The World Remade

by G. J. Meyer

  Influenza or not, the end of the first day of the new offensive found the German vanguard on the banks of the Vesle, a remarkable twelve miles from their starting point. The second day—the day the Americans attacked at Cantigny—brought the capture of the city of Soissons. By the end of the third day, German troops were at the River Marne, thirty miles from where they had begun, little more than a two-day hard march from Paris. They had smashed through every body of Allied reserves sent to stop them, capturing 650 pieces of artillery and taking sixty thousand prisoners. The French government, in one of the numerous echoes of 1914’s First Battle of the Marne, was making preparations to leave Paris for Bordeaux on the Atlantic coast. The roads leading southward and westward out of the capital were jammed with civilians—a million of them, according to reports—desperate to escape the Germans.

  Ludendorff had not foreseen this. His objective was still to drive the British out of Flanders. This new offensive, like Michael, had been intended to create just enough of a threat to draw Haig’s reserves southward out of Flanders, in advance of further attacks to take place there in June or July. But now, as in 1914 but this time unexpectedly, Paris not only beckoned but seemed achievable. The essential next step was to get men, guns, and supplies across the Marne, in position for a direct move on Paris. To do that the Germans needed bridges.

  Which is what made the town of Château-Thierry, almost directly in the path of the German advance, suddenly loom large. There were two bridges at Château-Thierry, substantial bridges carrying rail and motor traffic, and only one French colonial division was available to keep them out of German hands. General Pétain, seeing the danger and short of troops, asked the Americans if they could help. Pershing had two divisions, the Second and the Third, that were not at the moment committed to any sector but were also not considered entirely ready for active service. He ordered both to proceed to Château-Thierry and there report to the commander of the French Sixth Army. Both were more than a hundred miles away.

  They had to arrange to get to Château-Thierry by a combination of truck and rail travel and marching. The Third Division, however, included a motorized machine gun battalion—“motorized” meaning it had its own transport—that was able to set out immediately. Though some of its trucks broke down en route, seventeen of its machine gun squads reached Château-Thierry on the afternoon of Friday, May 31, at the end of a grueling twenty-four-hour journey. They were just in time. The Germans were at the north edge of the town, trying to enter but being held off by the Tenth French Colonial Division. That night two American squads, led by a young lieutenant not long out of West Point, entered the city, linked up with the colonials, and joined the fight using their Hotchkiss machine guns. Other squads set up their guns south of the river, in positions from which they could spray the Germans with indirect fire (rounds fired into the air to rain down on unseen targets) and guard the approaches to the bridges.

  The defenders held their ground through more than two days of heavy gunfire. The French blew up one of the bridges when that became the only way to keep the Germans from taking it. The American machine guns made it impossible for the Germans to approach the remaining bridge. When seventeen thousand of the Third Division’s infantry arrived on June 3, a resumed German advance became impossible. Some of the Americans then moved east to Jaulgonne, where they attacked German troops crossing over on a bridge there and forced them back across the river.

  Unable to advance, the Germans turned to the west on a route parallel to the Marne. They captured a hill overlooking the surrounding terrain, took possession of the nearby village of Vaux, and drove a body of French troops sent to intercept them into a hunting reserve called the Bois de Belleau—Belleau Wood. By June 6 the Americans had launched an advance that drove the Germans off the high ground. Marine Corps units of the Second Division relieved the French in Belleau Wood and dug in for a showdown. The Germans attacked and were repulsed. When the Americans attacked, they, too, were turned back, with heavy losses. The wood had limited tactical and almost no strategic value, but for both sides it took on symbolic importance. The Germans wanted to give the newcomers a thrashing, to keep them from becoming too confident and the Allies from being encouraged by their performance. The Americans for their part, as at Cantigny, wanted to prove themselves.

  In action at last

  “It was assuredly the Americans who bore the heaviest brunt of the fighting on the whole battlefront during the last few months of the war,” Ludendorff would recall.

  For almost the whole month of June, that obscure patch of woodland became a microcosm of the Great War, the Americans’ introduction to the war’s dark heart. The fighting was savage, profligate of life, and profoundly brutalizing; for a time the Americans were under orders (unofficially of course) to take no prisoners. “Day and night for nearly a month men fought in corpse-choked thickets, killing with bayonet and bomb and machine gun,” an American survivor would write years afterward. “It was gassed and shelled and shot into the semblance of nothing earthly. The great trees all went down; the leaves were blasted off, or hung sere and blackened. It was pock-marked with shell craters and shallow dugouts and hasty trenches. It was strewn with all the debris of war, Mauser rifles and Springfields, helmets German and American, unexploded grenades, letters, knapsacks, packs, blankets, boots. A year later, it is said, they were still finding unburied dead in the depths of it.”

  When the fighting ended on June 26, with the Americans in uncontested control of the wood, eighteen hundred of them were dead and nearly seven thousand wounded, missing, or captured. Those numbers were dwarfed by too many of the war’s battles to count, but Belleau Wood had been very much a Great War fight all the same.

