guard roads and bridges, dig reserve trenches, garrison captured territory, perform the hundred and one varieties of labor which an army requires behind its line.
When all the statistics of the war are compiled and classified, their graphic chart will look like a pyramid. They will show that the losses bore by far the heaviest on the ages between twenty and twenty-five; they shaded off until in the ages between forty and forty-nine they became almost negligible.[1]
Here is reverse breeding on a wholesale, intensive scale. The young, unmarried men go first to be killed; are most numerously killed through the whole war, They are the select stock of their generation; and practically, not one has fathered a child. Their blood is wholly lost to the race. Next come the men in their middle twenties. Some of them have married since they left the first line, and some have not. It is doubtful if they average more than one child apiece when their turn comes to die. So it goes on, class by class; smaller losses and more children, until we come to the Territorials of forty-five. In that category, the losses of life are proportionately very small, and if we study vital statistics, we find that men of this age have had about all the children they are going to have. But all this time
- ↑ Forty-five years was the usual limit of military service; though for a few months during 1918, the British stretched conscription to fifty. But many French and German Territorials who entered the war aged forty-five, were kept in the army until the end; and were therefore forty-nine in the year of the armistice.
