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.
World War I memorials
One result of this style of warfare was a level of casualties unknown in previous conflicts. Approximately 2 million Germans and 1.3 million Frenchmen died during the war; 720,000 British soldiers died, along with 61,000 Canadian, 60,000 Australian and 18,000 New Zealand servicemen. On the Eastern front, 300,000 Romanians alone died. The war had a global impact, and at least 2,000 Chinese died in the European theatre of the conflict alone. Many of the deaths occurred within a short period of time, or affected particular groups: half of France's casualties occurred during the first 17 months of the war, for example, while the French middle and upper classes suffered disproportionate losses. Many of those who survived were injured in the course of the fighting; some injuries, such as facial traumas, resulted in the victim being shunned by wider society and banned from public events. These losses also left large numbers of widows and orphans – 1.36 million in France alone – and affected most families in some way: in Australia, every second family had lost a relative. Even those left at home had suffered extensively from stress, anxiety and grief.