In asking why, Crosby proposes a combination of factors that, he said, acting together accounted for the world’s collective amnesia. For one, he argues, the epidemic simply was so dreadful and so rolled up in people’s minds with the horrors of the war that most people did not want to think about it or write about it once the terrible year of 1918 was over. The flu blended into the general nightmare of World War I, an unprecedented event that introduced trench warfare, submarines, the bloody battles of the Somme and Verdun, and the horrors of chemical warfare. Moreover, the epidemic had no
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