The Daily Brief

It was a seasonal thing, the spring flu that hit in that particular year— everyone caught it, and almost everyone got better— the usual aches and temperature, headaches and lassitude. It didn’t seem much different from what strikes us every year; translating into a couple of days curled up at home in bed under the quilts, drinking hot liquids, sleeping a fevered and restless sleep and when awake, feeling rather feeble and wretched. These days— as then— only a relative handful of elderly and chronically ill see the usual flu turn into pneumonia, deadly, swift and terminal. The only curious thing noted in early accounts from Spain, in the northern resort city of San Sebastian, was that everyone exposed to the spring flu seemed to come down with it.

San Sebastian was (and still is) a charming, compact little city, built around an almost perfectly circular harbor. A generous pedestrian promenade runs nearly the entire circumference, adorned with elaborate light standards and a low balustrade along the edge, broken by shallow stairs descending to the beach level. The shortest way to commute across the downtown is in fact to walk along the beach; my daughter and I noticed many primly business-suited professional men walking home in the afternoon, carrying a briefcase and their shoes and socks, with their pant-legs turned up towards their knees, sloshing through the shallow water. The business commuters strolled by ladies of a certain, old-fashioned age, wearing modest one-piece bathing suits, and serious night-at-the-opera jewelry; an elaborate choker or paurure, long bracelets set with many stones, and cocktail rings.

San Sebastian was a place to be seen, gambling in the casinos, strolling along the circular promenade, even in 1918 while the last tattered glories of Belle Epoque Europe and all its old verities and optimistic assumptions were being smashed to microscopic fragments several hundred miles farther east. Spain was at peace, its’ newspapers uncensored, and although the city fathers of 1918 tried to downplay the spread of what otherwise seemed to be the usual three days of aches and fever— who wanted to come to a resort in the season, and spend ones’ holiday being sick— the spring flu struck across Europe. Government offices shut down, the British grand fleet couldn’t put out to sea in May because so many sailors were down sick, British and German ground offenses were put off, workers in vital war industries were unable to work- but then summer came, and the tide of illness— now termed the “Spanish flu” ebbed under the summer heat.

And then in August, the flu returned, crashing like a monstrous wave, nearly as communicable as it had been in the spring, but mutated during the interim— no one knows where by what means—into something deadly, something that killed large numbers of the young and otherwise healthy. It is estimated that in the United States alone, more than a quarter of the population caught the flu. Of those stricken, about twenty percent had a mild case and recovered without incident, but according to writer Gina Kolata, the rest became deathly ill. They died within days or even hours, delirious and gasping for air, their lungs filled with thin, bloody fluid.

Others, who seemed at first to have a manageable illness, would develop a deadly pneumonia, which if not fatal meant a protracted convalescence. And doctors and public health officials were all but helpless in the face of the deluge, a helplessness most particularly searing because the medical arts had just come off a seventy-year run of successes on all fronts. Miracles had seemingly been worked 2-a-penny: epidemic diseases like cholera, malaria, typhus had been banished or at least beaten back, anesthesia made complicated surgeries possible, antiseptics banished bacterial infection, childbirth made considerably less hazardous to the average Western woman, people no longer routinely died of appendicitis or a hundred other maladies that had kept human lives nasty, brutish and short. But the doctors were as helpless in 1918 as they had been a hundred years before; there was nothing they could do, as the strongest and fittest gasped out a last few agonizing breaths, their faces and extremities dark and congested from lack of oxygen. Hospitals filled up and up; as did the morgues and graveyards. Public health departments handed out gauze masks, and forbade spitting in public. Volunteers in places as far apart as Reading, England and El Paso, Texas set up temporary hospitals in schools and other public places.

I am fairly sure that my great-grandmother, Alice Page Hayes was one of those fearless and public-spirited women; according to her daughter, my adventurous Great-Aunt Nan (who did herself contract the flu), she had volunteered with the Red Cross and St. Johns’ Ambulance Service in Reading where she lived with her husband and daughter, all during the war. I have somewhere a tiny St. Johns’ Ambulance pin attesting to her service; of course, it was the done thing for middle and upper-class Englishwomen all during World War I. Alice Page Hayes, though, had an advantage over her peers, and that was that she had seriously trained as a nurse early in the 1880ies when it wasn’t quite the ladylike thing to do at all. Volunteer work made necessary by a war made it possible for her to continue with her calling, even though (as witness in her own copy of Mrs. Beatons’) nursing the sick was a particularly necessary part of ordinary household management, up until the day of inoculations and antibiotics. I am supposed to be like her, or so say a handful of family friends and connections acquainted with us both. Was she much like me? Managerial and confident, and just perhaps – one of those lucky people who never catch anything, or at very worst, a light case of whatever is going around?

