A Bryant

“Robert Graves, the poet and British Army officer, was in London, too, still shaky from the German metal he had received in his chest and thigh the year before. His mother-in-law contracted influenza, but deceived her physician in order to make the rounds of the latest London plays with her son, Tony, on leave from France. She died July 13: “her chief feeling was one of pleasure that Tony had got his leave prolonged on her account.” On the day she died, Grave’s friend and fellow poet, Sigfried Sassoon, who had been shot through the throat in 1917, was shot through the head while on patrol in No-Man’s-Land. He recovered. Tony was killed two months later.27 Yes, the war was much more engrossing than Spanish flu.”
― Alfred W. Crosby, America's Forgotten Pandemic: The Influenza of 1918

“With them heredity, diatheses, the vicissitudes of weather and other meteorological conditions, elements of decomposition, impure atmosphere, gluttony, insufficient and unwholesome food, inebriety and other environments, potent factors in the formation of disease, are entirely overlooked. Having their gaze fixed upon the one ignis fatuus, they become oblivious to all things else in heaven, earth or sea.79”
― Nancy K. Bristow, American Pandemic: The Lost Worlds of the 1918 Influenza Epidemic

“No other influenza before or since has had such a propensity for pneumonic complications. And pneumonia kills.”
― Alfred W. Crosby, America's Forgotten Pandemic: The Influenza of 1918

“World War I killed upwards of fifteen millions, wreaked immeasurable physical, social, and psychic damage, and left most of the citizens of the belligerent powers with a deep conviction that war must in some way be prohibited.”
― Alfred W. Crosby, America's Forgotten Pandemic: The Influenza of 1918