As Lloyd George’s biographer has stated, his recovery was remarkable in the circumstances.9,10 Had Great Britain lost her war leader to Spanish flu at this juncture, the blow to national morale would have been crippling.
Another famous leader almost perished at the hands of the Spanish Lady on 2 October 1918. Following the death of his daughter-in-law and her young son from influenza, the forty-nine-year-old Mahatma Gandhi began to show symptoms of the disease. Spanish flu also raged in the Sabarmati Ashram, Ahmedabad, where Gandhi had retreated for meditation and prayer.11 By the time Gandhi had been admitted to hospital in Bombay awaiting an operation for boils and suffering from dysentery, he was refusing all treatment. Unlike the majority of patients, Gandhi had resigned himself to his imminent death.
‘My heart is at peace,’ Gandhi wrote to his son, Harilal, who was still struggling to come to terms with the death of his wife and little son. ‘And so I do not find the going at all difficult.’12 Gandhi’s doctors were persistent in their efforts to keep him alive, however, and so were his supporters. ‘Mr Gandhi’s life does not belong to him – it belongs to India’, proclaimed the weekly Praja Bandhu magazine.13
Gandhi was eventually coaxed into drinking goat’s milk. This was in violation of his religious beliefs, but Gandhi recovered and even recommended his treatment to others: ‘Even after we feel that we have recovered, we must continue to take complete rest in bed and have only easily digestible liquid food. So early as on the third day after the fever has subsided many persons resume their work and their usual diet. The result is a relapse and quite often a fatal relapse.’14
Gandhi survived, but India had been stricken by a ‘national calamity’ according to the Sanitary Commissioner for Government of India.15 Typically of Spanish flu, the disease was fatal among the ten to forty age group, and more women died than men. In total, around 17 million people died of Spanish flu between June and December 1918. Bombay suffered terribly. Between 10 September and 10 November 1918, the total mortality was 20,258.16 This was made worse by the failure of the south-west monsoon and resultant crop failure. As a consequence, Bombay had to cope with an influx of migrants from districts suffering from ‘scarcity and dearness of food’. In Ahmedabad, 3,527 died, the highest mortality being among the lower castes, who were both ‘poor and underprivileged’.17
Bombay’s sanitary commissioner, while adopting the fatalistic attitude that influenza could not to be stopped by public health measures, nevertheless recommended sleeping in the open air, away from ill-ventilated homes, and using disinfectant. The Times of India advised readers to gargle with permanganate of potash and seek hospitalization for pneumonia.18 When the hospitals ran out of beds, schools were requisitioned. There was a general feeling among the Indians that the government could have done more, and that the majority of the officials had stayed in the hills, and abandoned the population to their fate. Food shortages caused by the famine and a contaminated water supply scarcely helped matters, and the colonial administration was criticized for its apathy, allowing ‘sixty lakhs of people to die of influenza like rats without succor’.19 In Calcutta, the scenes were equally grim. The Associated Press reported that the Hooghly River was ‘choked with bodies’, and ‘streets and lanes of India’s cities are littered with the dead. Hospitals are so choked, it is impossible to remove the dead to make room for the dying. Burning ghats and burial grounds are literally piled with corpses.’20
In Britain, Sir Hubert Parry, best known for his scoring of William Blake’s poem Jerusalem, became a victim of Spanish flu on 17 October 1918. In honour of his creative significance, Parry was buried in St Paul’s Cathedral, London. To be pre-deceased by one’s son was no longer uncommon, a legacy of the war which killed so many young men. But Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of Sherlock Holmes, suffered a particularly painful bereavement. When his son, Kingsley, had been injured at the Battle of the Somme in 1916, it seemed as if he would survive once he had recovered from his wounds. But, cruelly, Spanish flu attacked Kingsley in his weakened state and he died on 28 October 1918. Already fascinated by spiritualism, Sir Arthur turned to this popular new belief system to make sense of his devastating loss.
