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Comment by lorenzfx | Hacker News Reader

> That said, a quick shufti at the casualty figures[0] shows that the absolute worst place to be, during the war, was in a German trench.

I am not sure how you reach that conclusion. If you add the British and French casualty numbers, you roughly get the German casualty numbers (the Germans also fought the Russians and the British and French also fought the Ottomans). According to the Wikipedia article on the western front [0], the entente had more casualties.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_Front_(World_War_I)

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The Germans (just the Germans) lost two million dead, and many more wounded. If you add the other Axis powers, then it looks even worse.

Consider, also, that there were numerous fronts in the war. The Russians lost almost as many as the Germans, but they were on a totally different front from the European allies, so maybe we could say the Russian trenches were the worst, but I'll bet that they had a lot of Cossack cavalry; which, I suspect, didn't do so well against machine guns.

The Ottomans had a huge civilian death toll, but that included the "Armenian Issue," which people like to fight about (My wife actually had a neighbor that was a survivor of that "Issue," and he called it "genocide").

The short of it, was that no single nation suffered as many casualties as Germany. It's notable that they suffered so few direct civilian casualties (but look what happened from secondary causes). Boy, did that change in WWII.

The only nation that came close to Germany for total deaths was Russia.

Then, of course, we had the good ol' 1918 Pandemic, and everybody took that in the shorts.

"I'll bet that they had a lot of Cossack cavalry; which, I suspect, didn't do so well against machine guns."

From an article about calvary use in WW1 (on the same site as had the German front color photos):

"Generally the troops can retreat faster than they can advance, so in an age when "breakthrough" machines (tanks, armored cars) either did not exist or were even slower than walking men, cavalry was given the task or harassing a retreating army in an attempt to turn their retreat into a rout and prevent them forming a defensive position further back. So cavalry was not meant to be charging into the teeth of machine guns, but rather charging into groups of men as they fell back, hoping to break whatever discipline they had left.

"Throughout the Western Front of both sides had large bodies of cavalry on "standby" when they launched big offensives, in the hope that they could break the enemy line and the cavalry could turn a little tear in the line into a huge opening. However, from 1914-early 1917 the offensive strategy used on the Western Front undermined the ability of cavalry to fulfill this role - week-long artillery barrages gave the opposition time to prepare secondary lines of defenses and bring up reserves to fill those lines. So rather than charging into a disorganized mass of retreating men they found freshly build trenches and machine guns - exactly what they were meant to prevent. Therefore the cavalry had little use. However German lancer units were more usefully employed in the war against Russia because the battle was more fluid and less encumbered with barbed wire trenches that tied up the Western Front."

https://rarehistoricalphotos.com/german-cavalry-lances-1918/

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