One of the enduring puzzles of the 1918 pandemic was the mortality rate among the young and healthy, whereas the very young, the old and the chronically ill are the more usual victims. Some experts speculate that a previous flu in 1890 may have been just enough similar to the 1918 pandemic to afford immunity to those who had caught the earlier influenza variant – or that immunities acquired by those who were babies and small children at the time over-reacted with fatal results to the later epidemic. Nonetheless, I like to think of my great-grandmother, who had been exposed to and survived everything that the late 19th-century could throw at her, walking confidently into an emergency ward full of the desperately sick, knowing that she would do her best, that thanks to her work, some would live who otherwise would have died, that she would be OK, that she was one of the strong ones – and that I am one of her strong descendants.

In Dinant, Belgium, there is a cliff beside the River Meuse. At the base of the cliff is a cathedral, topped by an onion dome (onion domes abound in this town, for some reason). It is impossible to walk around the cathedral – the cliff forms its back wall. Atop the cliff, lining its edge, and at one point peering down on the cathedral dome, is a citadel.

If you go to Dinant today, and pay your few francs for the tour, you can either ride the cable car to the top of the cliff, climb the 408 stairs to the top of the cliff, or as I discovered on my final visit there, you can drive to the top of the cliff. I wish I’d known about the parking lot before climbing the stairs on my previous three visits.

As the tour guide leads you through the rooms, repeating himself in French, Dutch, German and English, depending on his audience, you learn that the Dutch occupied the citadel at one time, and that Napoleon stopped there, meeting his mistress who rode in a carriage from Paris. The carriage is on display in the citadel’s museum. You will traverse a catwalk, not visible in this photo, that takes you out over the cathedral. It’s larger than a catwalk, honestly – 2-3 people could walk abreast, but when you’re afraid of heights, it seems to be very narrow, and very fragile. My first visit, I stayed in the middle of it and scampered across as quickly as I could to reach the safety of the tunnel on the other side. Thank goodness I’m not claustrophobic, as well. By the time of my final visit, I had desensitized myself to where I could stand by the fenced edge, and take a picture looking *down* on the onion dome.

The citadel has been there since before Napoleon. The almost-twenty years that have passed since my visits there have dimmed my memory of its exact age. It has withstood countless attacks, and fallen to others. In 1915, with the town in flames from German bombs, it fell again.

It is a long citadel, as you can see in the picture. Inside there are many rooms, one after the other. Some paths lead you through rooms in a roundabout way bringing you back out into the center of the citadel, while others lead you into rooms that have no way out except to retrace your steps.

As you tour the citadel, the guide leads you through the rooms. In one, there is a display case showing mannequins with period uniforms/weapons of WWI. In the next room, there is a red plastic film over the window, to give the impression of the burning town. There is a diorama there, showing soldiers fighting. The soldiers are dressed like the mannequins in the previous room – this room represents 1915.

While the town burned below them, the defenders fought the Germans in the citadel. But it was not their town – not their fortress. They did not know that some paths led through rooms to a dead end. Fighting furiously, being pushed back from room to room, they learned the hard way that there was no way out.

It is a quiet group that retraces its steps through those rooms, back to the central, open area of the citadel.

After the tour ends, you are free to wander the grounds. I found myself wandering the military cemetery there, looking at “the crosses, row on row,” and murmuring portions of “On Flanders Fields” to myself, even though I was in Wallonia, not Flanders. There were Germans and Canadians buried there, but also Americans, from both wars.

Dinant was and is my favorite Belgian town. I’ve toured the citadel either 4 or 5 times, because we would take new arrivals there, for something to do on a Saturday.

It’s been 17 years since I last toured the citadel, but I still remember that red-tinged room, and the hopeless valor of those gallant soldiers.

