Having acquired information from a “trustworthy source,” the Telegraph today turned its attention to Germany’s military strength and losses so far in the war. An article on page 8 gives the situation as best as the paper can work out, although given its perennial scepticism as to official German accounts you almost expect it to claim that losses must be higher than claimed. Even so, when you do the maths with the figures given for killed, died of disease, missing, prisoners and wounded it comes to just over half of the total figure, so where does this number given come from? Nevertheless, with a number of assumptions made, a round figure of 2 million casualties is generated, up to a quarter of these being deaths, which a leader on the subject two columns away on the page is happy to point out is more than total British casualties so far. The leader also regards the army as having reached its zenith now in terms of quality, which is all to the good, as “this great conflict is at bottom a struggle between Force and Justice, with all that makes life worth living in the eyes of the Allied and neutral nations dependant on the destruction of Kaiserism – the most menacing and accursed institution of modern times.”