“Battles are won by slaughter and manoeuver,” Churchill once observed. “The greater the general, the more he contributes to manoeuver, the less he demands in slaughter.”12 The generals of this war demanded much in slaughter. By the time of the Armistice, more than nine million soldiers lay dead and roughly thirty-seven million wounded. On average, there were about 6,046 men killed every day of the war, a war that lasted 1,566 days. In Great Britain, almost six million men—a quarter of Britain’s adult male population—passed through the ranks of the army. About one in eight perished.13
