Notable progress, too, was being made along another line. Humanitarianism in its modern connotation is the child of the nineteenth century. To feel distress over the knowledge that famine or other ill afflicts a distant people is a purely modern accomplishment of which our forefathers of two or three centuries ago were wholly innocent. As applied to armies, the humanitarian impulse has worked a startling revolution. Organizations designed to care for the sick and the wounded have developed on an elaborate scale. The Red Cross was called into being only half a century ago as an indirect result of the horrors of the battlefield of Solferino. It was born too late to have any share in alleviating the miseries of our own Civil War but since that time it has constituted an ever increasing agency for the relief of human suffering, whether in peace or in war. Even the “unspeakable Turk” has been infected by the virus of humanitarianism and the Red Crescent plays for the Mohammedan world the rôle fulfilled by the Red Cross among the nations of Christendom.
The progress made in recent years in the fields of medicine and surgery has been no less striking than in that of humanitarianism; while the development of a new social consciousness (a concomitant, of course, of the humanitarian movement) has resulted in throwing about the soldier who wars for America in 1918 a set of safeguards, and in providing him with a degree of comfort such as no other warriors in the history of the world ever enjoyed. Against drunkenness and vice, twin plagues of army life since the beginning of the world, he is at least as well protected as is the civilian at home. Libraries and clubhouses and games and lectures are provided with unstinted generosity for his recreation and instruction. That his mind may be free from incidental worry, a system of life insurance on a scale hitherto undreamed of has been evolved; while the wife or other dependents at home are insured by the largess of a parental government against coming to actual want during his absence.
SOME FACTS AND FIGURES
All these things will avail little to comfort the soldier or his loved ones if it is in fact true that he is being sent to a certain and awful death—if his span of life, after reaching France, is limited to a few weeks, and after reaching the front line trenches to a few hours or minutes. Let us proceed, then, to weigh this particular fish. We can do it only approximately, for it is inherent in the nature of warfare that accurate, dependable statistics are commonly lacking, or extremely difficult to obtain. The testimony of such as we have, however, is all in support of the view that never before in civilized warfare has the individual soldier had so good a prospect of surviving the term of his enlistment and returning once more to the homeland as now. It is not contended, of course, that modern war is simply a pleasant pastime from which all will return unscathed, but merely that the current impression concerning its having become
more awful and more fatal than in times past is incorrect. According to respectable authority the casualties in the entire French army in proportion to mobilized strength amounted, for the first six months of 1915, to 2.39 per cent. Since then the ratio has steadily decreased, the figure for the last six months of 1916 being 1.28 per cent. At the beginning of the war, for the battles of Charleroi and the Marne, when the French suffered more heavily than at any time since, the casualties were 5.41 per cent of the mobilized strength of the army. In other words during the period of greatest danger in the entire war but five men in every hundred received wounds, while, of these five, it is a safe generalization to say that only one died as a result thereof.
In view of the enormous numbers of men in the present war, the absolute figures of losses are appalling enough. Relatively, however, the losses are lower than in many previous wars. In no great battle of the war, probably, has the individual soldier stood so good a chance of being wounded or killed as did those—to mention a few cases only—who fought at Fredericksburg or Gettysburg, at Stone River or Chickamauga, at Waterloo, at Aspern, at Borodino, or Leipsic. At Fredericksburg, Burnside lost, in a few hours, one-tenth of his army, the loss in that portion actively engaged amounting to 16 per cent; at Gettysburg, in three days, one-fifth of the Union army and almost one-third of the Confederate army were killed or wounded; at Chickamauga and at Stone River over one-fourth of the Confederate forces engaged were lost, while the casualties sustained by Grant’s army in the seven-days’ wilderness battles amounted to the same appalling proportion. As to the Napoleonic wars, at Waterloo 40 per cent of the French army—30,000 out of 74,000—were lost in a few hours’ time; at Austerlitz, the French, although overwhelmingly victorious, lost almost one-ninth of the army in one day’s fighting, while the allies lost nearly half of theirs; at Borodino, in a single day, the victorious French suffered casualties of 22½ per cent, the defeated Russians casualties
of 50 per cent of the armies engaged; at Aspern, a drawn battle, both French and Austrians lost, in killed and wounded, over one-fourth of the total armies engaged; at Albuera over one-fourth of the French and one-fifth of the allied armies were lost, but the British force, which bore the brunt of the allied fighting, lost 4,100 men out of a total of 8,000 engaged. In the present war, because of an unrescinded order, we are told, a Canadian detachment of 800 left 600 men on the field. But this is more than matched on both sides at Gettysburg, where with no mistake in orders one Confederate regiment lost 720 men out of 800, while a Union regiment lost 82 per cent of the men engaged. Sixty-two Union regiments in this war sustained losses in some single battle in excess of 50 per cent, a record equalled on the southern side by forty-three regiments. Those killed in action today are as irrevocably dead as those killed in any former war; but of those merely wounded (about four-fifths of all battle casualties) the prospect of recovering is incomparably better than in any previous war, while the prospect of death from disease incurred in service is likewise vastly diminished.
BRAVERY THEN AND NOW
It is a foible of most peoples in all generations fondly to picture themselves as braver and hardier than those of other races and times. So, in the present war, it is commonly assumed that greater demands upon the soldier’s fortitude and courage are made than in times gone by. In fact, however, bravery has been throughout the ages probably the commonest attribute of mankind. Soldiers are as brave today as in former times, but no more so. To contemplate a modern bayonet charge or a fight at close grips with gun-butt and knife is far from pleasant. But whereas such fighting is the occasional or exceptional thing today, of old it was the normal mode of fighting. The idea that combat should be waged at a distance was born only with the development of smokeless powder and high-power rifles. As late as Cromwell’s time