100 years ago in The Saratogian
Saturday, Oct. 26, 1918. Saratoga Springs health officer Dr. A. Sherman Downs is backtracking on one part of his plan to restore public life to normal as the Spanish flu epidemic subsides.
Downs announced two days ago that churches could resume Sunday services on October 27, while public schools and theaters could reopen on October 28. Today, he pushes back the reopening of the schools until November 4.
“This should not be taken to mean that there is an increase in the number of cases of influenza, nor that conditions are not improving,” Downs tells The Saratogian, “The number of cases is steadily decreasing.”
However, “The medical inspectors, Dr. Harry L. Loop and Dr. Earl H. King of the committee on hygiene have concluded that as a precautionary measure it would be better to wait another week, when the danger of infection in schools will be reduced still further.
“In some places bad results have come from opening too quickly and before conditions were fully cleared up, which suggests the wisdom of being on the safe side.”
Private Lanfear Has Trench Fever
While the flu has taken a heavy toll on civilians and soldiers alike, Private Frank H. Lanfear of Saratoga County’s Company L, 105th U.S. Infantry regiment, is the first local soldier to be stricken with trench fever in Europe.
Lanfear didn’t describe his symptoms in a September 21 letter to his mother, Mrs. Thomas H. Lanfear of 170 Beekman Street. Writing from a Red Cross hospital in England, he states that “I am not wounded so there is no need to worry.”
‘L’ Man Pictures Horrors of the War
Today’s Saratogian includes almost a full page of letters from Saratoga County soldiers describing their war experiences. Corporal John Gamby, for instance wrote to his mother while “the shells are bursting all around us” on September 21, but survived to write again on October 1.
The most harrowing account comes from 1st Sergeant George Pulver, who writes that “The conventions of life are just reversed” in wartime. “You sleep in the day time and stay up all night. Some days a fellow cannot sleep because of the straffing.”
Pulver describes the German enemy as “fiends of inferno!” after seeing evidence of atrocities in France. “A fellow cannot hate a German until he comes over here and sees bleeding France and has his best friend blown and shattered at his feet,” he writes.
“Then is the time that the blow comes home, that is the time that a human is set back thousands of years and made the aboriginal animal that he was, with the desire to kill.”