The pointless savagery of the Great War forged a generation of writers, so I’ve always found it strange that no one here at home chronicled the Great Influenza or its effects on us, although Miss Katherine Porter did write the brief and touching story of her soldier-love, who died of the influenza that he caught while nursing her. Without literature as a guide, I expect you think of the flu as a homey, familiar kind of illness, not a horrifying scourge like the black plague or smallpox. You may believe you know what the flu epidemic was like for us.

Pray, now, that you never learn how wrong you are.

The onset of the disease was abrupt, very much like that of meningitis, which is what the doctors thought it was, in the beginning. The initial symptoms were a severe headache and a high fever, followed by those of an awful cold: a terrible sore throat, an endlessly dripping nose, violent coughing. And then—

Well, I cannot make poetry of our great trial, as Mr. Owen did of combat, but permit me to act the schoolteacher and explain to you the workings of the lungs. In health, they are the lightest of all our organs. Their surfaces are a lacy gauze of fine blood vessels. Across this diaphanous borderland between the body and the world, the scientists tell us, life must be renewed each moment of the day and night by the exchange of gaseous waste for fresh, clean oxygen.

Early in the epidemic, frantic to find the cause of this vicious illness, pathologists cut open chests and discovered that those delicate soap-bubble lungs were as heavy and solid as a liver—saturated with bloody fluid, the air passages leading to the throat completely blocked. Those who died turned blue-black for want of air. In the morgues, bodies the color of slate were said to be stacked in piles “like cordwood.” In a single year, fifty million people died that way—millions more than died in combat on all sides, on all fronts, in four and a half years of the Great War, itself an orgy of killing.