National Post (National Edition)
THE FORGOTTEN HORRORS OF THE SPANISH INFLUENZA
One hundred years ago, Canada was being ravaged by the worst single disaster in its history. In the space of a few months, 50,000 Canadians were struck down by Spanish influenza — roughly the same number as the country’s entire First World War military deaths. If such an outbreak were to strike modern Canada in equal proportions, it would kill at least 221,000.
Incredibly, the trauma of the Spanish influenza has been almost completely forgotten. The disaster has few memorials, no dedicated museum and in most Canadian history books it receives only the barest mention.
But the Canadians of 1918 did not experience the 1918 pandemic as a forgettable footnote to the First World War. They saw, smelled and experienced the disease for what it was: The fastest and most violent loss of civilian life in modern times.
Below, a few of the overlooked horrors from the pandemic of a century ago.
SOLDIERS RETURNED TO FIND THEIR FAMILIES DEAD
Canadian soldier Arthur Lapointe was climbing out of a dugout on the Western Front when the Spanish Flu struck him with the force of a bullet. “As I reach the top my head swims with sudden nausea, everything around me whirls, I falter, then fainting, fall headlong to the ground … I feel sick and think I am going to die,” he wrote later.
Lapointe was among 45,000 deployed Canadian soldiers stricken with the flu, of whom more than 700 would die. The disease was so brutal that, according to historian Tim Cook, many soldiers compared it to the aftermath of a poison gas attack.
Lapointe recovered, but only when he returned home did he discover that three of his brothers and two of his sisters had died of the same disease.
STANLEY CUP FINALS HAD TO BE CANCELLED
For the year 1919, a cryptic “series not completed” is etched on the Stanley Cup. Through four years of war, the Stanley Cup finals had continued unabated. Whole hockey teams had signed up for the army en masse, but leagues were nevertheless able to keep together just enough players to keep the sport going. But even hockey could not conquer flu. In the spring of 1919 the Montreal Canadiens had played five games against the Seattle Metropolitans for control of the Cup. Hours before the decisive sixth game, however, flu scythed into both teams. All but four of the Canadiens were unable to leave their beds, and the disease would ultimately kill defenceman Joe Hall.
RURAL LIFE TORN APART
For the Roddy family, a haircut was all it took to bring the reaper into their Rouleau, Sask., home. The family’s patriarch, Martin Roddy, returned from town after visiting a barber who “wasn’t feeling well.” Within days, Roddy, his wife and daughter Beth were all dead, leaving behind four children. Canadian cities would be hardest hit by the Spanish influenza in terms of raw death toll, but it was in rural areas that the pandemic would take on its most apocalyptic character. By late 1918, the Saskatchewan government was receiving reports of abandoned homesteads populated only by the frozen corpses of dead families. Whole bunkhouses of farmhands died in their beds as livestock starved.
In her 1983 book The Silent Enemy, author Eileen Pettigrew described a travelling salesman entering Paradise Hill, Sask., only to find a town littered with death: A store empty except for the bodies of the proprietor and his wife, a young man digging graves for his entire family, a tent filled with three dead Indigenous men.
“The number of families without anyone to help them, persons dying and others ill and unfed beside them — is frightful … it is a frightful plague rampant all over the world,” reads a 1918 diary entry by future prime minister William Lyon Mackenzie King.
CITIES EFFECTIVELY PLACED UNDER MARTIAL LAW
The first deaths from Spanish Flu on Canadian soil are believed to have been sparked by a Catholic Eucharistic Conference held in the small Quebec town of Victoriaville. Infected American clergy were among the attendees, and communion cups tainted with the virus sealed the fate of thousands. Within a month, Toronto was recording 50 deaths a day and Montreal was retrofitting trolley cars to carry the dead. Faced with the awesome speed and ferocity of the pandemic, cities took extreme measures to curb its spread. Alberta made it a criminal offence to venture outdoors without a mask. Winnipeg banned spitting. Roads were patrolled to prevent the movement of the sick. Movie theatres, dance halls and restaurants were closed, with many of them transformed into makeshift hospitals. Churches were similarly shuttered in favour of parishioners reading the weekly sermon in the newspaper. “God who is seeking for our love … is no doubt taking a violent means of detaching us from the apparent pleasures of this world,” read one such sermon published in the Saskatoon Daily Star. “Are we going to resist the call of God?”
