By Kathi Hill
We are living through the scariest pandemic any of us ever remember, at least in this country. The worst for me, being at home most of the time anyway, is that my hair is looking more like a fright wig every day.
I don’t remember the flu pandemic in 1957, but I do remember the one in 1968, because I caught the flu. I was terribly ill for about two weeks. It was awful! The one in 2009 is memorable, because Husband and Daughter came down with it, and I was their nurse. Trust me, you do NOT want me as your nurse.
I don’t have anything to report about this go around, but I do have a little bit of a story to share about the 1918 Spanish flu, which is what so many are comparing this to.
Before I tell my story, let me say this has been nothing compared to the 1918 pandemic where more than 50 million people died globally and more than half a million died in the United States alone. There have been 362,000 globally who have died from this pandemic, with 103,000 of those deaths in the United States. This is much more comparable to the 1968 pandemic than the one we are in the midst of today.
My granddaddy, John Henry Harper, was born in 1895. At age 22 he went into the army on June 22, 1918, to fight World War I. Never having been out of the North Georgia Mountains, he found himself bound for France.
At some point he contracted the famous 1918 Spanish flu. He was very sick for some time. What he remembers most was being in a ward full of other people with the flu. And one day looking to his left, and seeing only dead people, he looked to the right and saw the same. He was the only living person on the ward at the time.
Surviving this, he was to become one of the members of a division sent to fight the Meuse-Argonne Forest offensive.
This is one of the bloodiest battles America ever fought, and the second deadliest, with more than 26,000 American soldiers losing their life in 47 days. And almost 96,000 were wounded. A total of 350,000 casualties resulted from this battle.
His unit became trapped, “The Lost Battalion,” about 554 men, and had nothing to eat for weeks except tact – dried fish – and coffee. For the rest of his life, if he even smelled fish cooking, or if it had been cooked in a house, he would simply turn around and leave. Roughly 197 were killed in action of the “Lost Battalion,” and approximately 150 missing or taken prisoner before the 194 remaining men were rescued. My granddaddy was one of the rescued.
He remembers there being so many German casualties that the soldiers were stacking them up and hiding behind them to shoot.
My granddaddy was a sharp shooter, but he never talked about that. I imagine there was nothing that happened that anyone would want to dredge up and relive.
There’s plenty of information out there to read about this battle. Heartbreaking numbers. If you have the time, I suggest you look up some of this and learn about it.
I’ve read articles that say one of the reasons we lost so many soldiers was that lots of them were weakened or even still had the Spanish flu when they were sent to the Argonne Forest to fight.
And we think we have it rough with pandemic. We don’t have a clue.
