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The disease swept around the globe in several waves, speeded by the large numbers of troops on the move. In half-starving Germany, some 400,000 people died of influenza in 1918 alone. Most unusually for epidemic diseases, it took the worst toll on the fittest, those aged between 20 and 35, many of whom were soldiers feeling lucky to have survived combat. The human immune system fought the disease by filling the victim's lungs with frothy scarlet fluid, which contained antibodies but which in effect often drowned someone from the inside; healthy young bodies had the best immune systems and so suffered the highest death rate. Hundreds of thousands of young men in uniform on both sides succumbed in 1918 and 1919, as if in the aftermath of a gas attack, their faces quickly turning purple, their mouths, noses, and sometimes ears and eyes oozing blood, strangling to death.

Young men were also in close quarters in prison. The records are incomplete, but influenza was the likely killer of most of the 73 British conscientious objectors who died behind bars, in alternative-service work camps, or soon after their release.

Flu victims came from every level of society. Edward Cecil, who had remained at his post as a colonial bureaucrat in Egypt for most of the war, succumbed to the epidemic a month after the Armistice. His ashes were buried in the family graveyard near Hatfield House, next to those of his mother and father, prime minister in a sunnier time.

Some two months later, the disease claimed a victim from very different circumstances. When Lloyd George had released Alice Wheeldon from prison, she had returned to Derby, frail from her hunger strikes, needing help just to make her way along the railway station platform when she arrived. Although comrades on the left were loyal, neighbors ostracized her, and her secondhand clothes shop failed. Her daughter Hettie, who had managed to avoid jail, lost her job as a schoolteacher. When Sylvia Pankhurst paid the family a visit, she found mother and daughter supporting themselves by growing vegetables on a rented plot, and tomato plants in what had once been the shop window.

Alice Wheeldon died of the flu in February 1919. Winnie—just re-leased from prison—and Hettie were both too ill themselves to come to their mother's burial. A reporter for a Derby newspaper managed to find the unannounced ceremony and wrote a story headlined, "Funeral of Mrs Wheeldon; Sensational Incidents at Graveside; Rhetorical Sneers at Prime Minister."

The disapproving journalist noted that Wheeldon's "severely plain oak coffin" was buried in a manner so "devoid of all Christian ceremony" that not a single one of the 20 mourners wore black. Indeed, Alice's son Willie, only recently released from prison for evading the draft, pulled a large red flag from his pocket and placed it, fluttering in the winter wind, over his mother's coffin. The only recorded speaker was John S. Clarke, whose appearance was all the more dramatic because he was still on the run from the police. Alice Wheeldon was the victim of "a judicial murder," he declared from atop the pile of dirt heaped up by the freshly dug grave. Lloyd George "in the midst of high affairs of State stepped out of his way to pursue a poor obscure family into the dungeon and into the grave."

To cries of "Hear, hear," Clarke continued: "Mrs. Wheeldon was a socialist. She was a prophet, not of the sweet and holy bye and bye but of the here and now. She saw the penury of the poor and the prodigality of the rich, and she registered her protest against it.... If Mrs. Wheeldon could speak ... she would tell us ... to fight more fearlessly than before, so as to obtain that glorious time when peace and joyousness shall fill all life."

The mourners dispersed. The grave was not marked, for fear it would be defaced. Clarke slipped back underground. The following year, Hettie Wheeldon married a labor unionist comrade who had been part of the family's antiwar circle, gave birth to a premature baby who