We bumptious Americans are always being reminded by everyone from Henry James on, that things in Europe are old, historic, and ancient. We are told that some places are piled thick in layers of events, famous people and great art, like some sort of historical sachertorte… and to a student of history, certain places in Europe are exactly that sort of treat. What they hardly ever mention is that most usually, the most ancient bits of it are pretty sadly battered by the time we come trotting around with our Blue Guide, and what there is left is just the merest small remnant of what there once was. The sanctuary at Delphi once was adorned with statues of gold, silver, bronze… and they were the first to be looted and melted down (all but one, the great bronze Charioteer) leaving us with the least and cheapest stone, sadly chipped, battered and scarred. (My daughter at the age of three and a bit, looking at a pair of archaic nudes in the Delphi museum asked loudly “Mommy, why are their wieners all broken off?”) The great Athenian Akropolis itself was half-ruined, many of the blocks of which it was constructed scattered across the hillside like gargantuan marble legos. In Rome, most of the ancient buildings had been stripped long ago of the marble and stone facings, leaving only the battered concrete and tile core to hint at what splendor had once been… and again, only the smallest portion left to us to admire, the smallest, cheapest portion, or that hidden away by chance.

But there was one place, just one place where the last few artistic relics of the classical world looked as fresh, as unmarred as if they had just been installed the day before, in the little provincial town of Ravenna, where the VEV needed a new air hose and some other essential innards, and fortuitously mushed to a halt right in front of the very garage capable of providing it, although the junior mechanic had to rush off on his Vespa to fetch the essential parts from another source. I was driving to Spain from Greece, having taken the car ferry from Patras to Brindisi three weeks before, in a bright orange Volvo sedan with AFG plates and all of my daughters’ and my luggage crammed into the trunk and the back seat.

We had just come from the grand artistic buffet that was Florence, crowded with tourists and tour guides, and touts, enormous motor-coaches everywhere, and everywhere the grasping hand, wanting a substantial payment to see this or that. It was actually a relief to get to Ravenna, which in contrast seemed like a graciously hospitable place, proud in a casual sort of way about the monuments and churches with their splendid late classical mosaics, imbedded into their pretty little town like raisins in a loaf of raisin bread. The Arian Baptistery was, if I remember correctly, down a little side street in back of a large chain drug store. Most of the other places that drew tourists were in similarly modest locations; no crowds, no touts, no being nickeled and lire’d to death. Local residents just seemed enormously pleased that people came all the way to Ravenna to marvel at their lovely, historical chapels and churches, and some smaller sites asked nothing more of the tourists than to feed come coins into a meter that would turn on the spotlights in the Mausoleum of Galla Placida, so we could better admire the mosaics in the ceiling.

There was no need for the meters and lights in the New Church of St. Appollinaire, with it’s splendid procession of saints and martyrs along the nave. Windows allowed the autumn sunlight to spill into the church, and outside when the winds rippled the tree leaves, the whole wall seemed to shimmer, in a blaze of gold and rich colors. Much of the mosaic was made of glass, tiny squares and slips of jewel-colored glass, or clear glass backed with gold-leaf. In San Vitale, Justinian and Theodora looked down from amidst their courtiers, generals, priests and ladies, and in the old sanctuary of St. Appollinaire-in-Classe (Classe, which had once Ravenna’s port on the Adriatic) the Savior was enthroned in a lush green garden, amid a flock of sheep under a golden sky full of angels… all of it as jewel-bright, new, and unchipped by time, as if the artists, and tile-cutters and plasterers had just finished the work last week, not twelve hundred years ago, a last splendid blaze at the end of the Roman Empire in western Europe. For a very brief time, this out of the way little provincial town had been the capital of the Western Roman Empire, the last flickering light of civilization in a darkening world, rent by war and barbarian invasion, and the memory of times when things had been much, much better.

When these mosaics were being installed, the dark ages were already falling, the Legions gone from Britain, the roads and forts and harbors falling derelict without the skill and direction to keep such massive works functioning. There was no one left to see to the waterworks, to protect the essential trade and communication which was the lifeblood of the Empire. Science and literacy were useless luxuries in the face of the brute barbarian tide, and the stifling hand of religious orthodoxy. The remnant of the Empire remained for a little while in the east, in Byzantium which was renamed Constantinople, the city of Constantine, but all it’s battles after that were defensive; static and scholeric looking to the past, to the way things had always been done. There is a sadness and resignation to the mosaics of Ravenna, as if those who were pictured, and those who did the work already knew their world was in twilight, and not much could be done to hold back the night, but it didn’t matter, because the next world would be a better one.

There was no confidence left in their society, no belief in their ability to make things better; all they had was a determination to hold on to what they had, to put off acceptance of the inevitable as long as possible. In the end, Constantinople would fall as well, and the last of the Roman Empire would be gone forever, but the mosaics of Ravenna remain. For now, anyway.