Imperialism, War, and Revolution, 1881–1920 547bringing the nation to the brink of starvation, and dis-
content was so severe that defiant strikes and sabotage
became widespread in early 1918. In Berlin alone, more
than 250,000 workers refused to continue; their strike
soon ended, but revolutionary conditions did not.
Antiwar sentiment developed in many places (see
illustration 27.4).
The last months of the war brought one more epic
tragedy to the world. A virulent form of influenza
struck in the trenches of the western front and flour-
ished when soldiers carried it home. Before the pan-
demic ended in 1919, it had become the greatest public
health disaster of modern history. More than two bil-
lion people worldwide contracted the disease, and
somewhere between twenty-two million and thirty mil-
lion people died from it—twice as many as died in the
fighting. The disease spread from France to Spain,
where it killed an estimated eight million Spaniards
(more than 40 percent of the 1910 population) and ac-
quired the name of the Spanish influenza. Returning
British colonial troops spread the disease in India,
where an estimated twelve million people perished
from it. In the United States, 500,000 deaths made this
flu the worst plague in American history. By compari-
son, AIDS killed 125,000 in its first decade.
Among the states fighting on the western front,
Germany most severely felt the exhaustion of war in- The Allied naval blockade and the American en-
try into the war left little doubt that Germany was de-
feated, although the fighting had not been pushed onto
German soil. As the army neared collapse, the German
DOCUMENT 27.3
Sylvia Pankhurst: The Situation
of Women War Workers
Propaganda was insistent to get women into the
munition factories, and every sort of work ordinar-
ily performed by men. The sections clamouring for
the military conscription of men saw in the indus-
trial service of women a means to their end. Femi-
nists who were advocates of Conscription for men
believed themselves adding to the importance of
women by demanding that women also should be
conscripts....
From all over the country we cited authentic
wage scales: Waring and Gillow paying 3^1 ⁄ 2 d. an
hour to women, 9d. to men for military tent mak-
ing; the Hendon aeroplane works paying women
3d. per hour, at work for which men got 10d. per
hour; women booking clerks at Victoria Station
getting 15s. a week, though the men they replaced
got 35s.; and so on, in district after district, trade
after trade....
Firms like Bryant and May’s, the match mak-
ers, were now making munitions. Accustomed to
employ large numbers of women and girls at ill-
paid work, they knew by long experience that
piece rates would secure them a higher production
than could be induced by a bonus. Without a care
for pre-war standards, in a trade new to their fac-
tory, they had fixed for munition work, often per-
ilous and heavy, similar sweated piece rates to
those paid for matches....
Pankhurst, Sylvia. “The Home Front” (London: 1932). In Brian
Tierney and Joan Scott, A Documentary History of Western
Societies,vol. 2. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1984.Illustration 27.4
The Rise of Antiwar Sentiment.The German artist George
Grosz was one of the most caustic social critics of the early twen-
tieth century. In this pen-and-ink drawing of 1916 entitled “The
Faith Healers,” he attacked the German army, whose officers are
seen declaring that a decaying corpse is still “fit for active duty”
(KV). Note the stereotype of smug commanders in the fore-
ground and, through the windows, Grosz’s assertion that big
business and industry stood right behind the army.