The World at War

Science fiction writer H.G. Wells opened his seminal novel, “War of the Worlds,” with this passage: “No one would have believed in the last years’ of the nineteenth century that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man’s and yet as mortal as his own.”

Released in 1898, the novel (and still popular today with the latest Steven Spielberg film iteration made in 2005), is about an invasion from Mars. It stood out among a British genre of “invasion literature” that began around 1870. Stories about enemies invading the United Kingdom, crown of a British Empire that reached its zenith in 1922 with one-fifth of the world’s population under its rule, gripped readers until the outbreak of World War I in 1914.

In one respect, Well’s novel was prophetic about the global conflagration. The clash of empires and cultures (worlds), the feverish bent to destroy, the disregard for human life, and the delusion that firepower and machines would lead to conquest were themes reflected in the novel. Wells would continue to write fiction and non-fiction books prophetic about the progress of mankind.

The most stunning similarity between “War of the Worlds” and World War I is what actually defeated the Martians and what could have defeated the armies engaged in fighting, if peace had not been reached on Nov. 11, 1918 – germs, microorganisms that causes viruses and disease.

Wells’ Martians had not accounted for the Earth germs that humans, through the evolutionary process, had become immune but which Martians had no such biological defenses. Despite the awesomeness of Martian technology – the British Maxim gun was no match against the incinerating “heat ray” – the invaders could not stop the unseen germs, which do not discriminate when they attack and kill.

Wells thinking was influenced by his early training in biology. He viewed life through the Darwinian lens that only the strongest of species, human, plant or animal, survive. As a writer, his “War of the Worlds” plot device that saved mankind was not only clever but prescient. Despite man’s awesome military power that left 17 million dead at the end of World War I, the influenza virus the followed the fighting demonstrated it was more powerful than men at killing people.

The 1918 flu pandemic, which lasted until 1920, infected 500 million people worldwide, and killed an estimated 50 to 100 million, according to historical records compiled and reported by the Center for Disease and Control. Ninety-six years later, scientists and historians still study the outbreak in their effort to determine exactly what caused it, where it originated, and whether there was one strain or multiple strains of influenza in the pandemic. 

As for the outbreak’s origin, one theory points to a major military hospital and troop staging area in France. Modern transportation’s easy movement of sailors, soldiers and civilians around and between continents is believed to have contributed to the speed at which the virus spread around the globe. A recent National Geographic article cites a Canadian historian who believes the flu originated in China.

“Historian Mark Humphries of Canada's Memorial University of Newfoundland says that newly unearthed records confirm that one of the side stories of the war—the mobilization of 96,000 Chinese laborers to work behind the British and French lines on World War I's Western Front—may have been the source of the pandemic,” the magazine reported.

Wherever the virus originated, the evidence that it likely spread because of war mobilization is a deadly irony.  In the United States, isolated from the ravages of World War I, the virus ripped across the nation with a vengeance, killing an estimated 675,000 people, six times the number of Americans killed on Europe’s battlefields, according to historical accounts.

The influenza pandemic reportedly started in Kansas, then spread east to New York and then west, as Atlantic coast cities telegraphed Pacific coast cities to warn them of a virus that in some cases struck people down as they walked along the street.

Desperation and fear mounted. Things got ugly. In downtown San Francisco, before a crowd of pedestrians outside a drug store, a municipal health officer shot a blacksmith for refusing to wear an “influenza mask.” The wounded man was taken to a hospital and placed under arrest, according to the Oct. 28, 1918, Bellingham Herald in Bellingham, Washington.

Headlines in the Oct. 4, 1918 edition of the New York Times read:

 

The virus came in three waves; it went from Europe to America and back to America. It raged around the globe. It was a terror unlike the terror of war.

Today, the world is at war. Wars rage in Europe, the Middle East and Africa -- Ukraine, Syria, Iraq, Israel, Sudan. Low-level conflicts percolate in Asia, Africa, South America and North America (the drug wars in Mexico that spill over the U.S. border). Mobilizations, though, are in the tens of thousands, not tens of millions as in World War I. War, it seems, is a perpetual state for mankind.

The world also is threatened by a virus that, like influenza in 1918, can only be fought with precaution and quarantine as scientists search for a vaccine: Ebola. It’s a disease that has a high fatality rate that leads to bleeding inside and outside the body. Unlike influenza, though, Ebola is not airborne spread (coughing or sneezing) but through contact with an infected person’s blood or bodily fluids. It was discovered in Africa in 1976.

Though it rages in Western Africa, where ignorance and superstition is aiding its spread, Ebola poses minimal risk to the rest of the world – at least for now. Dr. Jefferson Sibley, who runs a hospital in central Liberia where a 14-year civil war that ended in 2003 killed more than 250,000 people, recently told Time magazine that Ebola is worse than war.

“The good thing about the war was you heard the gun sounds, you could run and take cover,” Sibley said, in the magazine’s Aug. 25, 2014 issue. “Ebola is not like that. You never know where it is coming from or who is bringing it to you.”

Nature can always best us when it comes to killing, but we have achieved the means to destroy ourselves and the planet with nuclear weapons, another Wellsian prophecy. In “War of the Worlds,” H.G. Wells warns us not about invaders or Martians, but about ourselves. We can be our own worst enemy, clinging to our self-interest, failing to heed the past or to consider the impossible as possible, thinking wishfully instead of realistically.

“War of the Worlds” opens with the words “No one would have believed,” but Wells expects his readers to consider believing the unbelievable. As he writes in the novel’s epilogue: “The broadening of men’s views that has resulted can scarcely be exaggerated. Before the [Martian]cylinder fell there was a general persuasion that through all the deep of space no life existed beyond the petty surface of our minute sphere. Now we see further.”

Wells died August 13, 1946 at his home in London. He was 79. At the time, post-World War II Europe and Asia lay in ruin from the airplanes and weapons of mass destruction that Wells prophetically wrote about in his 1907 novel, “The War in the Air,” which, in Wells' view, readers refused to seriously consider. When a new edition of the novel appeared in 1941, the third year of World War II, Wells penned in the preface that his epitaph should be: “I told you so. You damned fools.” The italics are his.  

(Images and photos: Painting of Martians in "War of the Worlds" by Henrique Alvin Coreat; a young H.G. Wells; policemen masked against the influenza virus in Seattle, Washington, 1919; London in World War II)