Flu: 1918

By Jen Ellis

It was another 5 a.m. wake-up call as I rolled out of bed, shuffled across the barracks and headed to grab some coffee before heading to the hell that awaited me across the encampment. When I was sent to Camp Devens after its completion in 1917, I never thought I would spend my time helping with never-ending numbers of dying men who only days ago had seemed healthy and fit for battle.

Just a few weeks ago, a couple of the other medics and I were milling over news reports of small towns and other military camps including Camp Funston, in Kansas, being nearly wiped out in mere days by the Spanish Flu. Never did I think I would ever have to live the horrors of this silent killer. It wasn’t until September 7 when our camp finally met its match.

The day started out as usual, sergeants screaming their commands, calling soldiers to their feet and telling them to fall in line for inspection, as Reveille played in the background, all nearly drowned out by the rhythmic poundings of the soldiers’ boots marching into formation. All seemed well; men were marching, training, and occasionally resting in the warmth of a New England September. It was not until lunch that we realized something was not right. As I was heading back to my desk at the base hospital for the Division of the Northeast here in Devens, I noticed a couple of panic-stricken attendants rushing about, grabbing something here, darting there, continuously moving; one could not only see but feel the fear and awe on their faces.

At this sight, my palms began to get clammy and half out of fear, half out of curiosity, I let out a meek “What’s goin’ on in there?”

As if I had had just shaken them from a deep concentration or figured out their secret, their heads shot up from their work and snapped in my direction.

“Huh, we’re not sure right now.” Their voices trembled with fear and anxiety. “We thought it was just the flu, but it’s getting way out of hand.”

I walked down the hallway to the soldier’s bed. With each click of my boots I could feel the blood coursing through my veins and pounding in my ears. As I neared the bed the image that met me was burned into my brain, forever to haunt me like a bad dream.

As I peered down at the man, a bluish figure was staring back at me. Immediately I felt my face go pale; deep down inside, I knew he was going to die. As I later learned, this blue color was caused by a lack of oxygen.

“My God,” was the only thing I could utter as I staggered back a couple of steps. Within seconds, I had alerted the rest of the medical staff who came to observe. Within moments, the room was filled with about 25 doctors all sharing the same worried looks. By this time, the poor bastard had completely lost all sense of who he was or where he was, and began to cough up blood; the wheeze of his strained breathing echoed through the silent hush of the room.

Thankfully, he did not make it through the night; the Spanish Flu had claimed its first victim at Camp Devens that night. By morning, men began to trickle in, one by one; the camp was succumbing to the flu. This flu was like nothing I had ever seen or heard of. Young men, many under the age of 25 due to the expansion of the draft, in great mental and physical condition were coming in.

Throughout the encampment, things were beginning to slow down and focus on the treatment of the ill. Our hospital was made to hold 1,200; it now overflowed with nearly 6,000 men. On one of the largest barracks, cots and curtains were set up; our main hospital was overflowing with the sick and dying. The rapid spread of the flu and the fact that our little encampment, built to house 35,000 men, was overcrowded with a whopping 45,000. Within a week, there were over 250 doctors from across the East Coast, over 10 times our normal number.

As I watched the horror unfold around me, standing too shocked to even bat an eyelid, one of my fellow staff members helped to snap me back to reality.

“Hey, you’re not helping them by standing around!” he exclaimed half jokingly.

With this, I went back to my rounds today’s orders: keep up with the soiled bedding and make sure no one had died, more commonly known as removing the bodies and updating their files.

“We got another one!” I called as I picked up the medical chart hastily crammed in the clipboard at the foot of the cot, checking it against the information on his toe tag. The men were dying so quickly that some were even toe tagged upon arrival. This helped to move things more efficiently once they had died and needed to be moved; plus, it was easier to gather information from someone who was still alive, versus a corpse.

“What a waste,” Johnny exclaimed, “he didn’t even last a day in here.”

It was true, many men came in, got violently ill, then died.

As word of the flu hitting the camp spread, there were attempts to quarantine the soldiers to protect the civilians of Ayer; these attempts were in vain; by the time the paperwork went through the civilians had already begun to die.

As the families of those at Camp Devens caught wind of the outbreak, frantic mothers, sisters, daughters, wives and even girlfriends, accompanied by the occasional father of brother, came flooding in the gates in search of their loved ones. One of the hardest parts of working in the hospital was having to inform those who came of the loss of their loved ones. Shaking in their frail frames, many of these distraught and helpless women could not handle this crippling blow. In a panic, some tried to rush through the doors into the main room in which the cots and sick lay row by row, a morbid resemblance to Arlington cemetery. Usually, they would get as far as the doors and upon catching their first glimpse of the cots, drop to their knees on the blood soaked floors as the doctors and nurses did what they could to save those who had a hope of survival while easing the pain of the dying, uninterrupted by this minor disturbance.

