1918
Spanish Flu Pandemic Begins
A strain of influenza, probably born in an army camp in Kansas, spread through the trenches of the Western Front and then around the world on troop ships. It killed the young and healthy preferentially, drowning them in their own lungs. By 1920, fifty million were dead - more than the war itself had managed.
Armistice in the Compiegne forest
At eleven a.m. on the eleventh day of the eleventh month, a bugle sounded cease-fire along the Western Front. Men looked up from their trenches, stunned. Ten million soldiers were dead, twenty million wounded. Four empires had fallen. The peace, Marshal Foch remarked, was only an armistice for twenty years. He was off by two months.
Spanish flu begins its world circuit
In a Kansas army camp a cook reported a fever. Within months a strain of influenza unlike any in living memory was riding troop ships and railways around the world. It killed the young and healthy in hours, drowning them in their own lungs. By the time it burned out, fifty million were dead, more than the war.
Romanovs executed at Yekaterinburg
In the cellar of a merchant's house, Nicholas II, his wife, four daughters, and their hemophiliac son were shot by Bolsheviks who feared White armies might rescue them. The bodies were soaked in acid and dumped in a mine. Three centuries of dynasty ended on a stone floor in the Urals, in the middle of the night.
Kaiser Wilhelm II abdicates
With revolution in the streets of Berlin and his army refusing to fight on, the German Kaiser abdicated and fled to the Netherlands in the dining car of a private train. He would live out his life in a Dutch country house trimming his beard and chopping wood. The Hohenzollern dynasty, five centuries old, was done.
Wilson's Fourteen Points
In a speech to Congress, Woodrow Wilson laid out fourteen principles for a just peace: open diplomacy, self-determination of peoples, free seas, a League of Nations. Idealistic and wildly popular, especially in the colonized world, the points would be largely abandoned at Versailles a year later. Wilson would pay with his health.