Across the pond

Waiting for the train at Waterloo yesterday I noticed a very small plaque commemorating the 626 Southern Railways men who lost their lives in the Second World War. Alongside was a huge tablet with five columns of the names of the men killed in the First World, totalling about 150 men.

It was a timely reminder for me, schooled as I am in the literature of the slaughter of millions in the 1914-18 trenches, from Siegfried Sassoon to Sebastian Faulks and Joan Littlewood, that for many civilians the slaughter was much worse in the 1940s. Five times worse in the case of Southern Railways.

Perhaps South West Trains should put up a plaque with their names on it, before those names are forgottten. It would need to be five times bigger. Which would convey a powerful message about the reality of modern warfare.

More importantly there is a need to collect reliable casualty figures for the wars that are still going on. I only had time this morning to check it on Wikipedia. They quote Associated Press on military casulaties up to August 2008 as 4,136 US and 176 British. They quote Iraq Body Count as reporting 94,560 non-combatant deaths up to 2006, but their figures are almost certainly a massive under-estimate. A Lancet survey in 2006 estimated the Iraqui death toll at 654.965 and an Opinion Research Business survey of January, 2008 came up with a figure of 1,033,000. Most of these were civilians.