers" assembled to take part in this profligate orgy of mass murder which went on for more than four years, from July 1914 until November 1918.
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.