As if having to scoop these women back onto their feet to allow the doctors to move about without having to worry about stepping on someone was not enough, I also had to turn many family members away. With the extreme number of cases, visitation was restricted only to those whose loved ones were the sickest, those boys who probably would not see the light of another day, never mind their first day of combat.

Never in my life shall I forget the unearthly shrieks and cries not only when a visitor was informed of a death, but also when families were turned away.

With the death toll so high, a reported 6,000 cases according to the Red Cross by September 21, there were just not enough hours in the day to keep up with the autopsies. To try to keep up with the mounting bodies, up to 100 a day, we were forced to lay the dead next to each other, row by row, just like you would while stacking wood. That’s what we called the job, “stacking the wood;” it helped to detach ourselves from the unwelcomed job of having to haul our fellow men from their death beds.

One day that I can never forget, September 27, as the flu spread, the nurses and doctors got ill too, 70 of the 200 nurses, forcing a few of us to work longer shifts and handle more tasks. On this specific day we almost lost Johnny, one of my closest army buddies whom I had worked with for the countless hours throughout this epidemic. For a few days, he had been feeling a little weak and was showing it in every way. He was one of those men who could run a thousand tasks in a matter of seconds and come back looking for more work; now he could hardly drag his ravaged body across the barracks.

“You ok?” I asked, knowing the answer.

“Yea,” he coughed, “just a little under the weather today, that’s all.”

His words wounded sincere, but his dark sunken eyes pitted against a pale corpse-like pallor told a different story. By now he was coughing almost constantly and began wheezing.

“Hey, why don’t you go lay down for a bit or at least have someone look at you?”

“I just need to get a little food in me,” he replied with a thin raspy voice.

With that he began to shuffle off to get some food and take a break. Suddenly the heavy and uneven clunking of his boots stopped and was replaced with a hollow thump. I spun around to see Johnny clinging to the foot of one of the freshly emptied cots. A nearby nurse quickly scurried over and helped him into the cot; his weak resistance was no match for her persistent pushes and pulls.

Now, I knew that Johnny had been unwell for quite some time, none of us were, working from 5 a.m. until 9 p.m. when we went to bed to start again in the morning was no way to live, especially in these conditions. All this time I had figured it was just a little bit of a cold mixed with the constant fatigue and abuse our lives called for; in fact, I had been wrong, the flu was at it again, only this time it had chosen a true soldier.

With what little medication we had on hand, which was actually much more than the public had available due to the military seizure of medications, and a little rest, it quickly became evident that Johnny would not become another body stacked awaiting its turn in autopsy.

While Johnny, my assigned partner for making the rounds was still recovering, I was temporarily assigned to help the doctor in charge of autopsy; the last of his nurses had fallen ill with expectations of a full recovery.

“One, two, three!” Thud!

Another fallen soldier laid spread out on the autopsy table awaiting examination.

With a queasy heart and a shaky hand I began to fumble around the room trying to help in whatever ways I could. Being my first autopsy, my mind raced about, curios to see what happened in an autopsy and hoping to find dome understanding of what was killing everyone. My main job, documentation: record any findings and try to stay out of the way.

“Would you look at that,” the doctor exclaimed. He held out one of the lungs.

“Poor bastard. Drowned in his own fluids.”

Hesitantly, I put on gloves and moved my mask to better cover my face and moved closer. Indeed my instincts had been correct; the once spongy and healthy lung was now nearly a solid, filled with a foul mixture of blood, mucus, and pus. Nearly gagging, I asked what had caused such a thing to happen. To my mortification, this was met with an unnerving “I am not quite sure, and I don’t have the time to look too deeply into it.”

By mid October, my world had changed dramatically. It was at this point in time I was allowed to go on leave. I was shocked to see how my home town had changed. Never would I have thought that only a couple of towns over Leominster had completely changed. As I walked through town, everywhere I turned “Closed for Flu” signs hung in the windows of small shops that lined Monument Square. A few school children milled about, unable to attend classes because the schools had been closed.

As I neared the edge of downtown, I walked neared Evergreen Cemetery. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw a large mound of freshly dug dirt. Curious, I headed toward it only to be stopped by a caution sign, warning that the mound was a flu grave. Awe struck, I stepped back and continued to look. The longer I looked the more I was able to remember the sights of the dying, the scent of death, and the burning copper like smell of blood s it soaked through just about everything at Devens. After spending a few minutes reflecting, I headed silently back to my house in search of much needed rest.

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Jen Ellis was born in Leominster, MA and is currently studying Business Management at Fitchburg State College, Fitchburg, MA.