To End All Wars_ A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914-1918 - Adam Hochschild [193]
Higher than the military toll were the civilian war deaths, estimated at 12 to 13 million. Some of these lives were lost to shelling and air raids,
a much greater number to massacres for which the war was an excuse, like the Turkish genocide of the Armenians, and even more than that to the near-famine conditions that spread through the Central Powers and the lands they had occupied. (Such deaths continued for many months after the war ended, for the Allies maintained the Royal Navy blockade to pressure Germany into signing the Versailles treaty.) And should we not add to the total the toll from other conflicts triggered by the war, like the Russian civil war, whose civilian and military deaths have been estimated at 7 to 10 million?
Should we not also include some of the deaths reflected in the elevated rates of suicide that followed the war? Many things, of course, can contribute to someone's decision to take his or her own life, but sometimes clues point to the war, even to a specific time and place. The Battle of Fromelles, for example, a forgotten sideshow to the Somme, saw more than 2,000 Australian and British soldiers die on July 19 and 20, 1916, in a foredoomed night attack against formidable German machine-gun nests in half-buried concrete bunkers. Brigadier General H. E. Elliott had protested beforehand to Haig—something few dared do—that his troops were being asked to do the impossible. After the battle Elliott stepped between the dead bodies, tried to comfort the wounded, then returned to his headquarters with tears streaming down his face. Fifteen years later, half a world away in Australia, he killed himself.
Some deaths governments barely bothered to count, such as those of underfed African porters, subjected to whippings as punishment, who for years carried wounded men or 60-pound loads of food and ammunition through rain forest, swampland, and savanna. As the fighting moved, some who had first been forced to work for one side found themselves carrying supplies for the other. Of more than two million of these forced laborers, an estimated 400,000 died, mostly of disease or exhaustion—a death rate far higher than that for British troops on the Western Front. With African farmers conscripted as porters and rival armies seizing villagers' grain and cattle, famine spread. Many African women and children were reduced to eating roots and grass before they starved. Their deaths went untabulated, but low estimates put them in the hundreds of thousands.
The war also left a ravaged landscape. The armies of the First World War faced each other on fronts hundreds of miles long, and when they retreated they usually destroyed everything the enemy could use, leaving wells poisoned, roads cratered, fruit trees sawed off at the base, mines flooded, and homes, farms, and factories dynamited into rubble. The Germans left territory twice the size of Massachusetts in northern France—the country's former industrial heartland—in smoking ruins. In tiny Belgium alone, more than 70,000 homes were completely destroyed. In Russia and Eastern Europe it was mostly retreating Russians who did the same to an immensely larger expanse of land.
Beginning in the last months of the war, an even more deadly cataclysm flamed across the world: the great influenza pandemic, whose total death toll is estimated at 50 million or more. Its spread was directly connected with the war, for the first outbreak to attract attention, in the spring of 1918, was at a large army base in Kansas. The following months saw hundreds of shiploads of American soldiers heading to Europe, bringing the disease with them. It spread rapidly from Brest, their main disembarkation port in France. With millions of soldiers sharing cramped quarters in troopships, trains, and huge army camps, the flu could jump from one person to another, with almost everyone in