WW1 dead and shell shock figures 'significantly underestimated' So there is confusion concerning places whose borders had shifted; there is inconsistency in recording the deaths of soldiers from sickness and prisoners of war who died in captivity; and there is uncertainty surrounding the number of soldiers reported missing. Overall it means a complex network of dispositions of individual soldiers wounded, killed or missing underlay the evolution of statistics of war-related casualties and it thus seems that in several cases, including Britain, the generally accepted calculations are underestimates. No precise death toll for the conflict has ever been established. Most current estimates for combatants put the figure at around 9.5 million. In his book The Pity of War, Niall Ferguson uses a figure of 9,450,000. The Commonwealth War Graves Commission currently honours 1,117,091 soldiers from Britain and the Commonwealth, although that figure is gradually rising, as various ongoing projects identify individuals who were left off the official records. The new book, The Cambridge History of the First World War, also contains an article by Jay Winter, Professor of History at Yale University, which suggests a major increase in the estimates of the number of men who suffered from shell shock. Previously, estimates ranged between two and four per cent but Prof Winter argues more than 20 per cent of men suffered from the condition. He said: "Medical and administrative practices and prejudice led to radical underestimates of shell shock. Medical studies show that conditions and stress in the Great War were probably more intense than in later conflicts and yet physicians were reluctant to diagnose many injuries as psychological. To do so probably would have made it less likely that a disabled man would receive a pension. Furthermore, those with physical injuries - loss of limbs, facial injuries - were rarely, if ever, deemed to have additional psychological injuries. This makes no sense at all.