Jeune homme
De vingt ans
Qui as vu des choses si
affreuses
Que penses-tu des
hommes de ton enfance
Tu connais la bravoure et la
ruse
Tu as vu la mort en face plus
de cent fois
Tu ne sais pas ce que c’est que
la vie
Transmets ton intrépidité
À ceux qui viendront
Après toi
---
Bleuet (Guillaume Apollinaire)
Young man
Of twenty
You, who have seen such terrible things
What do you think of the men from your childhood?
You know what bravery is and cunning
You have looked death in the face more
than a hundred times and you don’t
know what life is
Hand down your fearlessness
To those who shall come
After you
Despite a serious head injury that
forced him to wear a metal band around his head, he had survived fighting in
the war. He was the inventor of the word surrealism
and, already, one of the finest French poets. But on November 9, 1918, he lay
on his deathbed, his skin covered with a dark blue tint. Overcome by fever,
suffocating and gasping like an asphyxiated, Guillaume Apollinaire died that
day in his apartment in the 7th arrondissement of Paris. German bullets and
shells had left him alive. The Spanish flu did not spare him.
Two days later, his friend Blaise
Cendrars, another celebrated poet, attended Apollinaire’s funeral. As they
followed Apollinaire’s coffin towards Père-Lachaise, an exuberant crowd
surrounded them, uttering howls of joy: it was November 11, the day of the
armistice. The streets of Paris resounded with the cries of ‘À bas Guillaume!’(Down with Guillaume!) An ironic coincidence since the shouts was in
response to the abdication of the German emperor Wilhelm II, the hated Kaiser
(Guillaume II in French).
Cendrars was shocked, no doubt so. The
people were celebrating a victory at the end of the massacre but another
terribly destructive force was already at work of which people spoke little,
even as the number of dead continued to rise. It was a destruction perpetrated
by an invisible enemy, even more deadly than the German troops. It would eventually
leave behind more casualties than the battles of the Great War.
The brilliant poet, who had survived a
shrapnel and a trepanation, had just succumbed, at the age of thirty-eight, to
the Spanish flu. While he lay cloistered at the top floor of 202 boulevard
Saint-Germain, looking on the rue Saint-Guillaume, he perhaps thought, in his
delirium, that the people on the streets were demanding his head! It was a
cruel end at the young age of thirty-eight, for one who had fought so
furiously, and whose skull still housed a German bullet when he died.
The 1918 flu, wrongly named the Spanish
flu, was caused by a particularly virulent and contagious strain of H1N1 that
spread during that pandemic. The flu killed 20 to 40 million people, 30 million
according to the Institut Pasteur, or
even 100 million according to certain recent reassessments. It was the
deadliest pandemic in history.
The inaccurate name of Spanish flu seems
to come from the fact that only Spain — which had not engaged in World War I —
freely published information relating to this epidemic and in particular that
concerning the disease of King Alphonse XIII. French newspapers therefore spoke
of the Spanish flu which was ravaging Spain without mentioning the French cases
which were kept secret so as not to let the enemy know that the army was
weakened. Sounds familiar?
In 1918, the war ended in Europe. The
belligerent governments censored the press. Only in Spain, which did not take
part in the conflict, there was talk of the pandemic which made people believe
that the flu only affected the Spanish. In fact, in two successive waves, one
banal in the spring, the second disastrous in the fall, most countries on the
planet suffered from the scourge.
Faced with that ordeal, science appeared
disarmed. It was known since Louis Pasteur that the culprit is a microbe. But
no one could identify, even less isolate, the virus, which microscopes of the
time could not detect because of its size, which is much smaller than that of a
bacterium. We don't even know, for the most part, what a virus is, yet we know
that the flu is an immortal disease.
Its first known occurrence can be traced
back to antiquity, when the inhabitants of Périnthe, at the edge of the sea of
Marmara, were coughing and sneezing and some of whom died of fever. It is a
Greek doctor who gave a brilliantly precise description of it. His name thus
gathered a certain notoriety. He was Hippocrates. While the ancients attributed
epidemics to the vengeance of the gods (sounds familiar again?), Hippocrates
was convinced that the source of the scourge was something earthly, and he
tried to fathom it. Yet, he made the mistake of creating the ‘theory of
humours’, the origin of so many medical aberrations (remember Molière's
physicians?). We had to wait till the 19th century for the discovery
of the microbes.
The flu had existed since the dawn of mankind.
But the hunter-gatherer societies, fewer and detached from each other, easily
survived. It was the invention of agriculture and animal husbandry, and the
multiplication of human-animal contacts, that favoured the epidemics. Over the
centuries, such outbreaks have struck all human societies through the same
mechanism: transmission of the virus from certain animal species (birds, bats,
etc.) to farm animals and then to humans. Sometimes the consumption of certain
wild animals caused direct transmission. It is believed that this is the case
with the coronavirus, although one can not be sure until it is proved.
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