As the nations that fought The Great War lay down their arms, there is something else going
on that further colors a world that is unquestionably a world of absolute disaster.
In the autumn of 1918, the Spanish Flu reaches its highest level of infection and mortality.
I’m Indy Neidell; welcome to a Great War epilogue special about the Spanish Flu.
The simplest thing I can say about the Spanish Flu was this- it killed more people in a shorter
period of time than any other disease in human history.
The flu has quickly spread all over the world since the spring.
The first wave in spring was already bad, but the second wave this fall is absolutely
devastating.
September and October are the worst months of the flu.
On every single day of September and October 1918, more than 300,000 people are killed
by the disease.
It’s so widespread that there is no one that isn’t affected in some way; those who
are themselves spared still have to deal with close friends and family dying.
Everyone all over the world is affected, literally the entire world population.
It’s hard to even imagine what that does to a world already so broken.
And the second wave is followed immediately by two more waves lasting into the spring
of 1919.
Then a final wave of infection strikes in autumn of 1919, which leaves people dying
into the first months of 1920.
In the end, we don’t have exact figures on how many people died from the Spanish Flu,
but we know that it killed at least 40 million and maybe as many as 100 million people worldwide
in 18 months, beginning in March 1918.
Far more people died of the flu in 18 months than died in or because of the Great War over
its entire four years.
That’s up to 1 in 20 of the world population.
There was nowhere on the planet that was safe.
It reached the frozen wastes of the Arctic and the remote Pacific Islands.
As a comparison, the population of Spain in 2018 is around 46 million people- imagine
if every single person in Spain, man, woman, and child, died in under two years, and you
get an idea of how many lives were lost to the flu.
Now, in terms of mortality by percentage, it was not the most deadly disease we’ve
ever seen.
The Black Death, for example, which ravaged Europe 1347-1351, though it originated in
Central Asia in the 1330s, killed an estimated 23 million of Europe’s roughly 72 million
inhabitants in that period, which is roughly a third of the population.
But we hadn’t seen anything like that for centuries by 1918.
Sure, there was malaria, which overall killed more people through the years, and smallpox,
which killed hundreds of millions of people between 1900 and 1950, but the rate of people
dying over just that two year of period, coming on the heels of the First World War, made
it really seem that, one way or another, the world was coming to an end.
Aside from just the death toll, which was 3-5% of the global population, the flu infected
some 500 million people.
About a quarter of the world was infected, and it killed up to 20% of those infected,
whereas a normal flu has a mortality rate of just 0.1%.
Unlike most flu outbrea ks that primarily kill the very young, the elderly, or the sickly,
a huge proportion of those killed by the Spanish Flu were healthy young adults.
One explanation for that is that death is caused by a cytokine storm provoked by the
flu.
This is an overreaction of the immune system to a pathogen.
Cytokines tell our immune cells to fight the invader and an exaggerated response to an
especially virulent pathogen in, say, the lungs, can lead to respiratory failure.
A cytokine storm is the result of a healthy and vigorous immune system, so the stronger
immune systems of young adults, when confronted with the flu, ravaged their own bodies, while
those with much weaker immune systems saw far fewer deaths.
Also, a study published in the scientific Journal PNAS in 2014 shows that children born
in the years just after 1889 were never exposed to the kind of flu that struck in 1918, which
left them uniquely vulnerable, while older people had been, which gave them immunity.
Those researchers looked back at the dominant flu strains going back to 1830.
There was an 1889 world outbreak called the Russian Flu, the H3N8 virus, which left that
generation of children unexposed to an H1 type virus like the 1918 flu.
Those letters and numbers by the way, refer to a flu’s proteins.
Starting in 1900, there were seasonal outbreaks of H1 type flus that the study claims provided
partial immunity to children born after 1900, and all this could explain why adults aged
18-29 were basically the hardest hit.
The Spanish Flu, despite its name, did not originate in Spain.
During 1918, when the flu spread among the armies fighting the war, wartime censors minimized
the spread of news about it to maintain morale.
Spain was neutral, though, so the newspapers were free to report on the epidemic, and the
media in the warring nations was free to write about its effects in Spain, which created
the false impression that it originated there, thus giving rise to its name.
If you’re wondering exactly where it did originate, there are several theories.
Many say that the first confirmed outbreak was at Fort Riley, Kansas, and it was American
troops that were first infected and who brought the flu to Europe with them.
A British virology investigation in 1999 places Etaples in France, near the battlefront, as
the center of the epidemic and postulated that a precursor virus among birds migrated
to pigs kept in the region and from there to humans.
Dr. Claude Hannoun, the leading Spanish flu expert for the Pasteur Institute, hypothesized
that the virus came from China, before mutating in the United States and spreading to Europe
and the rest of the world.
While he thought it was possible the disease originated in Kansas, he did not think it
likely.
Also, just a few years ago, historian Mark Humphries found archival evidence of a respiratory
illness that struck Northern China in late 1917 and may have been spread to Europe by
the nearly 100,000 men of the Chinese Labor Corps.
A 2016 report from the Journal of the Chinese Medical Association, though, found no evidence
that the virus was imported to Europe from East Asia, and actually found some evidence
that it was already in circulation among the European armies before the 1918 pandemic broke
out.
Wherever it came from, it was catastrophic, and the close quarters and massive troop movements,
as well as the new access to modern transportation systems, quickly spread it everywhere.
There are those who argue that the flu was one thing that tipped the balance in the war
in favor of the Allies, and it’s true that there is data that the Central Powers were
hard hit before the Allies were and that mortality in Germany and Austria was higher than in
Britain and France.
But that I cannot confirm.
On November 30th, 1919 health officials will declare the Spanish Flu pandemic over, though
deaths will continue into the spring of 1920.
A world that had just been devastated by four years of total war, a world that was just
beginning to rebuild itself, had to do so against a background of millions upon millions
of people dying of disease.
And think of this: most of the people fighting and dying in the Great War were men born between
1889 and 1900.
Most of the people that died form the Spanish Flu were born in the same time frame.
An entire generation has just lost up to 100 million people right when they come of age.
That’s around 18% of all the young adults of the world wiped out in less then five years,
and the proportion of males lost is significantly higher because of being soldiers.
Shortly after the war, the novelist and patron of arts Gertrud Stein will name this generation
the “Lost Generation”, and they are already generally considered “decadent, dissolute,
and irretrievably damaged by World War I”.
True or not, a big chunk of that generation was indeed lost to war or illness.
However, those that remain are part of what is in many ways a new world, with new nations,
new philosophies, and very different and new demographics, and many will use their experiences
of suffering to work to make that world better, in a variety of ways.
That is beyond the scope of this channel, though.
Today was a brief look beyond what we usually cover- man’s occasional inhumanity to man,
and to look at nature’s occasional indifference to mankind.
If you want to check out our other epilogue episodes, you can click right here for our
epilogue playlist.
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