Civilian casualty ratio
Some 7 million combatants on both sides are estimated to have died during World War I, along with an estimated 10 million non-combatants, including 6.6 million civilians. The civilian casualty ratio in this estimate would be about 59%. Boris Urlanis notes a lack of data on civilian losses in the Ottoman Empire, but estimates 8.6 million military killed and dead and 6 million civilians killed and dead in the other warring countries. The civilian casualty ratio in this estimate would be about 42%. Most of the civilian fatalities were due to famine, typhus, or Spanish flu rather than combat action. The relatively low ratio of civilian casualties in this war is due to the fact that the front lines on the main battlefront, the Western Front, were static for most of the war, so that civilians were able to avoid the combat zones.
Men of Letters
The book tells the story of the Post Office Rifles during the First World War. 12,000 men served with the unit during the course of the war, across three battalions, and around 1,500 of them were killed. The book describes in detail the horror and suffering of the war and Barrett writes about a man who was shot in the head by a former Post Office colleague before being suffocated by mud near Passchendaele. He also describes the humour of life in the trenches, including an incident in which some former postmen delivered mail to the Germans on the other side of no man’s land by wedging them into carrots and throwing them across.