Otto English is the pen name used by Andrew Scott, a writer and playwright based in London.
LONDON — History can essentially be divided into two: that which we like to remember, and that we seek actively to forget.
We Brits love to wallow in the heroic myths of both World Wars, but we are less keen on recalling the wicked excesses of empire or the depravity of the slave trade or the degrading poverty suffered by so many Victorians in the slums of East London.
Some history is forgotten because it jars with the cozy narratives we construct about our past; some because it is simply too horrific to remember.
So how will we remember COVID-19? As the nation emerges, long-haired and blinking into the post-lockdown, as the pubs reopen and “air corridors” to safe holiday destinations are unveiled, there is a prevailing sense that most people want simply to move on.
It’s unlikely that the coronavirus crisis will be bathed in the warm glow of revisionist nostalgia any time soon.
It’s unlikely that the coronavirus crisis will be bathed in the warm glow of revisionist nostalgia any time soon.
This year was supposed to be the year Britain got that other unmentionable nightmare “done.” But instead, like some bizarre Monty Python cartoon, the country found itself leaping from the Brexit frying pan into the all-consuming coronavirus fire. The entire surreal nightmare swept out of nowhere and raged so hot that even Dominic Cummings, the mythological Downing Street Svengali, couldn’t get it under control.
The first two cases of COVID-19 in the U.K. were diagnosed on January 31, the very day we left the European Union. Since then, at least 300,000 people have been infected and 44,000 have died — a greater death toll in six months than was suffered in the entirety of the Blitz.
But unlike that much memorialized event, it’s unlikely that the coronavirus crisis will be bathed in the warm glow of revisionist nostalgia any time soon. It’s looking instead like we will once again seek to forget — just like the last time a pandemic brought us to our knees.
Invisible enemy
In the late summer of 1918, as World War I edged toward its bitter dénouement, an invisible enemy launched itself indiscriminately on both sides of the Western Front. This was the second wave of the H1N1 virus that had passed almost unnoticed through Europe in the spring of that same year. In the months since, it had mutated into the deadliest transmittable disease in recorded history.
As the “Spanish Flu” carved its path through the trenches, the U.S. military saw more lives lost to the virus than in action against the enemy. More than 340,000 troops were hospitalized. Three-quarters of French and half of all British troops were taken ill.
Grim as the statistics were, they were as nothing compared to the illness itself. Symptoms included blood spurting involuntarily from the noses and ears of victims. Patients suffering the worst cases contracted cyanosis, a condition that turns skin purple-blue. Worst of all, the virus typically took the lives of those in the prime of their lives.
By September, the flu had crossed No Man’s Land and was visiting its worst on the Imperial German Army. Within weeks, tens of thousands of men had fallen sick or were dying in what was effectively the final blow to the Central Powers. On November 11, an exhausted Germany admitted defeat, and the Armistice was signed.
Global pandemic
The war was over, but the flu was only warming up. Repatriating troops carried the virus home, and in the months that followed, death and disease engulfed the Earth. Most nations were slow to appreciate the scale of the emergency — one of many uncomfortable parallels between 1918 and today.
Then as now, the pandemic shook confidence in governments and led to civil unrest. U.S. race riots, sparked by the death of a Black teenager, Eugene Williams, in the summer of 1919, were informed in no small measure by the lack of health care provisions available to Black Americans during the pandemic.
Tents set up to treat Spanish Flu patients in 1918 | Hulton Archive/Getty Images
In Britain, Prime Minister David Lloyd George fell ill and nearly died. Hospitals were overwhelmed as lockdowns and social distancing were enacted. Schools and factories were shut. Period footage of San Francisco on Armistice Day shows revelers wearing face masks, in accordance with strict laws enacted in California, but contemporary “libertarians” objected and set up an “anti-mask League.”
By the time the fourth wave had passed, in March 1920, one in three people around the world had fallen ill, and an estimated 50 million to 100 million people (a staggering 5.4 percent of the global population) had died. That’s more than all civilian and military deaths, of all nations, in both World Wars.
Invisible again
And yet once it was over, our experience with the Spanish flu was swiftly — and deliberately — forgotten. Britain has a sizeable memorial, in central London, to animals that have died in war, but not so much as a bronze plaque to the victims of that terrible pandemic.
There was no official acknowledgement of the 250,000 British dead or the thousands of health workers who had tried to stem the tide. If any record of this inexorable cavalcade of death can be said to exist, it is on the dates that dot cemeteries up and down the country and in the Commonwealth war graves of Europe.
History has an unnerving habit of repeating itself and there are important lessons to be learned — and passed on to future generations.
Nor was the Spanish flu memorialized in art. The 1920s were a golden era of American and European literature and yet, there is almost no mention of it anywhere. Those writers, who did reference it, including T.S. Eliot, did so in a way that fused the pandemic with the experiences of the trenches.
It’s not hard to see why. There is a grim poetry to war; images of doomed ranks of handsome young men marching off to the Western Front are the stuff of myth and cliché. There’s nothing lyrical about dying from the flu. And so, swiftly, the collective tragedy became little more than a footnote to history — a piece of trivia to be trotted out in pub quizzes.
Lessons from 2020
Will the same happen with COVID-19? You would, of course, hope not. As the confluence of events between 1918 and 2020 shows, history has an unnerving habit of repeating itself and there are important lessons to be learned — and passed on to future generations.
Pandemics challenge our innate sense of invulnerability. If politicians act quickly and assuredly, they can save us from their worst effects, but viruses are, by their nature, beyond anyone’s control. They expose the essential conceit of governments, the lie that everything can be solved and more than that, they make us all realize how fragile we are.
The impact of this health care emergency will linger for years. It will be there in its long-term economic ramifications, in the effect it has had on a generation of children’s education and in the unspoken collective trauma of the event.
British Prime Minister Boris Johnson has been under fire for his handling of the coronavirus pandemic | Daniel Leal-Olivas/AFP via Getty Images
It will undoubtedly impact policymaking for generations. The Spanish flu led to calls for universal health care, and today no politician will dare to be seen to be assaulting the sacred NHS. Our pandemic has pulled back the curtain on the curse of British arrogance and the fetid tide of Brexit populism.
Prime Minister Boris Johnson might be very good at winning elections and playing up his parallels with Winston Churchill, but when he was faced with a real emergency, he dithered and prevaricated and palpably failed. In pursuit of a uniquely British solution to what was not a uniquely British crisis, the only exceptionalism on display was the worst death toll of any nation in Europe.
So the lesson we must not forget is this: We live in a joined up and interdependent world — and our choices matter. Empty promises and punchy slogans are all fine and lovely when times are good, but they mean nothing when tens of thousands of our fellow citizens are dying.
Perhaps the most fitting monument to the legacy and scale of our losses to the coronavirus might be to ensure that this time — we remember.