How the Great War ended, one hundred years ago:

Enemy Ace: The First Horseman

Editor’s Note: After his capture by the Allies in the late spring of 1918, Lieutenant Hans von Hammer spent the remainder of the war as a prisoner of war. In this excerpt from his memoir The Hammer of Hell he describes how the war ended for him.

The signing of the Armistice on November 11 prompted great rejoicing among the troops and citizens of the Allied nations. For Germans it was understandably a more mixed experience. Most of us were of course glad that the fighting and killing had ended. Yet we knew that we were not the victors. Our ruler had abdicated. Our government—indeed, it seemed to many, our whole society—was in a state of collapse. An uncertain future awaited us.

For my part, I have little memory of my thoughts and feelings on November 11. For I was on that day engaged in a struggle for my life more difficult than anything I had encountered in the skies.

Early in 1918 Germany had suffered an unusually severe influenza season. Large numbers of our troops went down with the “flu” during the spring offensives. Though the great majority survived, we were deprived of their services just when we needed them the most. The officers of my flying unit were fortunate to escape the epidemic.

In late autumn all of Europe experienced a second visitation of the disease that proved far, far more fatal than the first. This was the infamous “Spanish Influenza.” Whether it actually originated in Spain I have no idea idea [It did not. As Spain was a neutral nation, where the press was not subject to wartime censorship, the pandemic received its greatest early news coverage there. Ed.]. I do know that by early November it had struck our prison camp.The epidemic spread with extraordinary speed. Our crowded, ill-heated quarters, rendered even more confined by the onset of cold weather, made an ideal environment for the spread of contagion. The camp hospital was almost immediately overwhelmed. An emergency ward was quickly set up for the overflow. No sooner had this been done when I found myself there.

The ward was a hasty makeshift effort. It was little more than a huge tent lined with row upon row of cots. On these lay scores of men stricken with the coughing, the fever and chills, the aches all over the body that marked the influenza. Among them moved a handful of orderlies, and a still less numerous band of doctors and nursing sisters. They did their best, I am sure, but there was little that they could do, overwhelmed as they were and with no effective remedies to offer. There was no privacy, no adequate heat, and very little personal attention available for each man. It was a scene out of a nightmare.

The more fortunate began to recover within a few days. I was not among them. As occurred with so many, I developed the complication of pneumonia. By the eleventh I had a severe catarrhal cough with accompanying shortness of breath. It seemed that I could not draw a full breath day or night. Simply obtaining enough breath to live was an endless, exhausting struggle.

To this day I remain uncertain as to how many days I lay in that state. For much of the time I felt that I might die at any moment. There were moments when I felt that such a fate would not displease me. Whenever I had such thoughts I reminded myself that this was no way for a soldier, a flier, to think. I had survived a year’s worth of aerial combat, survived the loss of two machines, survived until the very end of the war. It would hardly do to fall by the wayside now!

It was some days after I finally began to recuperate before I was strong enough to return to leave the ward. During that time I had opportunity to converse with a convalescent captain of infantry named Holst who occupied an adjacent cot. Holst had survived almost three years on the West-Front, had been wounded twice, and had, like myself, found the thought of dying at the moment when peace was to have returned intolerable.

He had had the good fortune to avoid the pneumonia. During his first two days in the ward he had observed my sufferings with that scourge. “You looked for all the world like a mustard gas casualty,” he told me, after I had grown strong enough to converse. “Poor fellows—I’ve heard that the worst cases sometimes spend weeks wheezing as if each breath might be their last, before either dying or beginning to mend.”

When I once let escape a complaint about our accommodations, Holst commented that I must never have seen the inside of a field or evacuation hospital after a major battle. “You don’t know how well you have it here,” he said. “I don’t say that this is a luxurious sort of place, but compared to that it seems a model of efficiency and comfort.” I felt much the same about my regular quarters in the camp after returning there from the influenza ward.

The remainder of my time as a prisoner of war proved uneventful. When we inmates were finally released to return home we left many burials behind. The great majority of these unfortunates had perished during the influenza epidemic. There can be no greater irony than for a man to survive one of the bloodiest wars in history, and yet perish of disease before he can again see his home.

The great influenza continued throughout 1919, spreading from Europe to the Americas and all over the world. Estimates of the total loss of life in the epidemic vary widely. It is generally agreed that the number of victims was several times greater than the total number killed on all fronts throughout World War I.