World War I casualties
Casualty statistics for World War I vary to a great extent; estimates of total deaths range from 9 million to over 15 million. Military casualties reported in official sources list deaths due to all causes, including an estimated 7 to 8 million combat related deaths (killed or died of wounds) and another two to three million military deaths caused by accidents, disease and deaths while prisoners of war. Official government reports listing casualty statistics were published by the United States and Great Britain. These secondary sources published during the 1920s, are the source of the statistics in reference works listing casualties in World War I. This article summarizes the casualty statistics published in the official government reports of the United States and Great Britain as well as France, Italy, Belgium, Germany, Austria and Russia. More recently the research of the Commonwealth War Graves Commission (CWGC) has revised the military casualty statistics of the UK and its allies; they include in their listing of military war dead personnel outside of combat theaters and civilians recruited from Africa, the Middle East and China who provided logistical and service support in combat theaters. The casualties of these support personnel recruited outside of Europe were previously not included with British war dead, however the casualties of the Labour Corps recruited from the British Isles were included in the rolls of British war dead published in 1921. The methodology used by each nation to record and classify casualties was not uniform, a general caveat regarding casualty figures is that they cannot be considered comparable in all cases.
Paris in World War I
Fearing a long siege, General Gallieni did what he could to reduce the number of Parisians who needed to be fed; a dozen free trains were organized on 5 September to take Parisians to the French provinces. An emergency census ordered by Gallieni on September 8 showed that the population of Paris had dropped to 1,800,000, or only 63 percent of the population counted in 1911. By October, public transportation was again running in the city. The military government declared a moratorium on rents for those Parisians who had been summoned into the army and protected them from legal action until the end of the war. As of December 20, pedestrians could walk freely in Paris once again, but vehicles were only allowed to enter and leave Paris by fourteen of the fifty-five city gates that were open from five in the morning until ten at night. The government returned to Paris on December 11, and President Poincaré was again able to meet with his Council of Ministers in the Élysée Palace. The front lines moved further north, and by 4 January 1915, Paris was no longer considered to be threatened. Nonetheless, the city was bombed by a German Zeppelin airship on March 21, 1915, and by German planes on May 11 and May 22.