All these things will avail little to comfort the soldier or his loved ones if it is in fact true that he is being sent to a certain and awful death--if his span of life, after reaching France, is limited to a few weeks, and after reaching the front line trenches to a few hours or minutes. Let us proceed, then, to weigh this particular fish. We can do it only approximately, for it is inherent in the nature of warfare that accurate, dependable statistics are commonly lacking, or extremely difficult to obtain. The testimony of such as we have, however, is all in support of the view that never before in civilized warfare has the individual soldier had so good a prospect of surviving the term of his enlistment and returning once more to the homeland as now. It is not contended, of course, that modern war is simply a pleasant pastime from which all will return unscathed, but merely that the current impression concerning its having become more awful and more fatal than in times past is incorrect. According to respectable authority the casualties in the entire French army in proportion to mobilized strength amounted, for the first six months of 1915, to 2.39 per cent. Since then the ratio has steadily decreased, the figure for the last six months of 1916 being 1.28 per cent. At the beginning of the war, for the battles of Charleroi and the Marne, when the French suffered more heavily than at any time since, the casualties were 5.41 per cent of the mobilized strength of the army. In other words during the period of greatest danger in the entire war but five men in every hundred received wounds, while, of these five, it is a safe generalization to say that only one died as a result thereof.