…Curious then that for the first 50 years after the Spanish flu swept around the globe, killing about 50-100m people, no one – least of all historians – gave it much thought, concentrating instead on the far more compelling story of the Great War. Indeed, in 1924 the Encyclopedia Britannica didn’t even mention the pandemic in its review of the “most eventful years” of the 20th century.
…One obvious reason was the way that the pandemic was overshadowed by World War I. The second wave of the pandemic coincided with the Allied assault on Cambrai in October 1918 and the collapse of the Hindenburg Line. Then in mid-November, just as flu deaths were peaking, came the armistice. The result was that many families buried their dead to the sounds of bells and hooters as people flocked to the streets to celebrate the peace.
…So when did historians wake up to the 1918 pandemic? The answer appears to be around 1968. That was the year that the author Charles Graves, prompted by a new pandemic of “Hong Kong” flu, published Invasion by Virus. This was followed in 1974 by Richard Collier’s Plague of the Spanish Lady. Drawing on the personal testimonies of over 1,700 flu survivors, Collier was the first to capture the horror and panic as the flu circumnavigated the globe. However, his narrative was episodic and lacked a true historical perspective.
…Crosby was also the first to argue that the pandemic had had a significant impact on history by sickening the US president, Woodrow Wilson, at a critical juncture of the Versailles peace negotiations in Paris in April 1919. The result was that the American delegation acceded to French president George Clemenceau’s demands that the Germans pay harsh reparations, sowing the seeds, claimed Crosby, for the rise of Nazism and the second great conflict of the 20th century.
