The Worldwide Toll of World War I

By the end of World War I, ten-million people were known to have died and twenty-million, wounded. The numbers break down as follows:

• 9.7 million people died
• 8.4 million military died
• 1.3 million civilians died
• Germany suffered 4.2 million casualties
• At least 115,000 Americans died
• 206,000 Americans were wounded
• World War I cost the world $180 billion in direct costs
• The War cost the world $332 billion in indirect costs
• Germany had devastated northeastern France
• Inflation had soared to 3.5 times its pre-war level

World War I did more than slaughter millions of people. It produced an emotional reaction that vulgarized and cheapened those very things for which men thought they were fighting. The physical horror and the arousing of violent passions introduced a new brutality and coarseness into European and American life.

Through the nineteenth century, Western society had been largely and basically civilian where force was kept to a minimum where the twentieth century has become a time of violence. Something happened in between. That happening was World War I.

According to Henry Grosshans:

The war infected Western society with the standards of the barracks room, and the habits of the military camp became transferred into civilian society.

French writer Paul Valery complained:

The war has disturbed the economic structure, the policy of states, and the life of the individual. But worst of all these afflictions is what has happened to the mind. The mind has been cruelly wounded. It now doubts itself.

German Karl Kautsky remarked, the World War

Brutalized almost every strata of society .... [and] brought despair in the place of quiet thought and reflection.

In the place of thought, reflection, and reason, there came about after World War I an intense worship of strength, power, and brutality.

Suspicion of rationality and reason became manifested in intellectual figures as well as the common man. For example, Nazi Poet Laureate Hanns Johst once remarked:

Whenever I hear the word culture, I aim my pistol.

In a similar vein, future Nazi leader Martin Bormann argued:

Every educated man is a future enemy [of mankind]"

How many writers, artists, and musicians since then have glorified "blood" at the expense of thought and reflection. Listen to lyrics of music today and think about World War I.

Tip: Discover why more soldiers died on the Last Day of World War I than on D-Day.