I have been reading Military History since I was 13 and a very good friend gave me this chart many years ago.
If you read about that debacle... it will make your hair stand up!
Amazing
To me, that was the striking thing about that graph...you don’t even NEED to read about it to understand at a gut level EXACTLY how horrible that must have been, how many frozen bodies, people dying of wounds in the snow, the trails of blood, the privation in the elements, the starvation, the hopelessness and the humiliation...
422,000 going in and 10,000 coming out. Just imagine that.
Line up all those 422,000 men, count off 1 to 42 and begin at one again, then have all the men with the number one assigned step forward, and say “All the rest of you are going to be sentenced to a horrible freezing death, or a gunshot or bayonet death if you are lucky.”
Just wow.