h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

This is a really good Entry, but I was wondering if you have a source for this:

'In reality, of every 20 soldiers who died in battle, only one death was the direct result of enemy fire. The remaining 19 were attributed to exhaustion, heat-stroke or the many illnesses prevalent at that time.'

I find it hard to believe that of the 47,000 who died at Waterloo, 44,650 either collapsed with exhaustion or heatstroke or died of a preexisting medical condition.

I imagine that rather than pre-existing medical conditions, it'd be diseases brought on by infected wounds.

That said, I'd missed that part of the entry when we were writing it, and don't remember seeing a source.

It's not a very scientific analysis, I know, but I've had a look at some battle statistics from the era as a kind of straw poll. Around 20% of deaths were after the event, from wounds sustained in battle. That's four of the twenty (although I'd argue that these were still as a 'direct' result of battle injuries). So another 15 from heatstroke or exhaustion? It would be an astonishing fact if it were true, but I'm very dubious.

Me too, now you've brought it up...

I done a load of research:

http://www.civilwarhome.com/foxs.htm
http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=E9YgB0cxC0UC&pg=PA29&lpg=PA29&dq=proportion+of+deaths+in+battle+causes&source=web&ots=obqRzTNtqq&sig=F8YKRTVS6jbChyg5WL23E_n8cCg&hl=en&sa=X&oi=book_result&resnum=5&ct=result#PPA31,M1
http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=During+the+Napoleonic+wars%2C+eight+times+more+people+in+the+British+army+died+from+disease+than+from+battle+wounds.&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a
http://users.erols.com/mwhite28/wars19c.htm
http://jrsm.rsmjournals.com/cgi/reprint/94/2/95.pdf

My instincts were right that it's very badly worded, although the number was still a little exaggerated.

You'll see that there's fairly broad agreement that around one in nine soldiers who died on campaigns died of diseases rather than battle wounds. That's absolutely not the same as saying that they 'died in battle'. The ones who died in battle died as a result of 'enemy fire', but the majority of casualties on the campaign as a whole would have died of illnesses.

Of course, it was Florence Nightingale in the Crimea that began to change all that.

I'm sure WW2 was the first conflict where more troops were lost to enemy fire than to disease...