section_path: Casualties
section_name: Casualties
paragraph_text: Casualties
  
  Of the 60 million European military personnel who were mobilised from 1914 to 1918, an estimated 8 million were killed, 7 million were permanently disabled, and 15 million were seriously injured. Germany lost 15.1% of its active male population, Austria-Hungary lost 17.1%, and France lost 10.5%. France mobilised 7.8 million men, of which 1.4 million died and 3.2 million were injured. Approximately 15,000 deployed men sustained gruesome facial injuries, causing social stigma and marginalisation; they were called the gueules cassées (broken faces). In Germany, civilian deaths were 474,000 higher than in peacetime, due in large part to food shortages and malnutrition that had weakened disease resistance. These excess deaths are estimated as 271,000 in 1918, plus another 71,000 in the first half of 1919 when the blockade was still in effect. Starvation caused by famine killed approximately 100,000 people in Lebanon.
  
  Diseases flourished in the chaotic wartime conditions. In 1914 alone, louse-borne epidemic typhus killed 200,000 in Serbia. Starting in early 1918, a major influenza epidemic known as Spanish flu spread across the world, accelerated by the movement of large numbers of soldiers, often crammed together in camps and transport ships with poor sanitation. The Spanish flu killed at least 17 to 25 million people, including an estimated 2.64 million Europeans and as many as 675,000 Americans. Between 1915 and 1926, an epidemic of encephalitis lethargica affected nearly five million people worldwide.
  
  Eight million equines mostly horses, donkeys and mules died, three-quarters of them from the extreme conditions they worked in.