Each Remembrance Day / Veterans Day takes us another step away from the events of November 11, 1918; each generation finds it a little bit harder to imagine what it was like to be caught up, as my grandfather John Ferguson was, in what came to be the First World War. 
This year's pandemic has reminded us that the "Spanish" influenza of 1918-19 was a key part of the war's ghastly culmination. It may have originated in a US army base (Fort Riley, Kansas, the site of Camp Funston) but it soon spread throughout the world, killing 40-50 m. people.
Writing The Pity of War more than 20 years ago, I was intrigued by the possibility that the war had not only caused the war, by facilitating its spread via camps and troop ships, but had also helped to end it, by contributing to the German collapse.
This was one of many charts that didn't make it into the book.
And here is another that has always haunted me:
Finally, one of the many stark images I found in the photograph albums of German soldiers. My original caption: "Images of death, 4. ‘Dead Scot at Fosse 8’: from the album of a German soldier. Ordinary German soldiers often snapped pictures of enemy corpses – as trophies?"
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