Willa Cather visited wounded soldiers in New York in 1918, listening to their stories of war. She got the flu nearly a year later, and the doctor who treated her shared a diary he had written while serving on an American troopship as the Spanish flu ravaged the crew. The diary became a source for her novel One of Ours, which tells the story of a young Nebraskan soldier named Claude Wheeler. As Caterina Bernardini wrote in an essay for Lapham’s Quarterly last year, Cather “extracted many technical details, settings, and emotional notes she could use in her book: the image of bleeding to death from the nose, the description of the illness’ evolution into pneumonia, the scene of a bottom hold full of sweat and stench, and the burials at sea of the soldiers who died.” The book sold thirty thousand copies in two months and won the Pulitzer Prize, making Cather rich and famous. One of Ours drew pans from H.L. Mencken and Ernest Hemingway, who wrote in a letter to Edmund Wilson that he recognized a battle scene from the book: “Do you know where it came from? The battle scene in Birth of a Nation. I identified episode after episode, Catherized. Poor woman, she had to get her war experience somewhere.” Since those initial dismissals, though, Bernardini writes, “The novel has been reevaluated for its modernist depiction of psychological complexities. Cather created a character who believed his inner, idealized embrace of the war was the perfect solution to his unsatisfactory life in the Midwest. Yet the section of the book that focuses on the 1918 flu pandemic is shot through with a vein of irony that crucially illuminates the naivete of the protagonist’s perspective.”
The doctor said they might as well face the facts; a scourge of influenza had broken out on board, of a peculiarly bloody and malignant type. Everybody was a little frightened. Some of the officers shut themselves up in the smoking room, and drank whiskey and soda and played poker all day, as if they could keep contagion out.
Lieutenant Bird died late in the afternoon and was buried at sunrise the next day, sewed up in a tarpaulin, with an eighteen-pound shell at his feet. The morning broke brilliantly clear and bitter cold. The sea was rolling blue walls of water, and the boat was raked by a wind as sharp as ice. Excepting those who were sick, the boys turned out to a man. It was the first burial at sea they had ever witnessed, and they couldn’t help finding it interesting. The chaplain read the burial service while they stood with uncovered heads. The Kansas band played a solemn march, the Swedish quartet sang a hymn. Many a man turned his face away when that brown sack was lowered into the cold, leaping indigo ridges that seemed so destitute of anything friendly to humankind. In a moment it was done, and they steamed on without him.
The glittering walls of water kept rolling in, indigo, purple, more brilliant than on the days of mild weather. The blinding sunlight did not temper the cold, which cut the face and made the lungs ache. Landsmen began to have that miserable sense of being where they were never meant to be. The boys lay in heaps on the deck, trying to keep warm by hugging each other close. Everybody was seasick. The sun poured over them like flame, without any comfort in it. The strong, curling, foam-crested waves threw off the light like millions of mirrors, and their color was almost more than the eye could bear. The water seemed denser than before, heavy like melted glass, and the foam on the edges of each blue ridge looked sharp as crystals. If a man should fall into them, he would be cut to pieces.