LOSS OF LIFE IN WAR.

Stratford Evening Post, Volume XXXX, Issue 30, 22 September 1914, Page 4

LOSS OF LIFE IN WAR.

A well-known medical man and public writer, Professor Octave Laurent, has summed up the losses of human life in the account of his eleven months' experience as a surgeon with the Bulgarian troops, which has just been published in Paris. .He writes for his surgical colleagues, and not to produce a sensation. Bulgaria, with 4,300,000 inhabitants, put 500,000 soldiers in the Held. Of these 53,000 were wounded and 30,000 killed in the first war, and 16,000 killed and 62,000 wounded in the second. Altogether 150.000 killed and wounded—one-third of the effective fofce oi the army and 3 per cent of the population. There was one death out of every four injured, a very high figure. In the last Balkan war 150,000 men on both sides were killed or wounded on the field in a single month. Eighty thousand of these fell on the banks of the Bregnalitza in six days. Professor Laurent quotes an authoritative prophecy to the effect that a zero added to these figures would give the losses in a European war which would involve the armies of two of the Great Powers. There would be not less than 1,500,000 wounded and killed in a month, once. the forces were fully in the field he thinks. However, another writer now points out, that there has been a full month's fighting in the present great war, and heavy as the losses have been they cannot yet have reached anything like that appalling total. The armies engaged in the recent big' battle in France probably aggregated about 1,500,000. or perhaps 1,750,000.