You can read histories of Napoleon's retreat from Moscow, and not find it said that most of the troops died from typhus, dysentery, cholera. We should be asking, perhaps, " Why have we forgotten this terrible calamity?' What other calamities have we all chosen to forget? "What is it about certain types of disaster that numbs the human mind?' But the Great Influenza Epidemic that killed more than seven times as many is seldom mentioned. Histories are written, heroes celebrate, we stand to attention once a year and mourn. The First World War is always remembered, discussed, analysed. There was also a sleeping sickness epidemic, equally mysterious, though far fewer people died. The years 1918,1919,1920 were horrible because of this great influenza epidemic. Yet as that war ended, with its four million dead, there began a much greater calamity, the flu epidemic,which ravaged the whole world and killed twenty-nine million people. At the time it was terrible, impossible, dreadful - all Europe was afflicted by the numbers of the dead, perhaps sensing that they marked the beginning of our decline.The possibility of man-made disasters was being recognized, and with much unease and foreboding. The four million of the First World War were not planned, were not meant, they happened. But these were deliberate murders, policies of murder, planned and carried out. The sixty million (or so) of the Cultural Revolution. The twenty million (or so) of the Great Leap Forward. The twenty million (or so) of Stalin's murders in the Gulags. The seven to nine million of Stalin's forced collectivization of Russian peasants. This was modest compared to the horrors that were to follow, and very soon. The First World War's dead numbered four million. She compares how people recall the around 4 million who perished in WW1 with the near total loss of recall of memory for 20 million who died in the worldwide flu epidemic of 1918 - 1920.Įxtract from " The Wind Blows Away Our Words". In her reportage on Afghan conflict, "The Wind Blows Away Our Words", Doris Lessing raises the question of "memory".
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