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The Great War.

The devastating influenza pandemic known as 'Spanish flu', which killed at least 20 million people all over the world in 1918, was responsible for the first bitter blow inflicted on triumphant bacteriology, fortified by the series of resounding successes achieved in identifying the pathogenic agents of terrible diseases such as anthrax, cholera, tuberculosis, plague, and syphilis. Over-confidence and the idea, born of the Pasteur revolution, that every infectious disease was caused by a bacterium, had led the scientific community to accept the theory put forward by the German bacteriologist, Richard Pfeiffer, who, in 1892, believed he had identified the pathogenic influenza agent in a bacterium, Haemophilus influenzae. But, while the most appalling epidemic ever to sweep through the world since the 'Black Death' of the 1300s was still raging, the scientific community had to admit that influenza originated not from a microbe, but from a virus. This article aims to reconstruct the enlightening and little-known cultured/scientific events and issues of the dramatic crisis that bacteriology experienced in the autumn of 1918, with the consequent simultaneous collapse of both the 'Pfeiffer doctrine' on the microbial origin of influenza and the illusion of a world free of infectious diseases. This was an illusion destined to surface again at the end of the century and collapse with the advent of AIDS.

Scientific Triumphalism and Learning from Facts: Bacteriology and the 'Spanish Flu' Challenge of 1918: Bacteriology and the 'Spanish Flu' Challenge of 1918

This article explores the biography and First World War experience of Private Charlie Some, a Black soldier from Natal, South Africa who served in the No. 2 Construction Company of the Canadian Exp...

Charlie's War: The Life and Death of a Black South African in the Canadian Expeditionary Force

The role played by British colonial possessions during the Great War is only now starting to emerge in the last decade or so. This article aims to include Cyprus amongst those possessions that contributed enormously to the British war effort, such as India, Jamaica and the former settler colonies. Before the war Cyprus was an ‘inconsequential possession’ and during the first two years of the war it played a very minor role, when for the most part it served as a pawn to lure Greece into the war, which failed when Athens rejected the British offer to cede Cyprus to Greece in exchange for Greece coming to the military aid of Serbia in October 1915. From the summer of 1916, soon after the British and French signed the Sykes–Picot Agreement, the island became a bustling military and humanitarian base, while it also fed and fuelled the allied armies in Egypt, Macedonia and France. Its most significant contribution was undoubtedly the formation of the Cypriot Mule Corps in summer 1916. Until it was disso...

The impact of the Cypriot contribution during the Great War on colonial society and loyalties/disloyalties to the British Empire

The Great War was indeed a world war. Imperial powers like Great Britain drew on their far-flung empires not only for resources but also for manpower. This essay examines one important (though still inadequately studied) aspect of British wartime exigency, the voluntary and coerced participation of the British Empire's coloured subjects and allies in military operations on the Western Front. With the exception of the Indian Army in the first year of the war, that participation did not include combat. Instead coloured troops, later joined by contract labourers, played major roles behind the lines. From 1916 onwards, well over a quarter million Chinese, Egyptians, Indians, South Africans, West Indians, New Zealand Maoris, Black Canadians, and Pacific Islanders worked the docks, built roads and railways, maintained equipment, produced munitions, dug trenches, and even buried the dead. Only in recent years has the magnitude of their contribution to Allied victory begun to be more fully acknowledged. Yet the greatest impact of British labour policies in France might lie elsewhere entirely. Chinese workers seem likely to have carried the virus that caused the Great Flu pandemic of 1918-19, which may have killed more people around the world than the war itself.

White Man's War, Coloured Man's Labour. Working for the British Army on the Western Front

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White Man's War, Coloured Man's Labour. Working for the British Army on the Western Front