This was one reason why about 18 percent of the wounded rebels died of their wounds compared with 14 percent of the wounded Yankees.37 The record of both armies in this respect, of course, was abysmal by twentieth-century standards. In the Korean War only one of every fifty wounded Americans died of his wounds; in Vietnam the proportion was one in four hundred. The Civil War soldier was eight times more likely to die of a wound and ten times more likely to die of disease than an American soldier in World War I.