  American operations around Château-Thierry came to an end on the evening of July 1 with an attack on Vaux by two regiments of the Second Division. The village was defended by a single understrength German regiment, many of its troops sick with flu. The Americans prepared meticulously, even to the point of getting refugees from Vaux to describe the interiors of every building. The six P.M. infantry advance was preceded by twelve hours of bombardment by American field artillery and French big guns. The doughboys, when they made their move, found the Germans gone. The capture of the village and the railway line just beyond it had taken no more than half an hour and exacted zero casualties. That it was a victory was beyond question. Whether it was actually a battle was another matter. In any case, the long stalemate was nearing its end, unsustainable by the depleted and exhausted Germans.

  Background

  ____

  Death from a New Direction

  It can be accepted as given that Dean Nilson, Ernest Elliott, and John Bottom meant no harm. It was an accident of history that they happened to live in Haskell County, Kansas, in the winter of 1917–18. And that each of them had a connection to the U.S. Army’s Camp Funston, three hundred miles away. And that because of these connections, it was probably one or two or all three of them who set in motion the third worst pandemic in history, one that in less than a year would claim more than twenty million lives around the world and affect the course of the Great War.

  It was likewise an accident of history—a freak of epidemiology—that Haskell County appears to have been almost the only place on earth to report an outbreak of influenza in the first two months of 1918. It was a virulent outbreak, leading to more cases of pneumonia and a higher death rate than such things usually did. What caused it will never be known. Probably a virus somehow made the difficult leap from pigs to human beings, but this cannot be proved. Whatever its cause, the disease would run its course and disappear from Haskell County by the end of March. Before that happened, however, it would make a second, more fateful leap.

  Dean Nilson came home from Camp Funston on furlough, then returned to duty. Ernest Elliott, not realizing that his young son was at just that time coming down with the flu, went to the camp to visit his brother. And John Bottom, like all draftees from Kansas, reported there for b
asic training.

  These journeys all took place in the last few days of February and the first few days of March. And on March 4 a cook became the first Camp Funston soldier to show symptoms of influenza. This is unlikely to have been a coincidence, the incubation period for flu being one to three days. And at that moment there was no place from which the virus could have come except Haskell County.

  Camp Funston, named for the man who would have led the AEF if not for his fatal heart attack, was the second largest of the training cantonments built in 1917, housing some 57,000 men. Like most of the cantonments, it was shoddily built, seriously overcrowded in spite of the warnings of medical authorities, poorly equipped, and inadequately heated. In the three weeks following March 4, more than eleven hundred of the men stationed there were hospitalized with influenza. Of these, 237 developed pneumonia, the complication that can make flu lethal, and thirty-eight died. This was not a remarkably high death rate for an epidemic of this kind, and as the number of new cases began to subside, no one saw reason to be alarmed.

  But other leaps were now being made, and in all directions. Troops were constantly moving between Camp Funston, which was part of the huge Fort Riley army reservation in Kansas, and other military installations around the country. From many of these places, men were being ordered to France in a steadily increasing flow. And there was constant contact between soldiers and civilian populations near and far. Once the influenza virus took hold at Camp Funston, its spread was inevitable and followed quickly.

  Within a few weeks, twenty-four of the army’s thirty-six largest bases were hit, along with thirty of the country’s fifty largest cities. In early April influenza showed up in the French port of Brest, the destination of many American transports. From there it spread through the French army and the British Expeditionary Force, to Paris and Rome—basically everywhere. It skipped easily across No Man’s Land, soon ravaging the German armies to such an extent that Ludendorff would later blame it for the failure of his spring offensives.

  The contagion followed roads and railways into every corner of the Americas and Europe, and it traveled by ship to the Eskimos of the Arctic and the islands of the South Pacific. It affected so many draftees that training became impossible, and it brought commerce to a standstill in cities on every continent.

  And yet, despite its disruptiveness, it was not terribly dangerous. Its general mildness and the infrequency of complications caused many physicians to doubt that it could really be influenza at all. Most victims were able to return to their daily routines after a few days of misery.

  By high summer, the worst seemed to be over. Between June 1 and August 1, the BEF reported 1.2 million cases, a large majority of them only briefly debilitating, but on August 10 it declared the epidemic to be at an end. It was in decline in the United States as well, and in most places around the world.

  But it didn’t disappear. It not only persisted in an apparently random assortment of places, but abruptly became much more virulent. The death rate began to soar at Brest, where the French naval hospital was swamped with new cases. U.S. Navy facilities in Boston and Philadelphia were similarly hard hit.

  What was happening was a process known to medical science as “passage.” Viruses change constantly as they jump from host to host, and by the time this particular virus had passed through fifteen or twenty individuals it was radically different and much more lethal. Doctors now wondered if it could be influenza not because it was so mild but because it was suddenly so dangerous and manifested itself in such varied and unusual ways. Flu epidemics had always occurred between September and March, but now it was August, and this one was growing in reach and potency. Flu usually killed the aged and unwell, but this one was cutting a wide swath through the young and strong. Most vulnerable of all were pregnant women.

