Between the first case recorded on 4 March 1918, and the last sometime in March 1920, it killed 50–100 million people, or between 2.5 and 5 per cent of the global population–a range that reflects the uncertainty that still surrounds it. The Spanish flu infected one in three people on earth, or 500 million human beings. The poet's death serves as a metaphor for our collective forgetting of the greatest massacre of the twentieth century. No you don't have to go…'" The famous refrain was directed with irony at the defeated kaiser, but it was filled with poignancy for the friends of Apollinaire. 'But as it reached the corner of Saint-Germain,' recalled Apollinaire's friend and fellow poet, Blaise Cendrars, 'the cortège was besieged by a crowd of noisy celebrants of the armistice, men and women with arms waving, singing, dancing, kissing, shouting deliriously the famous refrain of the end of the war: "No, you don't have to go, Guillaume.
On leaving the Church of St Thomas Aquinas, the mourners set off eastwards towards Père Lachaise Cemetery. His funeral was held four days later–two days after the armistice was signed. Having survived a shrapnel wound to the head and the drilling of a hole into his skull, he died of Spanish flu at the age of thirty-eight, and was declared 'mort pour la France'. A leading light of the French avant-garde movement, the man who invented the term 'surrealist' and inspired such figures as Pablo Picasso and Marcel Duchamp, he had signed up to fight in 1914.
' À bas Guillaume!' Death to Wilhelm! Down with Wilhelm! Meanwhile, high above the city's seventh arrondissement, the poet Guillaume Apollinaire lay on his deathbed. Kaiser Wilhelm of Germany abdicated on 9 November 1918 and in the streets of Paris there was jubilation. Terence Ranger, The Spanish Influenza Pandemic of 1918–19 (2003) 1 The brevity of the influenza pandemic of 1918 posed great problems to doctors at the time… It has posed great problems to historians ever since.
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