The Spanish Flu Epidemic of 1918 Hitting Soldiers and Civilians in the Middle East

Nadene Goldfoot                                                    

                    Spanish Flu virus; reason why we keep getting vaccines for the flu every year

Just as Lebanon was ending the starvation period forced on them from the effects of World War I, another form of terror resulting from that war hit them, the Spanish Flu epidemic that was virulent.  During the World War I campaign in the Middle East, more soldiers died from epidemic diseases than from bullets. Louse-borne typhus, cholera from contaminated water, and malarial mosquitos were often the lethal agents, but not the only ones.

How did the epidemics affect civilians? One-third of Jerusalem’s population died from the epidemics that struck well before the 1918 influenza pandemic. Hundreds of Jews from Jerusalem, Hebron, and Gaza worked or served in the Turkish army base in Beer Sheva. When they returned to their homes, the plagues spread like wildfire.                                           

Mark Sykes from Britain and Frenchman Francois Picot, redrew the frontiers of the Middle East keeping in view the regions of their influence. The deal aimed to divide the Arab world into five entities which were to be shared by Britain, France, Russia and Italy  They did this during a starvation period of the whole area (1915-1918). 

Across the Middle East, the flu took lives as mercilessly as elsewhere. The global pandemic came in three waves, but it was the second, more virulent wave, which secured a deathly grip on the likes of the Ottoman province of Greater Syria (encompassing the modern-day states of Syria, Lebanon, Jordan and Palestine/Israel) around September 1918.

                                                                  

 I dedicate this article to Andrew Price Smith for his extensive analysis of the impact of the 1918 influenza and for being the first to investigate the Austrian Spanish Influenza Archives to demonstrate that the virus struck the Axis troops prior to the Alliance, which forced Kaiser to opt for peace.

                                                              

      Sir Mark Sykes (L) and Francois Georges-Picot (Courtesy/Wikimedia Commons)

 Colonel Sir Tatton Benvenuto Mark Sykes, 6th Baronet  (16 March 1879 – 16 February 1919)  He is associated with the Sykes–Picot Agreement, drawn up while the war was in progress regarding the partitioning of the Ottoman Empire by Britain, France and Russia, and was a key negotiator of the Balfour Declaration. Although a great supporter of Zionism during the First World War, his views changed in the year prior to his death.

                                                                     

            Chaim Weizmann (left) with Emir, then King Faisal I of Iraq in Syria, 1918

Chaim Weizmann (sitting, second from left) at a meeting with Arab leaders at the King David Hotel, Jerusalem, 1933. Also pictured are Haim Arlosoroff (sitting, center), Moshe Shertok (Sharett) (standing, right), and Yitzhak Ben-Zvi (standing, to Shertok's right).These men are the leaders of the Zionist movement to return to their land of origin, Eretz Yisrael.  Sykes worked so much with the Arabs, that they turned Sykes against his original agreement with the Jews.  

The man who was co-architect of the 1916 Sykes-Picot Agreement, Sir Mark Sykes, which carved up the Middle East into colonial spheres of influence in a post-Ottoman world, may have been one of the very last victims of the virus. It was first recorded at Camp Funston, Kansas, in March 1918, and had largely burnt out by the summer of 1919 – but left vast devastation.  Sir Mark Sykes would have had an agonizing death as his body convulsed and contorted from the ravages of the Spanish flu. (Will Covid 19 or the Delta version "burn out"?                                                            

It was 1919 and the British politician, diplomat and all-round swashbuckler was working at the Paris Peace Conference at Versailles when he retired to his hotel room in the French capital and died, on the evening of February 16. He was just 39.  Such was the unusual and virulent nature of this efficient killer that it was often initially misdiagnosed for dengue, cholera or typhoid.

 Diplomat and Sykes's biographer, Shane Leslie, wrote in 1923 about Sykes:

From being the evangelist of Zionism during the war he had returned to Paris with feelings shocked by the intense bitterness which had been provoked in the Holy Land. Matters had reached a stage beyond his conception of what Zionism would be. His last journey to Palestine had raised many doubts, which were not set at rest by a visit to Rome. To Cardinal Gasquet he admitted the change of his views on Zionism, and that he was determined to qualify, guide and, if possible, save the dangerous situation which was rapidly arising. If death had not been upon him it would not have been too late.            

Influenza pandemic of 1918–19, also called Spanish influenza pandemic or Spanish flu, the most severe influenza outbreak of the 20th century and, in terms of total numbers of deaths, among the most devastating pandemics in human history.

A physician, based in Glasgow, Scotland, grimly described the stages of the virus as it took hold of the body, in a letter dated September 1918: "It starts with what appears to be an ordinary attack of la grippe. When brought to the hospital, [patients] very rapidly develop the most vicious type of pneumonia that has ever been seen… It is only a matter of a few hours then until death comes and it is simply a struggle for air until they suffocate. It is horrible."

