In Into the Silence, Wade Davis writes
“The chances of emerging unscathed were slim. Indeed, in 1914, the chances of any British boy aged thirteen through twenty-four surviving the war were one in three.”
I am aware of a similar stat for Russia in WWII, but I don’t recall it being as bad as this. I was surprised at how bad the Britain figure is…presumably even more were wounded. I wonder how many were left unscathed.
Is Wade Davis correct? And was this the worst time and place to be a young man?
As am aside, the Soviet statistic gets repeated a lot, but is misunderstood (it's not only or even mostly war fatalities). I wrote more about that here.
Hopefully someone can speak more to the British statistics, but my first instinct is to feel it's off. About six million Brits were mobilized for the First World War, and of those about 700,000 died or about 11.5% of that total. Admittedly the death rate was much higher in certain sections of the population, such as among upper class men of military age serving as junior officers (quite a few public school classes were devastated by the war), but that's a long way still from "any British boy".