In this conflict, Germany would see 13 percent of its military-age male population killed, Serbia 15 percent of its total population, while in just a two-year span, 1913 to 1915, the life expectancy of a French male would drop from fifty years to twenty-seven. In the disastrous Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71, France had suffered an estimated 270,000 battlefield casualties in the present war, it was to surpass that number in the first three weeks. Over the next four years, it would lose over twenty times that number. “point of comparison, over the previous century, during which it had expanded its empire to five continents, the British Empire had been involved in some forty different conflicts around the globe-colonial insurrections mostly, but including the Crimean and Boer wars-and had lost some forty thousand soldiers in the process.
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