By the time the government set up a national commission to deal with the issue, in November 1918, many families had already travelled to the front to look for their lost ones. © Imperial War Museums.įrance proved less organised. Members of the Women's Army Auxiliary Corps (WAAC) prepare the tombs of British soldiers at Abbeville, near the Somme, in February 1918. “Had the British allowed bodies to be repatriated, only the richest families would have been able to – so they opted for a more democratic principle.” “All those who fell for the British Empire, whether English, Scottish, Canadian or Australian, are buried on the Continent,” says Prost. In 1917, the Imperial War Graves Commission, today known as the Commonwealth War Graves Commission, was tasked with building military cemeteries along the frontline – an institutional version of what the English wartime poet Rupert Brooke had described as “some corner of a foreign field that is forever England”. “The Dead” also examines the different armies’ burial practices, highlighting striking differences between the British army’s approach and that of its French ally. 'The Americans were keen to maximise their losses in order to establish themselves as a major military power.” “US losses are generally estimated at between 110,000 and 120,000, but I discovered that 35,000 of them had died of the Spanish influenza before even crossing the Atlantic to join the war,” he says. “Figures for August, September, October and the start of November were added subsequently, but in a haphazard way,” says Prost.īucking the trend, one country actually magnified its losses. © Photos of the Great WarĪs for Germany, its military leaders stopped counting casualties in late July 1918, more than four months before the armistice that brought an end to the war. Russian prisoners of war captured after the Battle of Tannenberg in 1914. We’re talking about some 200,000 people.” The French historian says the gap is even larger in Russia: “Soviet statistics omit the prisoners of war who died in German camps. “Current records claim around 1,325,000 died at the front or as a result of their injuries, but this does not include those – around 70,000 – who died of war-related illnesses upon returning home,” says Prost. In the case of France, Prost noticed that the military had only counted those who died while serving in the army, thereby excluding veterans who had returned to civilian life after the war. For his article, entitled “The Dead”, he combed through a century of statistics published by the warring nations. Prost is Professor Emeritus at Pantheon-Sorbonne University in Paris. “The armies often rushed to give their figures, seeking to play down their losses.” 'Official statistics fail to take into account the soldiers who died as a result of illness or while being detained in prisoner-of-war camps,” Prost told FRANCE 24. Its author, French historian Antoine Prost, says the number of soldiers killed is closer to ten million.

For years, historians of the Great War have settled for the figure of nine million soldiers killed during the bloody conflict that ushered in the so-called ' Age of Extremes'.īut that consensus has been challenged by an article published this week in the final volume of the ' Complete Cambridge History of the First World War', part of a flurry of new studies to mark one hundred years since the war’s outbreak.

Tannenberg battle casualties