United Kingdom and the First World War

Today the Commission cares for approximately one million dead of the First World War from across the British Empire, of whom about three-quarters of a million are British. However, these categories are fluid. Many of those who served in the formations of what were then called the ‘white dominions’ were first-generation emigrants whose parents lived in Britain. They may have died in the uniforms of Australia, Canada, New Zealand or South Africa, but some are also listed on the domestic war memorials of Britain, where they were born. More importantly, even now the numbers of those whom the Commission commemorates continue to rise.

The care taken to identify and commemorate those who came from Britain and who died in France and Belgium was not fully replicated for those recruited in India or Africa and who died in other theatres of war. Illiteracy and the frequent use of single names (rather than first and second names) created difficulties in record-keeping, but so too did racism and cost. Governments had to keep good records to pay their soldiers, to ensure against desertion and — if need be — to pass on allowances and pensions to their families. The British struggled to fulfil those obligations in a war that embraced their entire empire and much of the globe. As the Commission acknowledged in 2021, it failed to do so in the case of labourers and porters in the fighting in east — and probably west and southwest — Africa. Tens of thousands are being added to the gross tally of Imperial war dead as a result.

Another group of casualties also presents challenges for identification and quantification. Many casualties from France and Belgium — and ultimately from further afield — were evacuated back to Britain. In their case, if they then died, their bodies were released to their families for private burials, often close to the family home. Only in 1921 did the Commission assume responsibility for these graves. By then too some had been discharged because of their disability. No longer members of the armed forces, they lay beyond the purview of the state. On 27 September 2017, the grave of Private Alexander Ponton of the 4th Battalion of the King’s Own Scottish Borderers in Hobkirk Churchyard near Hawick was given a Commission headstone. He had served at Gallipoli but is not listed in the roll of war dead in his battalion’s history. Discharged from the army because he was suffering from tuberculosis at the end of 1915, he died as a civilian in October 1916.

Ponton came from an impoverished rural background and tuberculosis was common in such circumstances, as it was in crowded urban tenements in working-class housing across urban Britain. His illness could have been the product of his military service or it could have been present but as yet undetected when he enlisted. He now counts toward the total of Britain’s war dead, although he did not do so when he was buried. Then he was interred in a pauper’s grave and as a result the precise location of his remains cannot now be identified. If he had lived beyond 1921, the cut-off date for commemoration by the Commission, he would not have counted as a war casualty. The Commission’s total includes those killed in the wars fought over the three years after the German armistice of 11 November 1918 but not those who died after 1921 of war-related injuries incurred since 1914. In 1928, the government announced it would not entertain any further claims for war pensions. Current wisdom stresses that gas was not a major killer in the First World War, but by the 1930s many of those gassed were suffering from lung disease as a result of their wartime exposure. Those whose symptoms appeared after 1928 could not claim a pension. Some died. They do not count because they were not counted.

Ponton, given that when died he was a civilian, not a soldier, makes another point. Formally speaking, the Commission is not responsible for the commemoration of British civilians killed in the war. The standard numbers given for British war dead are for the armed forces only. Both the case of Ponton and the statistically much more significant cohort of African carriers (who were employed as civilians) show the permeability of this distinction. On 16 December 1914, German battle cruisers bombarded the Yorkshire coast, killing 140 civilians; and between 1915 and 1918, German air raids on Britain killed another 1,394, mostly civilians. None of them, despite the fact that they died as a direct result of enemy actions on what we would now see as a new front, is included in the British total, while those who died as a result of the same enemy actions but were in uniform are. The manufacture of munitions was inherently dangerous work. Possibly upward of a thousand workers, many of them women, were killed. They aren’t counted either.

Historically, the biggest killer in war is not battle but disease, a cause of death even less likely to distinguish between combatant and non-combatant. For soldiers, the First World War marked a turning point in this pattern. At least in western Europe, disease was not the big killer it had been. But in other theatres, dysentery, malaria and typhus stalked armies and remained as significant as fighting in inflicting loss. Those who died of disease while in British military service between 1914 and 1921 are commemorated in just the same way as those killed in action. In New Zealand, in the hills above Wellington, is a cemetery linked to a First World War training camp. Some of its Commonwealth War Graves Commission headstones carry the date of 11 November 1918. These young Kiwi soldiers died on the day on which Germany surrendered. They never came under fire but were victims of influenza. They never left New Zealand but they count; their contemporaries who worked as meat packers in Auckland or farmers in Canterbury who also died of influenza are not so commemorated.

In the immediate aftermath of the war, demographers tried to arrive at a global figure for the dead of the First World War. To do so, they could not disregard the civilian war dead. In 1920, E.L. Bogart stated that “the loss of civilian life due directly to war . . . equals, if indeed it does not exceed, that suffered by the armies in the field.” The highest of the calculations for the total military dead of the First World War across all belligerent states is just under 10 million. On that basis, Bogart would have concluded that at least 20 million died as a result of the war. Some have used that figure but it is guesswork, and the tendency by the 1930s was to see it as an underestimate. By 1942, Quincy Wright, an American international lawyer who wrote a major interdisciplinary study of war, had arrived at a total of 40 million First World War dead, due both to battle and to what he called war-distributed disease.

To reach this figure, Wright must have counted in deaths from the influenza pandemic. Today that pandemic is estimated to have caused 100 million deaths worldwide and so its demographic impact massively overshadows the war. Moreover, influenza did not distinguish between those countries that fought in the war and those that did not. As a result, contemporary calculations tend not to aggregate the losses from both. However, the First World War certainly aided the spread of influenza and also weakened the response of the civilian population as well as of the military to its onset. The Commonwealth War Graves Commission’s graves include many in the armed forces who died of influenza and who are counted toward Britain’s total loss from the war. On the other hand, civilians who died from the same disease at the same time and for similar reasons are not included.

Two points emerge from these observations. First, more than one hundred years after the end of the First World War, although even those who were long-term casualties of the war have long since succumbed, we are still don’t know its final death toll. Instead, we are still adding to the total of those killed by the war. Second, we have no firm idea of the mortality caused by this war because we have no set guidelines for the calculation of those killed by this war — or by any other. Our tendency to deal in big round numbers is testimony to this imprecision, which can see significant differences, say, of as much as one million additional deaths, as within the same range of acceptability.

In 1914, Britain was a sophisticated, industrialised and developed state. Neither Britain nor most of its colonies suffered the sorts of disruption and upheaval experienced by European states or German colonies, or by Russia or the Ottoman Empire. Britain does not have to factor in the effects of direct invasion, of civil resistance to occupation or of famine. British First World War deaths should therefore be more open to precise calculation than most — and they are. Its state apparatus enabled it to accumulate statistics of sufficient reliability to give broad totals in which we can place trust. But we still don’t have a solid figure, and we shall never have one on which all agree. And we are still counting.