ABSTRACT
The casualties were horrific. It is the sheer cumulative impact of the losses, week by week and month by month, which is staggering… It is not the demographic but the human impact of the losses which burned so deep. Bereavement was a more common experience anyway in the early twentieth century, but that does not rationalize away the poignancy of parents burying sons, or of wives and lovers losing young men in their prime.4
