Gaston Bodart

Gaston Bodart (1867–1940) was a military historian, statistician, and government official. He was born in 1867 in Vienna, Austria. He achieved distinction for his analysis of casualties of war in Austria's wars, from the Thirty Years War to the Russo-Japanese War in 1905 and for many years his studies of military casualties remained the standard in the literature. As an assistant commissioner of the Imperial and Royal Commission, he also helped to organize Austria's presentations at various world fairs and exhibitions. Trained as a lawyer, Bodart entered government service. By 1894, he was an assistant commissioner in the Imperial and Royal Central Commission. He published, in that year, Erziehung (en: Upbringing), with Ottilie Bondy, Henry Kautsch, and Goerg Adam Scheid. In his capacity at the Imperial Central Commission, Bodart helped to expand the collection of the Vienna Bibliotheque. Bodart also traveled extensively. He visited the United States as part of the organizing committee for the Austrian exhibit at the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition. Two years later, he was part of an Austrian delegation to examine the United States Commission on Fisheries exhibits. In 1907, he traveled from Genoa to New York City, and from there via train to Milwaukee and Chicago, to visit the World's Pure Food Exposition (1907). In 1908, Bodart published his Militär-historisches Kriegs-Lexikon (1618–1905), in which he examined several thousand battles of the early modern era. Drawing on this, Bodart's most famous work, Losses of life in modern wars, Austria-Hungary; France, (1916), identified the casualties of war in all of Austria and Austria-Hungary's wars the Thirty Years War, in the early 17th century, through the Russo-Japanese War, in the early 20th century. In this volume he compiled participants and casualties from more than 1500 battles, and he posited that wartime casualties led to stagnation and loss of creative force.