Excluding prisoners, in no case did the British losses in battle reach one tenth of the force engaged, and in the Spion Kop fighting, where the heaviest casualties were incurred, they were spread over a week. Another striking feature is the low proportion of killed. Usually in the past the killed have numbered one-third to one fourth of the total wounded. In this war they have generally been from one fifth to one tenth, and sometimes an even lower fraction, as a result of the use of the small-bore bullet. Not only so, but an enormous number of the wounded have recovered. Thus, taking the Casualty Return of July 11, we find that of over 12,000 wounded only 695 have died. In Napoleon's day the proportion would have been more like 5,000, and in the era of the Franco-Prussian war 3,000. Clearly, then, the risk to life in war is not increasing. Disease is as deadly as ever, but it may safely be said that much of our loss would have been preventable with a better hospital organisation. We have been asked by several correspondents to set forth in a short table the losses in the battles recorded in the present volume, and we take the opportunity of doing so, adding a rough estimate of the Boer force opposed. The Boer losses, unhappily, cannot be ascertained with the slightest accuracy, and even the estimates of their armies are largely conjectural. It should be noted that only combatants--cavalry, artillery, and infantry--are included in our figures, and that deductions are made for details absent at the base, for the sick, and for men not present for duty. The numbers in one or two instances differ slightly from those of the text of the work, the latest official returns necessarily differing in some cases from the figures obtained on the battlefield.