Sir Mark was, in many ways, an unlucky victim of the H1N1 pandemic, which struck 100 years ago and claimed 20 to 40 million lives worldwide (current estimates suggest up to 100m), as the globe was still reeling from the horrors of the First World War.                               

                 Treating the flu virus at Walter Reed Hospital in 1918-1919

In the region where Sir Mark’s colonial legacy still stirs great controversy, countless people also perished from the deadly effects of the Spanish flu – so-called because the virus was first widely reported in the Spanish press.                                                                                   

   Greater Syria’s civilian population fared little better. In a November 6, 1918, diary entry, the Spanish consul of Jerusalem wrote: “There are so many cases of pneumonia lately. The sadly famous flu transforms into pneumonia, and in three days one is making the trip to the next world… A girl only 20 years old… got a temperature of 43°C. She died, so to say, all burned up”.                                                               

Indeed, the untimely death of this woman (and that of Sykes, who was not yet 40) was another curious aspect of this killer virus. The young and fit perished at an astonishing rate due to their strong immune systems which, scientists say, went into overdrive and turned against them. The influenza bug also moved inland toward the Gulf, appearing in Arabia by late autumn 1918. Ibn Saud, the first monarch and founder of Saudi Arabia, called for the services of American doctor, Paul Harrison. He arrived in Riyadh and found that one-10th of the city’s 10,000 population had expired.                        

                                 Donkey and man leading camels

"The whole town was sick, so much that the bodies were carried out on donkeys and camels, two to a donkey and [illegible] to a camel," Harrison wrote, on January 18, 1919. Prince Turki, Ibn Saud's eldest son, was only in his late teens when he succumbed to the Spanish flu.

Across the Middle East, the flu took lives as mercilessly as elsewhere. The global pandemic came in three waves, but it was the second, more virulent wave, which secured a deathly grip on the likes of the Ottoman province of Greater Syria (encompassing the modern-day states of Syria, Lebanon, Jordan and Palestine/Israel) around September 1918.

Remarkably, very little definitive and authoritative information exists about the impact of the Spanish flu in Greater Syria, but what does exist, paints an intriguing picture of a region buffeted by a conjunction of adverse events.

"This mutated and virulent [second wave] presumably embarked on a ship in France or Britain and disembarked in the Egyptian port of Alexandria [in] September".                                      

The Middle East was a region in conflict, with Britain’s Imperial war machine battling Germany’s Great War allies, the Ottoman Turks.                                                         

Before the entirety of Egypt succumbed to the second wave in November 1918, Lind says the vast and unyielding troop movements in and out the region hastily spread the pandemic, with “Jaffa… in all likelihood the first point of entry for the virus on the Levantine coast [in September], carried by British ships from Alexandria or Port Said”.

Civilians and military troops alike were struck down by the contagion as it spread across Greater Syria’s sun-beaten lands where British legend T E Lawrence had set the desert on fire with his brave band of Ottoman-rebelling Arab irregulars.

 Troops from both sides of the war – British, Australian, Indian, Turkish and others – fell victim to the Spanish flu. The British Empire military formation of the Egyptian Expeditionary Force (EEF) experienced simultaneous epidemics of malaria and influenza in Palestine in October 1918 as it defeated the Turkish Army in a great cavalry campaign. 

Palestine had become a haven for mosquitoes which the Ottoman Empire had allowed to happen keeping everyone away except the returning Jews starting in 1881 to 1903; 1904 to 1914; 1919-1923; 1924-1928; and from 1929 to 1939. The swampy areas with mosquitoes was the first place to be tackled and ended.

   

Two devastating pandemics, the Spanish Flu and COVID-19, emerged globally in 1918 from America and 2019 from China, respectively. Influenza virus A H1N1, which caused Spanish Flu and SARS-CoV2, which caused COVID-19, belong to different virus family and bear different structure, genomic organization and pathogenicity. However, the trajectory of the current outbreak of COVID-19 depicts a similar picture of the Spanish Flu outbreak. Estimates suggest that ~500 million infected cases and ~50 million deaths occurred globally from 1918-1919 due to the H1N1 virus. While SARS-CoV2 accounted for ~2 million cases and 130,885 deaths just within three and a half months, and the number is still increasing. To contain the spread of COVID-19 and to prevent the situation which happened a century back, it becomes essential to examine and correlate these pandemics in terms of their origin, epidemiology and clinical scenario. The strategies tailored to control the Spanish Flu pandemic may help to contain the current pandemic within time.

Resource:

https://www.thenationalnews.com/lifestyle/the-spanish-flu-pandemic-and-its-impact-on-the-middle-east-1.703289

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aliyah

https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/epidemics-in-the-holy-land-100-years-ago/

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