GOVERNMENT INCOMPETENCE MADE IT WORSE
Even as flu tore through its cities, the Canadian government stubbornly refused to take charge of the response. When authorities in explosion-battered Halifax requested Ottawa’s assistance to deal with the arrival of several flu-laden ships, they received a terse reply that disease outbreaks aboard vessels “come under municipal or provincial jurisdiction not federal.” In fact, federal bureaucrats would repeatedly intervene to make the crisis worse. The army continued door-to-door conscription drives throughout the crisis, spreading the virus into uninfected homes. Troopships were turned into floating tombs after they were knowingly filled with sick soldiers. One ship, HMT Huntsend, had five per cent of the 649 Canadian soldiers aboard die en route to Europe. Worst of all, the federal government singlehandedly brought Spanish influenza to Western Canada by dispatching a secret flu-infected troop train to Vancouver. The train was packed with soldiers for the Siberian Expeditionary Force, a unit intended to help overthrow the new communist rulers of Russia. At regular intervals the train dropped off batches of infected soldiers who were then carried into urban hospitals. Calgary, Edmonton, Vancouver and innumerable rural communities all owed their first flu cases to this single train.
ARMISTICE DAY CELEBRATIONS
On the day the First World War ended, Reverend Edward Diamond of Kenora, Ont., immediately organized a service of thanksgiving at the city’s Anglican cathedral. Public gatherings were forbidden in Kenora, however, so Diamond reported that he “alone thanked God” for the victory by singing hymns and reading psalms to an empty church. Much of Canada did not show Kenora’s prudence, however. Spontaneous celebrations broke out across the country in defiance of orders against public gatherings. Untold numbers of celebrants would pay for this merriment with their lives. In Saskatchewan, the days after Armistice Day would prove to be the province’s deadliest; 2,500 would succumb to flu before the end of November.
MANY TRYING TO HELP KILLED BY FLU
For four years, Canadian women had watched as their sons, brothers and husbands had eagerly signed up for the danger and death of the Western Front. When the Spanish influenza began churning into Canada, it suddenly became their turn. Across Canada, women formed the core of a wave of volunteers who signed up to nurse the sick or simply to bring food to the homes of families incapacitated by flu. Out of a group of 15 volunteers at one Saskatchewan hospital, six were sickened by flu within a week of work. Edmonton volunteer nurse Christina Frederickson was one of the first to start treating the new disease — and she also became one of the flu’s first victims. As the hospitals of St. John’s, N.L. overflowed with the dying, Ethel Dickinson dropped everything to become a volunteer nurse. After three weeks of exhausting work the telltale nausea overcame Dickinson herself and killed her within two days. “It would be better to have the flu than to carry through life the uneasy feeling that by your indifference you allowed some other woman to die,” one volunteer recalled later, according to historian Mark Osborne Humphries.
INDIGENOUS COMMUNITIES WERE WIPED OFF THE MAP
Over Christmas, 1918, nearly one-fifth of the mostly Indigenous population of Norway House, Man., was killed by flu. Spanish influenza was unique in that it was particularly deadly for healthy adults, which means that the fur-trapping community was disproportionately robbed of parents and breadwinners. In Labrador roughly onethird of the Inuit community died from flu. In many cases, the culprit was a single supply ship, the Harmony, unwittingly sowing the disease along the Labrador coast. The village of Hebron lost 86 of its 100 residents after the Harmony’s visit. The ship’s next port of call, Okak, would lose 204 of its 263 residents to flu, abandoning the survivors to a hellscape of strewn bodies and sled dogs maddened by hunger. Spanish influenza was the rare Canadian disease that infected white people in about the same proportions as Indigenous people. Still, it proved far deadlier for native communities without proper medical care who were already coping with tuberculosis.
Residential schools were death traps at the best of times. Under Spanish influenza they became charnel houses. “For sickness, conditions at this school are nothing less than criminal … the dead, the dying, the sick and the convalescent were all together,” wrote the principal of the Red Deer Indian Industrial School, which lost five students in two days.
COMPARED TO REST OF WORLD, CANADA GOT OFF EASY
Canada still got off easy when it came to the Spanish influenza. Worldwide, the pandemic would kill between 50 and 100 million people. In parts of Africa, the death rate would be as much as 70 times higher than in Canada. India alone lost 18 million; more than the combined Western Front losses for all four years of the First World War. Thus, despite the flu’s carnage, most of the world of 1918 would have been eager to trade places with Canada. Prince Edward Island would even become one of the few corners of the planet to almost completely dodge the disaster by imposing a strict quarantine on travel from the mainland. In 1918, the island province only suffered 39 more deaths than usual.
IN AFTERMATH, DEMAND FOR PUBLIC HEALTH
When SARS or swine flu hits Canadian shores nowadays, citizens immediately turn to Health Canada for guidance. Response teams are marshalled, medical supplies are dispatched and hospitals are coached up on the best available knowledge. If the worst should happen, there is a detailed Government of Canada guidebook on how to manage the dead and keep civil society from falling apart. This is all a direct legacy of the Spanish influenza. Within months of the outbreak, the federal government had founded what would become Health Canada. In the Prairies, populist politicians began urging flu-stricken communities toward a vision of Canadian medicare. “Communities were forced to admit that volunteerism alone was inadequate,” wrote historian Maureen Lux. “There came a realization that government must take responsibility for the sick.”