Goodness gracious! From the battle casualties of Verdun to the numbers of victims of the Holocaust! These discussions certainly make interestng turns. McGrath makes a good point about casualty figures, though. Whether military or civilian deaths in war, or the victims of genocide, mortal statistics have their political and social uses. The 337,000 casualties attributed to the French Army during the Battle of Verdun was part of the official history of the war that was published in 1936. Churchill, in his "The World Crisis," set the number at 469,000. But 150,000 more bodies and body parts, as gruesome as it is to recount, were found after the battle, and indeed, up to the present day, causing historians to revise upwardly the numbers of dead and injured at Verdun towards the 500,000 mark. The bodies were interred in a vast Ossuaire at the site, as recounted in Horne, The Price of Glory. Horne suggests that the French High Command had it in its best interests, as well as that of the government to whom it served, to keep the reported casualties as low as possible during the war. Civilian and Poilu morale depended upon it. The French Army mutiny of 1917, brought on in part by the murderous Nivelle Offensive that cost France 120,000 casualties, demonstrated that the wasteful blood-letting of the war could spark active rebellion by the troops. The Germans, by the middle of the war a military dictatorship under the rule of Hindenburg and Ludendorff - with the Kaiser a useful figurehead - had somewhat similar concerns, though not to the degree of the French . . .