Pale Horse, Pale Rider

By R.Z. Sheppard

THE PLAGUE OF THE SPANISH LADY

by RICHARD COLLIER 376 pages. Atheneum. $10.

This recounting of the worldwide influenza epidemic of 1918-19 not only appears in time for the season's first sniffles but also in the wake of what might be called the new hypochondria. Two famous mastectomies, plus frightening books and articles about heart attacks and the cancer-causing properties of such common substances as asbestos and spray-can propellants have added to our usual anxieties. Yet as millions of people over 60 will recall, for real drenching fear nothing tops an old-fashioned plague.

Throughout the fall of 1918 and the first months of the 1919 winter, an unidentified influenza virus killed 21 million people and affected the lives of 1 billion more, or half the world's population at that time. The bug has been credited with being more effective than the Maxim machine gun in blunting Germany's final assault on France in World War I. Practically the entire Royal Navy was kept in port for twelve days nursing more than 10,000 cases, including the Commander in Chief, His Royal Highness King George V. The flu-ridden crew of the American transport Otranto was too weak to abandon ship after colliding with another vessel during an Atlantic storm. It sank with a loss of 431 lives. Aboard the troop ship Leviathan, a young Assistant Secretary of the Navy named Franklin Roosevelt suddenly keeled over. From an overcrowded Chicago hospital ward a deathly feverish 16-year-old who had lied about his age to become a Red Cross ambulance driver was sent home to improve his chances for recovery. His name was Walt Disney.

The flu was a highly democratic epidemic, striking across class, racial and economic lines. Yet no nation wanted to take credit for originating this leveler, which was known as the Spanish Lady because of an early publicized outbreak in May 1918 at San Sebastian. Author Collier notes, however, that two months before, 1,100 cases of flu had already been reported at Fort Riley, Kans. "Spanish Lady" stuck, however, probably because it was more romantic than a competing U.S. term, Hog Flu.

According to an early theory, the strain may have been caused when the mild Hog Flu virus, which sickened hogs but not humans, combined with a relatively harmless bacillus to produce a virulent man killer. But in 1918, 25 years before the electron microscope made it possible to see viruses at all, there was no way to discourage advances from the Spanish Lady. Paranoia often took the place of ineffective remedies. There were those who thought the bug was the Kaiser's secret weapon, despite the losses his own troops suffered. In Poland, the source of infection was said to be Warsaw's Jewish ghetto. Those whose prejudices were more political called it the Bolshevik disease.

The epidemic spread as fast as ships could carry infected passengers round the world. The highest mortality occurred in India, where 12.5 million people died. Very few places remained influenza-free because of fanatically enforced quarantine regulations. Among them were the South Atlantic island of St. Helena, Napoleon's last home, and a U.S. naval training station in San Francisco Bay, where drinking fountains were sterilized hourly with blowtorches. Nearly everywhere else life for the survivors changed radically. Moviehouses, restaurants and concert halls were ordered shut. Courting became medically dangerous. A sort of mass purdah prevailed as millions learned to breathe, speak, sleep and even play baseball behind surgical masks.

It is an immense story that Richard Collier (The City That Wouldn 't Die, The Sands of Dunkirk) attempts to tell. He has selected perhaps the only popular method possible: a compact narrative out of which the reader may pull facts and anecdotes as if from an endless Pandora's box Of Kleenex.

qed R.Z. Sheppard

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