A Year of Living Dangerously
Caskets lined the streets like wooden mountains. Men pushed carts looking for bodies as families decorated doorways with mourning crepe — white for a child, black for the middle aged and gray for the elderly.

No one was safe.

Country folk, city dwellers, soldiers and, most surprisingly, those in the prime of life became targets for the devastating global flu epidemic in 1918.

Every 30 to 40 years an aggressive flu virus emerges, one that has changed just enough that people's natural defenses are caught completely unprepared. In 1918, the flu and world events collided. The result — a fast, catastrophic spread of a deadly form of the disease. World War I occupied the planet's most powerful countries at the time. In the spring of 1918, as news of the war splashed across the world's newspapers, a solider at Fort Riley in Kansas reported to the camp hospital complaining of aches, pains and fever — common symptoms of the "three-day flu." By week's end, 500 army personnel had come down with the disease and 48 men, all fit, young and healthy, were dead.

Few took notice, though, as news of young boys perishing in foreign trenches from bullets and bombs took precedence. In any case, by late summer the strange flu seemed to have disappeared. The spring outbreak, however, was only the beginning.

Killer Onboard
That summer and autumn more than 1.5 million American soldiers crossed the Atlantic for war. A few of the men from Kansas brought onboard a silent passenger: the flu virus. Almost immediately, ships became floating hospitals instead of battleships. Some doughboys never made it to the European battlefields. Instead, they died at sea. The survivors carried the disease to the front lines of the war.

The virus that causes influenza is a changing creature, and the circumstances of war created an even greater opportunity for the virus to remake itself. As it traveled and passed through one body to another, meeting different immunological makeups and adapting to overcome each new environment, the microbe mutated and became viciously contagious and more deadly. In the mud and the rain of the war's front lines, a trenchmate's sneeze carrying virus particles could contain more killing power than an enemy's bullet.

The flu ignored hostile borders and traveled into Italy, Germany and France. Soon the British were laid low with the new illness as well, and the Spanish was especially devastated. In fact, the pandemic became known as Spanish Influenza, not because it originated in Spain but because so many Spaniards caught the disease — an estimated 8 million.