O forêt de l’Argonne ! hélas ! je t’ai connue
When visiting my mother for the Xmas break, she showed me this picture of her grand-father, Médéric, in his cavalry uniform, taken before the First World War, in 1905. During the war, as an older man, he did not come close to the front lines, but died from a disease caught from the horses he was taking care of. Two other documents I had not seen before were these refugee cards that my grand-parents got after their house in Saint-Lô got destroyed on June 7, 1944.
And this receipt for the tinned rabbit meat packages my grand-mother was sending to a brother-in-law who was POW in Gustrow, Germany, receipt that she kept despite the hardships she faced in the years following the D Day landing.
Here are the military records [recovered by my brother] of two of my great-grand-fathers, who both came from Western Normandy (Manche) and both died from diseases contracted in the Army during the first World War. My grand-father‘s father, Médéric Eude, was raising horses before the was and hence ended looking after horses in the Army, horses from whom he contracted a disease that eventually killed him (and granted one of my great-aunts the status of “pupille de la Nation”). Very little is known of my other great-grand-fathers. A sad apect shared by both records is that both men were retired from service for unfitness before been redrafted when the war broke in August 1914…
While preparing crêpes at home yesterday night, I browsed through the most recent issue of Significance and among many goodies, I spotted an article by McKay and co-authors discussing the simulation of a British vs. German naval battle from the First World War I had never heard of, the Battle of the Dogger Bank. The article was illustrated by a few historical pictures, but I quickly came across a more statistical description of the problem, which was not about creating wargames and alternate realities but rather inferring about the likelihood of the actual income, i.e., whether or not the naval battle outcome [which could be seen as a British victory, ending up with 0 to 1 sunk boat] was either a lucky strike or to be expected. And the method behind solving this question was indeed both Bayesian and ABC-esque! I did not read the longer paper by McKay et al. (hard to do while flipping crêpes!) but the description in Significance was clear enough to understand that the six summary statistics used in this ABC implementation were the number of shots, hits, and lost turrets for both sides. 
(The answer to the original question is that indeed the British fleet was lucky to keep all its boats afloat. But it is also unlikely another score would have changed the outcome of WWI.) [As I found in this other history paper, ABC seems quite popular in historical inference! And there is another completely unrelated arXived paper with main title The Fog of War…]
Xi'an's Og 