Military losses by Civil losses Wounds. Disease. by blockade. 1st year of war 481,506 24,394 88,235 2nd " " 330,332 30,329 121,174 3rd " " 294,743 30,190 259,627 4th " " 317,954 38,167 293,700[B] 5th " " 62,417 10,902 --- --------- ------- -------- 1,486,952 133,982 762,736 --------- ------- -------- According to this estimate the blockade by the third year was causing almost as heavy losses as the war itself; and a calculation on this basis suggests that the continuance of the blockade after the armistice for six months, must have cost Germany at least 100,000 lives. Presumably we intended the pressure of our blockade to ensure prompt acceptance of our peace conditions. If this was our policy, it was a dangerous mistake. A people, as docile and disciplined as the Germans, would have accepted any terms dictated them while still under the impression of their military defeat and of the moral derailment caused by the revolution. They would have welcomed our armies as allies in spite of the efforts to rally them made by Chauvinist or Bolshevist extremists. And nothing that a foreign State could have done was better calculated to make such efforts successful than the blockade and the boycott. Neither in Germany nor in Russia have we learnt that it is better to feed an idealist than to fight him. It is only those who fast who see visions. The food scarcity from which Germany was suffering during the six months I spent there, was something between the food shortage from which we were then emerging and the famine we were imposing on Russia. Germans were not dropping dead in the streets as they were in Russia; but, on the other hand, Germans were not merely being restricted to a sufficient ration of simple food as were we in England. The German rations were insufficient both in quantity and quality. This was especially the case in the essential elements of nourishment; in bread-stuffs, fats, and sugar. Bread was particularly bad; and I realised as I never had before that if one cannot live by bread alone, bread alone is what one cannot live without. So rotten bad was the blockade bread that the staff of life became little better than a stab in the vitals. This punishment of the Prussian Prometheus should not be overlooked when we cast up the reckoning. But how can we realise it? I remember, the day after I got back from Germany, seeing a girl in a Berkshire village come out from a baker's shop with a large piece of white bread and give it to her donkey. Three days before I would have pulled her and her cart all round the town for that bread. During my first weeks in Berlin I found that I was being continually reminded of the lines of the American poet:--