After one full year of fighting, the progress of the war was still hard to judge. The anniversary of the beginning of hostilities inspired a number of summaries, reports, and projections about what had so far been achieved and what the future might bring. This chart recording military casualties, provided by the French Ministry of War, was printed in the Elmira Signet on August 12, 1915. Although the numbers given here are inaccurate (German and Austro-Hungarian losses were in fact much lower than this list shows), they were probably the best source that residents of Waterloo County had concerning the overall human cost of the war. Projections of the war’s eventual outcome were becoming less optimistic to those faced with these numbers. One article from the Signet began fretting about what would happen to the British Empire if the Entente lost the war – an outcome that was starting to seem like a possibility.
Elmira Signet, August 12, 1915.