Meanwhile, the Spanish Lady’s killing spree continued, cutting down the famous and the unknown alike. VAD Vera Brittain, now back in London, struggled to cope with her exhausting duties during the ‘ferocious’ epidemic. In Nottingham, young Katherine Wade Dalton was married at St Mary’s church in the Lace Market district on 23 October 1918. Just one week later, the newly-wed returned to St Mary’s for her own funeral, after falling victim to Spanish flu. Katherine’s heartbroken husband and family installed a stained-glass window at the church as a memorial.21 In the same city, the Victoria Baths swimming pool was drained and turned into a temporary morgue when the local council ran out of places to store the dead.22 By the week ending 16 November 1918, Nottingham had recorded the highest death rate in the country: 60,000.23
On 26 October, in London, pacifist campaigner Caroline Playne noted: ‘Influenza very bad in places. People did not seem cheered at the prospect of peace. In trains and trams the depression shown on travellers’ faces was very noticeable and talk was all about specially sad cases of death from influenza. A sense of dread is very general.’24
Four days later, later, Caroline wrote that ‘The London correspondent of the Manchester Guardian 30 October, says that people in general are scared about the influenza. They besiege doctors’ surgeries and chemists’ shops.’25
Matters were not improved by the fact that Spanish flu represented a threat to law and order due to the shortage of police officers, with civil unrest a real possibility. On 1 November 1918, The Times reported: ‘1,445 members of the Metropolitan Police Force and 130 members of the London Fire Brigade on the sick-list with influenza. During the twenty-four hours ending at seven o’clock yesterday morning forty-four persons were stricken with sudden illness in the London streets and were removed to hospitals in the LCC ambulances.’26 Lady Diana Manners, ‘the most beautiful woman in England’,27 wrote to her fiancé, Duff Cooper, who was serving with the Grenadier Guards: ‘This pneumonia plague is ferocious. Lovely Pamela Greer, née Fitzgerald dead in three days.’28 Pamela Greer was just one of the society beauties falling victim to the Spanish Lady. Mrs Dubosc Taylor, described by Tatler magazine as ‘one of the most beautiful women in Society’,29 and who had turned her house in Portland Square into a hospital, perished as a result of Spanish flu. Survivors included Miss Lavender Sloane-Stanley, who had been serving as a VAD, and Lady Victoria Brady, only daughter of the Earl of Limerick.30
In central London, Dr Basil Hood was struggling to stay in control of his hospital, Marylebone Infirmary. At this period, Marylebone was a poor district of London with a high level of depravation, and Hood’s unpublished memoirs provide a devastating insight into conditions as Spanish flu raged throughout Marylebone like wildfire.
‘I have refused no case ever,’ Hood confided, ‘remembering what would be their state, in this area of undernourished and overworked poor. I considered our results were good, considering all things. Of course, cases of influenza/pneumonia if they came from our slum area arrived [sic] with a bad prognosis – inevitably.’31
Within a few days of receiving some 200 patients from Paddington Infirmary, by way of sick soldiers there, the great and awful influenza epidemic fell upon us under which the place literally reeled. All training and indeed every part of training went by the board, whilst the staff fought like heroes to feed the patients, scramble as best they could through the most elementary nursing and keep the delirious in bed. Each day the difficulties became more pronounced as the patients increased and the nurses decreased, coming down like ninepins themselves. In total, nine of these gallant girls lost their lives in this never-to-be-forgotten epidemic. I can see some of them now literally fighting to save their friends and then going down and dying themselves.32
Hood requested that, in any subsequent citations, the names of his co
lleagues remain anonymous to protect the sensibilities of their relatives. As a result, Hood’s colleagues remain unnamed in these extracts.
At the end of October we lost our first nurse with pneumonia and then on 7th November I had to report the deaths of 4 more nurses, the last having only been with us 4 days … One nurse especially I remember, nursing Sister X, in a side ward. Nothing that I could do or say had the slightest effect … she was just consumed with a burning desire to save her if she could. In the end they both perished, the nurse a charming little Irish girl devoted to her work. I can see her now, buttonholing me in the passage, ‘did I think Sister was a little better?’ ‘was she doing well?’ ‘was there anything more she could do?’ With never a moment’s thought of herself. It was a real blow when she was laid to rest and not least to me. I have never really got over that time and no wonder.33
Hood’s memoirs also illustrate the stark reality of the symptoms of Spanish flu:
One poor nurse I remember with a terribly acute influenza/ pneumonia. She could not stay in bed and insisted on being propped up against the wall by her bed until she was finally drowned in her profuse, thin blood-stained sputum constantly bubbling froth.
