War in the Trenches
In American History classes, World War I gets glossed over. We talk about the failure of European alliances, the folly of war, the Russian revolution, and the American Doughboys coming to save the day. It’s a maximum two days of class hot on the way to the Great Depression and World War II.
As teachers, we often miss the horrific changes technology brought to the battlefield. The development of the machine gun dramatically altered military tactics: the frontal charge against the enemy, the basic attack mode since the Roman Empire, utterly failed. The horror was it took the Generals four years and millions upon millions of dead to figure it out.
But the soldiers got it. They dug in, parallel trench lines that stretched almost four hundred miles across Europe. And not just the “fox hole” type shelters, these were deep trenches with “apartment” rooms dug into the sides. Trenches that let soldiers enter the battlefield below “bullet level” as much as a half a mile behind the front line. Trenches gave them a possibility of surviving in the “killing zone”.
There were still a hundred ways to die in the trench: walls collapsed, artillery shells hit, clouds of poison gas drifted in. A gung-ho new Second Lieutenant would cry “over the top” and demand an attack into “No Man’s Land” where interlocking fields of machine gun fire could sweep away an army in seconds. Or the rains would come and flood, with the choice being enemy fire or drowning.
Camp Death
But one of the great killers of the war wasn’t bullets, or gas, or even artillery. “Camp Death” had always been a destroyer of armies. In the Civil War, disease was the largest cause of soldier death, not battlefields. And while medical theory dramatically advanced in the fifty years between Civil War and World War I, the camps and trenches were still prime breeding ground for disease.
It might have started in a camp in France, or perhaps was brought over by American soldiers from Kansas. It was called the “Spanish Flu” and ultimately spread from the battle zone to the entire world. Over a quarter of the population of the world, from the Pacific Islands to the Arctic, became infected. The impact on the armies was censored – but in the two years of the pandemic between fifty and one hundred million people died worldwide. Near two percent of those who got the illness, died.
And it seemed the Spanish Flu was “designed” to target the soldiers. While most variation of the flu killed the old and the young, the Spanish Flu triggered an immune response that was particularly severe in healthy young adults. Their bodies own reactions to the disease would often kill them.
The massive troop movements around the world hastened the spread of the disease.
No Cure
There wasn’t a cure. Since the forces on the battlefield were packed close in the trenches, the disease spread quickly through the already stressed and tired men. All the medicine of 1918 could do was treat the symptoms. Sick soldiers were moved to “camps” where they lived or died, but definitely spread the disease even farther. US combat deaths in World War I were around 53,000. Another 45,000 died of the flu.
There isn’t a cure for the “flu” today, though there are preventative vaccines that work against common strains. But the flu-like disease that is emanating from China, the “corona-virus,” has no vaccine, no preventative. Looking at the current statistics, it seems to have a similar fatality rate, about 2%. And, like the pandemic of 1918, it seems to be spreading. From China, to South Korea, Iran, Iraq, and Italy: it’s moving around the world.
Now is the Time
There is no way to stop it. We can hide behind our borders, but the inter-connections of today’s world means that the “corona-virus” will arrive in the United States. Besides, it’s already here, locked in hospitals in Omaha and on Air Force bases. And it will almost assuredly leak out.
Wall Street sees the possibilities. The market’s falling because they know that world trade will be down. If folks can’t go to work in Chinese factories, then production will fall. And China is just the start.
There’s no reason to panic, but we need to prepare. And that’s what we ask our government, our leaders, to do. Prepare our country for what we will need to do to protect ourselves, to care for the ill, and to produce the drugs to prevent this illness. So far, the United States hasn’t even found an effective test to see if someone is infected.
It will take coordination, and folks who know what’s going on regardless of their loyalty to the Trump Administration. This is not the time to cut the Centers for Disease Control, nor is it time to reduce the staff of the Pandemic Crisis Team. And it certainly isn’t the time for the President to say; “…it’s all going to be OK by April”. He doesn’t know that, and neither does anyone else.
