THE OTHER GREAT WAR: Rudyard Kipling’s World War I-era book contains surreal and haunting similarities to today’s pandemic.

At first, the Irish Guards were relatively mobile—and naïve. If they came under fire, they scraped out shallow foxholes in which to huddle until the storm passed. But soon enough, an entire new civilization of trenches had coalesced below the level of the earth—a primitive, but elaborate, megalopolis. The trenches became a way of life: boredom, terror, endurance, courage, random carnage, confusion, the fog of war, and a new way of perceiving death. It’s not that individual death became unimportant, but that it became routine and, though one might not say so, a little bit meaningless—nothing to write home about. The dead were out of it. The miseries remained: “No sooner is a trench dug than it fills with water. . . . Every one is looking like the worst form of tramp—standing, walking, sleeping and eating mud.” An Irish soldier remembered: “In those days we was throubled the way a man is disthressed in dhreams. All manner of things happening, ye’ll understand, and him the only one able to do nothing.”

That same soldier told the author: “Ye’ll understand, ‘twas no question, those days, what ye could or could not do. Ye did it.”

It was then that the Spanish flu began.

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