I knew she was doomed and that her end was near so we did as she desired in making her as comfortable as possible. This epidemic was certainly the worst and most distressing of my professional life. In the first week of December 1918 the total patients reached 779 in one day, the nursing staff total under 100.34
The epidemic inevitably took its toll on the medical staff, Hood included:
Towards the end of November the incidence among the nursing staff began to diminish … and the worst being apparently over … I collapsed. I had been finding it increasingly difficult to get about the place – we had no lift that could be used by us when going from floor to floor – they were too slow in the work – as some 15 or 16 hours a day was required of me as well as night calls all the work had to be done at top speed and the stress and distress all coming at the end of 4½ years of war finally proved too much for me so that at the end of November I became incapable of continuing and was given 3 months’ sick leave. I could barely stand and always when possible against a wall!35
Hood survived the war, and left his unpublished notes to posterity as a fascinating insight into conditions at a London hospital during the Spanish flu epidemic.
In Vienna, Austria, an extremely gifted but scandal-prone young painter, Egon Schiele, was supporting his wife, Edith, through her first pregnancy. Schiele, whose obsession with under-age girls had led to a criminal prosecution for seducing a girl beneath the age of consent, had finally settled down and devoted himself to his work. Schiele was a magnificently gifted artist, with ‘an exceptional graphic ability and an unusual feeling for colour … and he employed these gifts like a virtuoso in order to depict a small number of constantly reappearing, dreadfully distorted and frightening figures, or in landscapes which, seen as though from the bird’s-eye view, also have something grimacing and caricatured about them…’36 But he also had a weak constitution, no match for the consuming monster of Spanish flu.
On 27 October, Schiele wrote to his mother: ‘Nine days ago Edith caught Spanish influenza and inflammation of the lung followed. She is also six months pregnant. The illness is extremely grave and has put her life in danger – I am already preparing myself for the worst since she is permanently short of breath.’37
Schiele already had a strong sense of mortality, reflected in his work, and a ‘penchant for deathbed sketches’.38 When Schiele’s mentor, the symbolist painter Gustav Klimt, had developed Spanish flu, following a stroke in February 1918, Schiele had sketched him on his deathbed. Schiele sketched Edith as she lay dying on 27 October. In a stark but tender drawing, Edith stares out of the page, with sad haunted eyes. She died the following day.
Schiele did everything in his power to avoid getting infected. But he had a weak constitution and died on 31 October 1918 at his mother-in-law’s house on the Hietzinger Hauptstrasse.39 ‘The war is over,’ he said as he died, ‘and I must go. My paintings shall be shown in all the museums of the world.’40
Obituaries focused on the irony of Schiele’s death.
Not only had he died not long after the Secession exhibition had made his name a household word, at the point where he was clearly soon to become the richest and most celebrated painter in Vienna. He had also died at the same moment as the old Imperial Austria had passed away, the ‘Expressionist painter [who] was one of the greatest hopes of our young art world.’ He was still only twenty-eight.41
In the first days of November 1918, Swiss-born novelist Blaise Cendrars witnessed ‘the incineration of plague-ridden bodies piled up in the fields and sprinkled with petrol, since the city had run out of coffins’, on the outskirts of Paris.42 When Cendrars arrived in Paris, he encountered the celebrated Modernist poet Guillaume Apollinaire (1880–1918), who was recovering from a gunshot wound to the head, having survived ‘combat, a head wound, trepanning, and military medicine’.43 The two men lunched in Montparnasse and spoke of ‘the subject of the day, the epidemic of Spanish flu which had more victims than did the war.’44 Five days later, Cendrars passed the concierge of Apollinaire’s building, who told him that his friend had caught Spanish flu. Cendrars hurried inside, where he met Apollinaire’s wife Jacqueline. She too was ill, but not as bad as her husband, who had turned black. Cendrars rushed to get a doctor, who said it was too late to help Apollinaire. The following evening, Saturday 9 November, he died.
