The bug more deadly than bullets or bombs
Toes turned blue, hair and teeth fell out, a ghastly death followed . . . How in just three years Spanish flu wiped out more victims than both World Wars
BOOK OF THE WEEK PALE RIDER: THE SPANISH FLU OF 1918 AND HOW IT CHANGED THE WORLD
ONE morning in March 1918, Albert Gitchell, a mess cook at a U. S. Army base in Kansas, reported to the camp infirmary complaining of a sore throat, a headache and a fever.
The doctor checked him over, but couldn’t see any cause for alarm.
By lunchtime, the infirmary was full of soldiers, all of them displaying the same symptoms. Within a month, so many had reported sick that the camp’s medical officer requisitioned an aircraft hangar to accommodate everyone.
This was the start of the Spanish flu — ‘the greatest tidal wave of death since the Black Death’, as Laura Spinney puts it in this vividly recreated, grimly fascinating book. Yet to begin with, hardly anyone in authority could bear to acknowledge what was happening.
For people still struggling to come to terms with the devastation of World War I, it seemed scarcely credible that another huge black cloud had appeared on the horizon.
‘Queer epidemic sweeps northern China,’ the New York Times told its readers on June 1, but no one paid much attention. It wasn’t long, though, before Spanish flu became impossible to ignore.
First, people’s hands and toes turned dark blue. Then, a few days later, they turned black. People watched in horror as the disease crept relentlessly up their arms and legs. Their hair and teeth fell out and they gave off a strange smell — ‘like musty straw’.
BYTHE time the French poet Guillaume Apollinaire died in November 1918, his skin had turned the colour of coal. The last few days of the illness were the most terrible of all. Delirious and too weak to move, people ended up drowning in their own bodily fluids.
By the time the disease had burned itself out almost three years later, as many as 100 million people had died — quite possibly exceeding the total number of people killed in both World Wars.
From Panama to Peking, they keeled over in their hundreds of thousands. In Rio de Janeiro, gravediggers couldn’t work fast enough to bury all the bodies — one man described going for a walk and seeing a human foot ‘suddenly blooming’ out of the earth.
In London, the great Russian dancer Leonide Massine, who was giving a performance of Cleopatra at the Coliseum Theatre, became terrified that his skimpy costume might make him vulnerable to the Spanish flu.
‘I wore nothing but a loincloth,’ he recalled. After his character died, he had to lie still on the icy stage ‘while the cold penetrated to my bones’.
The next morning, much to his relief, Massine found he was fine. But when he went to the theatre, he learned that the policeman who always stood at the entrance — ‘a hulk of a man’ — had died during the night.
It seemed as if the whole world had been affected by this dreadful, mysterious pestilence. In Bangkok, a British doctor noted that all his prize roses had withered and died, while in Portugal, the inhabitants of a mountain village were greatly alarmed to see huge numbers of owls screeching and hooting around their homes.
Amid the chaos and grief, two questions were on everyone’s lips: was there a cure? And who was to blame?
Predictably enough, all manner of quacks confidently put forward their pet theories. Some held that chain-smoking would keep the disease at bay, others that alcohol taken in copious quantities was the answer.
In fact, drinking yourself into a state
of oblivion was probably as good a response as any. The Swiss-French architect Le Corbusier locked himself away in his Paris apartment for several weeks, smoking and boozing like a maniac — and later emerged unscathed.
For a time, taking aspirin was thought to offer some protection against the virus. People duly wolfed down as many pills as they could lay their hands on — so much so that a number of them actually died of aspirin poisoning.
Others gave themselves mercury injections after learning that syphilitics, who were treated with daily mercury jabs, appeared to have a higher survival rate.
What everyone was at a loss to explain was why the disease struck in such a random fashion. In South Africa, workers in the Kimberley diamond mines were virtually wiped out, yet in the gold mines of the Rand there was barely a single incidence of Spanish flu.
Even today, no one is sure what the explanation is. The most likely bet is that the Rand gold miners had been partially immunised against the virus after coming into contact with large numbers of people at a nearby railway station. Being more isolated — and without a station — their luckless colleagues in Kimberley caught the full force of the illness.
As for what — or who — was responsible, that was an even harder question to answer.
The Spanish may have given their name to the flu, but this had as much to do with anti- Spanish sentiment as anything else — Spain having remained neutral during World War I.
In Senegal it was known as the Brazilian flu and in Brazil the German flu.
The Iranians blamed the British, while the Japanese laid the fault squarely at the feet of sumo wrestlers — flu first broke out in Japan at a sumo-wrestling competition.
COOLLy, crisply and with a consistently sharp eye for the telling anecdote, Spinney shows how flu has been around in one guise or another since the 16th century — the word ‘influenza’ was coined by the Italians who attributed the disease to the influence of the stars.
She also demonstrates how Spanish flu cast a long, dark shadow over the 20th century. In its wake, the idea of quarantining people who were thought to pose a danger to society gained enormous popularity — thus paving the way, albeit indirectly, for the Nazi concentration camps.
Even now the consequences are with us — though we might not be aware of it.
After the death from flu in 1918 of one man who had emigrated from Germany to America, his widow and son decided to invest his legacy in property. Over the next 50 years, the widow’s property investments did pretty well.
So too, in his own distinctive way, did her grandson. His name? Donald J. Trump.