What the Great War Can Teach Us about the Great Pandemic

As a History concentrator, I’m embarrassed to admit that two months ago I didn’t know that the Spanish flu outbreak of 1918 had even existed. But the current pandemic has propelled this footnote of history into the limelight. As crises arise, it is perfectly natural that we scramble to find precedents. We need to learn from the past to fix the present. It can also be therapeutic to know that we’ve survived something like this before.

However, the Spanish flu is not an adequate precedent for the coronavirus. I believe the same time period offers us a better alternative: World War I. The Great War has many lessons to teach us as we navigate the Great Pandemic.

Both World War I and this pandemic were unprecedented. This past February, newspaper headlines often referenced the SARS outbreak of 2003 and the Ebola outbreak of 2014. Similarly, in July 1914, as Austria-Hungary and Serbia went to war, Europeans hearkened back to the Crimean War of the 1850s and the Franco-Prussian War of 1870. But, as the rest of Europe spiraled into total warfare in August 1914, it became clear that these short, restricted conflicts were not adequate precedents for the carnage to come. So too, have we already dismissed SARS and Ebola as too limited to serve as historical precedents for our current global pandemic.

Precedent seekers in 1914 were forced to turn back more than a century to the Napoleonic Wars to examine what total war on the continent would look like. However, much had changed between 1814 and 1914 — the spread of nationalism and colonialism, the invention of machine guns and mortars, and the emancipation of Russian serfs. These developments led to many unanticipated consequences on the battlefield.

We too have to look back over a century to find a pathogen as global, transmissible, and deadly as the current coronavirus. But just as the Napoleonic Wars could not prepare the masses in 1914 for the horrors of World War I, the Spanish flu can’t teach us much today. Over the past century, our world globalized, geopolitics decentered, transportation and medicine progressed exponentially, and fake news and conspiracy theories prospered.

World War I’s exceptional nature is a better precedent for our times than the Spanish flu. The war killed over 20 million people, toppled mighty empires, led to the Ottoman genocide of the Armenian people, decimated Germany, created the first communist superpower, and contributed directly to WWII. One of the war’s most important lessons is that we are likely to underplay the unprecedented. The English writer H.G. Wells wrote of 1914, “All Europe still remembers the strange atmosphere of those eventful sunny August days, the end of the Armed peace. For nearly half a century the Western world had been tranquil and had seemed safe… The newspapers spoke of a world catastrophe, but that conveyed very little meaning to those for whom the world had always seemed secure, who were indeed almost incapable of thinking it as otherwise than secure.”

Our past half-century, like the one before WWI, has been relatively stable. We should not make the same mistake the British made in 1914 and assume this stability will last forever. While the coronavirus’s effects are still largely uncertain, it could permanently change the world in unimaginable ways. Regimes may fall, death counts could spiral to millions, authoritarianism may flourish, and supply chains could be severed.

The point of this article is not to fear-monger. Perhaps the world goes back to “normal” in a few months’ time. But, history teaches us to question our assumptions of constant stability. The world has unexpectedly changed dramatically before and it can do so again. Like WWI, this pandemic will surely end. The question is whether it will have permanent, drastic consequences.

WWI teaches us that we should not focus on the little things as we prepare for a possible shakeup of the world order. In August 1914, British Chancellor David Lloyd George was deeply concerned with maintaining investor confidence to prevent a financial collapse. Likewise, newspaper headlines throughout March 2020 tracked stock market nosedives, while President Donald Trump downplayed the virus to shore up market confidence. Lloyd George would soon learn that a financial collapse was the least of his problems. Already, this April, we’ve had a similar awakening as the headlines from Wall Street have been replaced by death tolls and horrific reports from heroic healthcare workers on the front lines.

An obsession with the markets in August 1914 and March 2020 was an indication that the gravity of the situation was not understood. During both these periods, the world was stuck in the pre-crisis mental framework that market developments were all important. The unprecedented nature of the moment could not be grasped. As H.G. Wells wrote about Britain in August 1914, “It was like a man still walking about the world unaware that he has contracted a fatal disease which will alter every routine and habit in his life.” Today, we have caught more than a metaphoric disease and history teaches us that it could change everything.

Jonathan L. Katzman ’22, a Crimson Associate Editorial editor, is a History concentrator in Dunster House.