Cendrars wrote an extraordinary account of Apollinaire’s funeral, which reads like a state funeral crossed with a black comedy. Proceedings began in a conventional fashion, with a traditional Roman Catholic funeral:
The final absolution having been given, the casket of Apollinaire left the church of St Thomas Aquinas, draped in a flag, Guillaume’s lieutenant’s helmet on the tricolore, among the flowers and wreaths. A guard of honour, a squad of soldiers, arms at their sides, led the slow convoy, the family behind the carriage, his mother, his wife, in their mourning veils, poor Jacqueline, who had escaped the epidemic which had taken Guillaume, but who was still weak.45
These in turn were followed by Apollinaire’s most intimate friends, including Max Jacob and Pablo Picasso, as well as all of literary Paris and the press. But as the procession reached the corner of Saint-Germain, the cortège was besieged by a noisy crowd celebrating the Armistice, a rival procession consisting of men and women waving their arms, singing, dancing and kissing.46
This was too much for Cendrars, who indignantly left the cortège with his lover, Raymone, and the artist Fernand Leger. ‘It was fantastic’, Cendrars said. ‘Paris celebrating. Apollinaire lost. I was full of melancholy. It was absurd.’47
After a warm drink to protect themselves from the flu, they took a cab to Père Lachaise cemetery, only to find that they had missed the funeral. Trying to locate Apollinaire’s grave in the vast cemetery they fell into two newly dug ones, much to the irritation of the gravediggers. But eventually the gravediggers took pity upon them and explained that they were unable to help: ‘You understand, with the flu, with the war, they don’t tell us the names of the dead we put in the ground. There are too many.’48 Cendrars explained that they were looking for the grave of an important man, Lieutenant Guillaume Apollinaire, to fire a salvo over his tomb, but the gravediggers could do nothing. ‘My dear sir,’ said the head gravedigger, ‘there were two salvoes. There were two lieutenants. We don’t know which one you are looking for. Look for yourselves.’49
Then they spotted a grave nearby, with a lump of frozen earth that seemed to look like nothing so much as Apollinaire’s head, with grass that resembled hair around the scar where he had been trepanned. Stunned by this optical illusion, Cendrars and his friends left the cemetery, which was rapidly becoming enveloped in a thick glacial mist.
‘It was he,’ insisted Cendrars. ‘We saw him. Apollinaire isn’t dead. Soon he will appear. Don’t forget what I
tell you.’50
For the rest of his life, Cendrars could never quite believe that Apollinaire was dead. As far as he was concerned, ‘Apollinaire inhabited not the kingdom of the dead but the kingdom of the shadows’ and his strange funeral seemed like some sort of cosmic joke. That the incident took place near the tomb of Allan Kardec, founder of French spiritualism, added to Cendrars’ impression of being sent a secret message from beyond the grave. Kardec’s grave bears the motto, ‘To be born, to die, to be born again and to progress without end. That is the law.’51
* * *
WHEN CAPTAIN J. Cook, RAMC, of the No. 18 Casualty Clearing Station at Arques, Pas-de-Calais, realized that he had an influenza epidemic on his hands, an extra clearing station was reopened at a former Christian Brothers’ School near St Omer.52 As 600 influenza patients a day poured in, additional beds were provided in marquees. Between thirty and forty nurses and forty medical staff were run ragged by the task of caring for their patients. At this point, Captain Cook noted sardonically, the English papers were publishing official statements to the effect that ‘Up to the present the epidemic of influenza has not affected the British troops in France.’53
At No.4 General Hospital, Arques, VAD Kitty Kenyon told her diary that ‘this new flu is knocking everyone everywhere over like ninepins’.54 Kitty was particularly distressed by the death of an orderly, Franklin. ‘He has been one of our orderlies for so long that it must have been hateful knowing all the last details and knowing that he would be carried out on a stretcher under a Union Jack, like so many men that he had accompanied himself. He was one of the nicest of our NCOs.’55
For probationer Margaret Ellis, stationed at No. 26 General Hospital at Camiers, nursing influenza patients was grim in the extreme. ‘They were all incontinent so you were continually changing beds and washing. I remember doing one boy from head to foot, and ten minutes later I had to start doing it all over again.’56
Pandemic 1918 Page 19
