12 JUNE 1915, Page 2

In the House of Commons on Wednesday the Prime Minister

stated that the total British casualties in the Flanders and Mediterranean Expeditionary Forces, including of course the Dominion and Indian contingents, up till the last day of May, comprised 10,955 officers and 247,114 non-commissioned officers and men killed, wounded, and missing. Of these 3,327 officers and 47,015 men have been killed. Considering the fierceness of the fighting, the great numbers of men engaged, and the fact that the war has lasted for ten months, the wonder is not that the total of officers and men killed is so large, but that it is relatively so small. If the effect of German bullets and shells had been supplemented by disease, the death-lists would of coarse have been enormously increased. As it is, our sanitary arrange- ments have been so good that the numbers killed at the front by disease have been hardly above the normal. If with the huge numbers of men on the ground we had bad even a moderate epidemic of enteric, the deaths might easily have been doubled.