1918. While generals count shells, a virus counts us. It rides the war's circulatory system, camps, troop trains and troopships, and kills perhaps fifty million people. In Philadelphia a parade to sell war bonds draws 200,000; within days the morgues overflow. In India, where the ships dock at Bombay, twelve million or more die.
Why then
Crowded camps and a planet mixed by war make a pathogen's dream. Warring governments will not let their newspapers alarm the home front, so the disease takes its name from neutral Spain, whose papers were free to report it.
What they wanted
Governments want bonds sold and morale intact. Doctors try to name the thing without sounding like defeat. City officials weigh closing schools, churches and saloons against the war effort: Philadelphia waits, St. Louis does not.
What changed
The flu ignores the Armistice and returns in waves into 1919. It kills young adults more than the old, the cruellest thing about it. The war's toll is incomplete without it.
Still argued
Where it began, a Kansas army camp, China or France, is still argued. That it was influenza, and that troop movements carried it around the world, is not.