Is destruction of life ever bearable? By the beginning of 1917, this was a question that lurked beneath the surface in every combatant country. Soldiers at the front, subject to discipline, bound together by the comradeship of combat, had means of their own to resist the relentless erosion. Whatever else, they were paid, if badly, and fed, often amply. Behind the lines, the ordeal of war attacked senses and sensibilities in a different way, through anxiety and deprivation. The individual soldier knows, from day to day, often minute to minute, whether he is in danger or not. Those he leaves behind—wife and mother above all—bear a burden of anxious uncertainty he does not. Waiting for the telegram, the telegram by which ministries of war communicated to families word of the wounding or death of a relative at the front, had become by 1917 a never-absent element of consciousness. All too often, the telegram had already come. By the end of 1914, 300,000 Frenchmen had been killed, 600,000 wounded, and the total continued to mount; by the end of the war, 17 per cent of those mobilised would be dead, who included nearly a quarter of the infantrymen, drawn in the majority from the rural population, who suffered a third of the war's losses. By 1918, there would be 630,000 war widows in France, the majority in the prime of life and without hope of remarriage."
~ From The First World War by John Keegan, p. 317