Numbers also disappoint and annoy in another fashion, which is that men read into them more than they say and then blame the numbers for misleading them.
I had a good deal of experience of that during the last two years of the war. People had got fidgety under the strain, and they did not want to watch the rate of progress made in wearing down the besieged Boche. Sometimes they would angrily deny those numbers altogether. So a man getting into a train for Edinburgh and foolishly expecting it would take him three hours would after, say, the fifth hour get very much annoyed with a companion who should be perpetually pulling out a map and a watch and telling him exactly how far they had come. I remember that this was particularly the case with the rate of German casualty.
There was nothing very mysterious about this; there was a certain known margin of error, and therefore a certain known maximum and minimum. For instance, it could be calculated from all sorts of sources which confirmed each other--prisoners' reports, published lists, rolls of honour, the rate of retirement of divisions, the analogy of known losses upon our side, and so on. But there came a time after which people were impatient and preferred to believe the whole thing to be fantastic guesswork, because they were in a hurry, and at the same time half despairing. There were hundreds and perhaps thousands of expert soldiers up and down Europe engaged in arriving at these numbers, their conclusions were centralised in the various staffs; and it was surprising to see by how little the various estimates differed. I remember once at Chantilly comparing a set of figures arrived at by one of the national staffs with another set of figures based upon different national methods, and remarking that there was not five per cent difference between them. Yet the ordinary member of the public had by that time become completely suspicious of all figures.
The German casualties on the Somme are a good example. We do not know them to a single unit, and shall never so know them. But we know them within a certain margin of error, and we knew them shortly after the cessation of the battle within a rather larger margin of error. But the ordinary member of the public at home was not in a mood for them, and would not follow them. I got shoals of insulting letters about them from honest people who were disappointed of a miracle. Yet these numbers were of supreme importance. For it was the usury of the Somme, coming after that of Verdun, which began the process of decline upon the enemy's side, politically and morally even more than militarily. The plain man could only see that the Somme had not succeeded in breaking the German line; his expectation was disappointed; he thought all this talk of numbers beside the mark, and his annoyance with it took the natural though very illogical form of belabouring the poor dumb figures that had done him no harm.