"
Plans for war had been drawn and redrawn for years, for decades.
Elaborate preparations had been made. Destructive weapons had been
designed and built. Transport had been provided, food stored. Defensive
preparations had also been made in the form of fortifications so placed
as to obstruct or prevent "the enemy" from crossing the "frontier".
When sport-lovers go from home for a day to play a competition in
another city or province, they go, play the game and then go back home
to continue the ordinary life routine. In the case of the project we are
now considering they left home in July, 1914 and returned months or
years later. Many never got back home because they were killed in battle
or died of wounds; many were "missing"; they disappeared.
If casualties in the 1914-18 war had been numbered in dozens, or scores
or even in hundreds, the communities from which they came could have
gone on without them--handicapped perhaps but not seriously disrupted.
But when they were numbered in thousands and tens of thousands it was a
quite different story. Actually, they were numbered in millions.
Mobilized to carry on the war were 42.2 million on the Allied side. On
the side of the Central Powers, 22.8 millions. The total: 65 million. 12
million of those mobilized were Russian, 11 million were Germans, 8.4
million were French, 8 million were from the British Empire. From
Austro-Hungary came 7.
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