An Unmarked Grave

An Unmarked Grave (2012) Charles Todd

The fourth Bess Crawford mystery finds the Spanish Influenza doing more damage to the soldiers fighting–and the civilians at home–than the Great War itself was doing.

I’ve been morbidly fascinated by this flu since I learned about it. It was truly a horrible disease, killing the young and healthy while more often than not leaving older people untouched. And he does a good job of making that point in this story.

Spanish Influenza had already cut down three of our nursing sisters, and two doctors were not expected to live through the night.

“It will have to end soon. The influenza. There will be no one else to infect.

“Today we received more influenza patients than battlefield wounded.”

Considering how deadly that war was, it’s amazing and horrifying to realize that the flu killed more people than the war did. Which is impressive, since infection caused many deaths and amputations, since antibiotics had not yet been discovered.

…(H)e managed to remove the bullet and find the tiny bit of uniform that had gone into the wound with it, probing carefully without adding to the damage already there.

And of course, how very young the soldiers were.

We were all so young, I thought as we drove away, the men who came to us and the sisters who treated them. I had seen and done things that my grandmother would have wondered at, but I had also discovered that courage was the ability to face what had to be faced, when it was impossible to run away.

We refer to those who lived and fought WWII as the Greatest Generation, but I wonder if that appellation more rightly belongs to our great-grandparents rather than our grandparents.
Rating: 8.5/10

Published by William Morrow

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