This should be quantified, as that was a podcast and I was speaking offhandedly so perhaps (it's been a while) I was not clear. Serbia, for instance, lost 16% of its total population in war time losses -- that obviously had enormous social effects. So that should be clarified from the get go: When I make that statement, I am speaking of Western countries like Britain, France, Germany.

Now, what do I mean by what I said? what I did not say was that the amount of killing that took place on Europe in WWI was ordinary, clearly it was well above normal levels; it had the largest death toll of any war to date. What I said was was that those men who died in the war would have died in other manners if they were not fighting anyways. That the war replaced other common forms of death that would have nonetheless occurred. So let's look at two separate arguments I make:

##Deaths

We look at the British -- 658,000 military casualties in the war. That comes out to let's call it ~165,000 per year. It wasn't by any accounts uniform (well over 80% of total war casualties and deaths came from July 1st, 1916 - November 11th, 1918). That is high, but to say the least, not earth shattering. Look at average British deaths per year in the 1900's are 624k, in the 1910s 690k, in the 1940s 603k, and in the 1970s 666k. While it fluctuates and has some variance, we see that in times of war and peace, it is hard to differentiate. If we were acting wholly on demographics in that respect and total deaths, we would assume there was a major war in the 1970's and the 1940's were an era of unprecedented peace!

You look at these places and the death counts just continues almost like the war didn't even happen throughout this period. The death counts remain statistically similar in periods of peace and war. This is not a theory of WWI, but a theory of war in general -- war doesn't cause more deaths, it tends to replace them.

##Birth Rates

Beside deaths, it is also useful to look at the rates of births as well of for instance Germany and France. They certainly dip during the war, but they rise back to pre-war expected levels immediately after. This dip in birth rates is not because all these men were off dying and couldn't make more babies, it's because most of the male population was simply on the front and couldn't reproduce by the very reality they were not with their wives/girlfriends/whatever. This population dip, due to these circumstances, were not unique to the First World War. That was a major point I was intending to make. John Caldwell notes that this exact same level of fertility dip and resurgence occurred 13 times before the First World War.^1

That is what I meant by "ordinary" if I did say that word explicitly. That if you look at a census before the war, and a census after the war, the rate of births and the other demographics would look where you would expect them to be if you were before the war predicting based on data.

##Conclusion

In that respect, the purpose of that podcast was to dispel mythology of the First World War. One of the largest myths was that it was somehow unique in how it destroyed populations -- that is patently untrue. In terms of raw death counts, WWI and combat deaths in general seems to replace deaths rather than increase them. In terms of population growth, there is a significant dip during the war itself. However, this dip is not unique to WWI, before or after, whatsoever and this dip is handily returned to normal (if not higher than normal) levels post-war, fixing itself naturally to where it would normally be. This only reinforces the above point -- if there were a disproportionate amount of deaths in this period, once the war is over and the men return from the front and the "dip" fixes itself, why does the rate of births align exactly where you would expect it to be based on prior data if there were no war? That is, the amount of people not making babies in 1920 is exactly the same amount you'd expect in 1910 whether or not the war happened.

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^1 Caldwell, John (2004), “Social Upheaval and Fertility Decline”, Journal of Family History, 29(4):382-406.

Though my knowledge on this subject isn't that extensive, I know that the British suffered because of this. The British, before enforcing conscription, had something called the "Pals Battalion", which would basically be a bunch of people from the same town signing up to war, knowing that they would all be within the same battalion. Now from there,we should note that these battalions consisted of people not equipped, in terms of training, to fight a war, and many ended up dead, injured, or simply wiped out. What this caused was, what Ernest Hemingway notable called, a "lost generation". Entire towns had lost all their young men, in fact, most of their men, for the battalions accepted people from 18-40, so the entire young adult, and middle aged section of towns where completely lost. This would have huge effects on the way Britain produced, it led to an increase in child labor, though that was quickly fought against, and led to people working longer hours, and not getting enough money.