  If the resulting global pandemic was not made possible by the war—would the virus have escaped from Haskell County if not for Camp Funston?—it was worsened by the conditions and priorities of wartime. This was unquestionably true in the United States, where the mortality rate was markedly higher among soldiers from rural areas than among city boys. The latter, having grown up in close quarters and been regularly exposed to infectious diseases, had robust immune systems. Youngsters from farms and hamlets, even if big and husky, were more vulnerable. Being crowded together in camps, trains, and ships where disease was rampant amounted to a death sentence for many of them.

  The belief that nothing was as important as the war, and that nothing must be allowed to interrupt the prosecution of the war, caused people in positions of authority to make decisions that today seem inexcusable. In Philadelphia, where the epidemic was raging in the navy yard but had not yet hit the civilian population, medical experts implored the head of the city’s public health department to cancel a big Liberty Loan parade scheduled for September 28. He refused on patriotic grounds, clearing the way for what proved to be the biggest parade in Philadelphia history. Hundreds of thousands watched as a two-mile-long procession of soldiers, sailors, and civic groups marched past. Two days later 117 Philadelphians died of influenza. Soon hundreds were dying daily, two-thirds of them under age forty. The number of sick was so overwhelming that the city’s hospitals had to stop admitting patients. Here as elsewhere there was a shortage of doctors and nurses because so many were away doing war service. Many of those still on hand were themselves soon felled by the virus.

  On September 26 the U.S. provost marshal, in charge of the Selective Service System, canceled the scheduled induction of 142,000 draftees. He did so not to limit contagion but because the cantonments were in such a state, their hospitals overflowing and corpses piling up faster than they could be buried, that ordinary operations had become impossible. His action saved many lives, but the army made no other changes. The transfer and intermixing of troops continued.

  Though the epidemic was rampant at Camp Grant in northern Illinois, 3,100 of the men stationed there were put on a train bound for Camp Hancock in Georgia. Once under way they sickened en masse, turning the journey into a nightmare. Upon arrival at their destination, more than seven hundred had to be taken directly from the train to the hospital. Hundreds ultimately died, and untold numbers of people were infected along their route and in Georgia. The commander at Camp Grant, having approved the journey against medical advice, shot himself.

  Still nothing changed. William Gorgas, the army’s surgeon general, urged that only men who had been quarantined for at least a week should be allowed to board troopships bound for France. General Peyton March, army chief of staff, refused, agreeing only to the exclusion of men who showed active symptoms at the time of boarding. Nobody knows how many doughboys died of influenza either at sea or shortly after arrival in France, but it is certain that thousands did.

  What the men aboard these death ships experienced can scarcely be imagined. Men crammed together in impossibly tight quarters would turn dark blue, a sign of cyanosis, the failure of the lungs to supply oxygen to the blood and more often than not fatal. Men would go wild with delirium, bleed from their noses, their ears, even their eyes. On some ships new deaths were recorded at a rate of almost one a minute, and men were buried at sea in an uninterrupted stream. One survivor, the colonel of the Fifty-Seventh Vermont Infantry Regiment, recalled that aboard the ship that took him to France, “altogether a true inferno reigned supreme.”

  Few civilians knew what was happening because the United States, like the Allied nations, censored news of outbreaks as potentially bad for morale. The pandemic would become known as the Spanish Flu for no better reason than that Spain, having remained neutral, was nearly alone in not suppressing newspaper coverage of the disaster. Spain was affected, but it had nothing to do with the start of the contagion or its spread to Europe and elsewhere.

  Rear Admiral Cary Grayson, President Wilson’s physician, learned of the death ships. He agreed with Gorgas that transporting troops without a precautionary quarantine was irresponsible, and persuaded the p
resident to discuss the subject with Army Chief of Staff March. Summoned to the White House, March stood firm. He said that any reduction in troop shipments would cheer the Germans and that every man who died at sea “just as surely played his part as his comrades who died in France.” He recalled later that Wilson gazed out the window for a long moment, sighed, and acquiesced. Then, weirdly, the president recited or perhaps sang the words of a ditty that had become popular with schoolchildren.

  I had a little bird,

  Its name was Enza.

  I opened the window

  And in-flu-enza.

  The president’s decision accomplished nothing except a waste of young lives. His meeting with March took place on October 7, by which time the defeat of Germany was a certainty and Berlin and Washington had begun the exchange of diplomatic notes that would culminate in an armistice. Not one of the troopships that left the United States after October 7 arrived in France in time for the doughboys who survived the voyage to get near the fighting. If they had been kept at home, nothing would have been different except that, assuming the taking of minimal precautions, many might not have died.

  In eastern France, meanwhile, the AEF was driving northward up the valley of the River Meuse and into the Argonne Forest. They were encountering fierce resistance and taking heavy casualties, but more doughboys were being put out of action by influenza than by the enemy’s guns.