The Devil's Ruse

By Ruth Welburn

Set against the backdrop of WWI, the novel pits the brightest scientific minds of the day against a deadly secret. In an effort to bring an end to a war that has been raging for four years, Dr. Nicholas Wareing takes on a risky research project for the U.S. Army. He struggles to unravel the mystery of influe

• Language: English
• Publisher: Ruth Welburn
• Release date: Aug 15, 2020
• ISBN: 9780986532290

Book preview

Contents

Dedication

Copyright

Acknowledgements

Preface

Prologue

Part I. The Devil and the Doctor’s Decision

Scene

1. Monday - April 1, 1918

2. Tuesday - April 2, 1918

3. Wednesday - April 3, 1918

4. Wednesday - April 4, 1918

5. Saturday - April 6, 1918

6. Thursday - May 9, 1918

7. Friday - May 10, 1918

8. Friday evening - May 10, 1918

Part II. A Beautiful Hypothesis and an Ugly Fact

Scene

9. Tuesday - May 14, 1918

10. Wednesday - May 15, 1918

11. Sunday - May 19, 1918

12. Monday - June 10, 1918

13. Wednesday - June 12, 1918

14. Wednesday - June 19, 1918

15. Friday - August 30, 1918

Part III. The Pandemic

16. Saturday - September 7, 1918

17. Saturday - September 7, 1918

18. Friday - September 13, 1918

19. Wednesday - September 18, 1918

20. Monday - September 23, 1918

21. Sunday - September 29, 1918

22. Meanwhile that same day

23. Saturday - October 5, 1918

24. Thursday - October 31, 1918

25. Monday - November 11, 1918

Epilogue

Endnotes

Sources

About the Author

Complete Publishing History

This book is dedicated to my brother, Dr. Ken Welburn,

for jump-starting this novel

COPYRIGHT

Copyright © 2010-2020 by Ruth Welburn

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the written prior permission of the publisher.

Published by eQuality Publishing

ISBN 978-0-9865322-8-3 (print)

ISBN 978-0-9865322-9-0 (ebook)

Cover Design and Book Layout by Iryna Spica of SpicaBookDesign

Ebook conversion by www.ebookconversion.ca

Author’s photo (the back cover) — Alyssa Lahaie

Novel available as an eBook and printed paperback.

To order contact — [e-mail]

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I have been most fortunate in having such a supportive circle of friends and family who have provided encouragement and advice. The book would not have been possible without their generosity and patience.

Many thanks to Garrison White and his wife, Sandra Mattia, for consenting to let me pattern the two characters with the same first names after them.

I would like to thank Iryna Spica of SpicaBookDesign for her wonderful work with the cover design and book layout.

Grateful acknowledgment is made to my editor, Alice Duncan, for her excellent editorial advice and inspiration.

Many thanks to Alyssa Lahaie, CEM of the Chapters book- store in the Regent Mall, Fredericton, for the photo on the back cover.

PREFACE

CHARACTERS, PLACES AND EVENTS

The novel is set in a fictitious bedroom community of New York City in the year 1918 over an eight-month period between April 1 and November 11.

The researcher, Dr. Nicholas Wareing, his laboratory (The Bacteriology and Infectious Disease Center) and his research project are a creation of my imagination and do not represent any real person(s), laboratory or research experiment. There are a number of real characters in the novel: Dr. Almroth Wright, Dr. Simon Flexner, Major Frederick Russell, Dr. Fraser Harris, Arnold Netter, Bubber Millie, Dr. Victor Vaughn, Lieutenant-Colonel William Henry Welch, Rufus Cole and Simon Walbach. Further, reference is made to such real persons as: Winston Churchill, George Bernard Shaw, William Park, George McCoy, General Foch, General Pershing and Billy Sunday. Depictions of the real characters, although based on news reports of the era and journal articles written about them or by them, are a product of my imagination. References to real events, organizations or locals are intended only to provide a sense of authenticity, and are used fictitiously. All other characters are fictitious, and any similarities to real persons are purely coincidental. All experimental procedures and laboratory results, although fictional, are based on those reported in scientific journals of the era.

WAR, REVOLUTION, STRIKES, FOOD SHORTAGES AND SOCIALISM

By the spring of 1918, the world was weary of a war that had been raging for four years. Britain was near bankruptcy, Russia was embroiled in a revolution and other nations stood poised on the brink of revolt. A shortage of food at home, widespread dissatisfaction with stupid generals and the carnage of the war led to labor unrest. A strong socialist movement swept the world. The United States, having entered the war one year earlier, scrambled to train and supply troops to Europe.

SCIENCE AND MEDICINE

In the early 1900s, medicine and science were fraught with arrogance and incompetence. George Bernard Shaw referred to the medical profession as dangerous quackery and scorned the credulity of the proletariat. In his preface to The Doctor’s Dilemma, Shaw writes:

"…the doctor never hesitates to claim divine omniscience, nor to clamor for laws to punish any skepticism on the part of the laymen…

I presume nobody will question the existence of the widely spread popular delusion that every doctor is a titan of science.

…No doctor seems able to advise you…any better than his grandmother or the nearest quack."

Shaw’s harshest criticism was directed at the practice of vaccination, which he denounced as a particularly filthy piece of witchcraft. Over the issue of mandatory vaccination, he became embroiled in a bitter public debate with his friend, Sir Almroth Wright. Shaw portrays Wright as the villainous Sir Colenso Ridgeon in his play, The Doctor’s Dilemma.

Dr. Almroth Wright was an opinionated, obdurate man who vehemently opposed woman’s suffrage. Best known for the typhoid vaccine he produced while at Netley Military Hospital in England, he advocated that inoculation be made mandatory for the British troops during the Boer War. To his consternation, the government limited the program to volunteers. So unpopular was Wright’s vaccination program that an entire cargo of the typhoid vaccine was thrown into Southampton Water. Later, a Medical Advisory Board investigated Wright’s vaccine, found it to be ineffective, and the program was suspended. Wright resigned his post at Netley and took up a position at St. Mary’s Hospital Medical School in London, where he continued to lobby for mandatory vaccination in the army.

Shaw fervently denounced the practice of mandatory vaccination. He writes:

"Such abominations as the Inquisition and the Vaccinati-on Acts are possible only in the famine years of the soul.

The doctor is not satisfied unless the inoculation takes, that is, unless it produces perceptible illness and disablement. Sometimes (they) get more value in this direction than they bargain for.

…Doctors, to save the credit of the inoculation,…accuse their patient…of having contracted this disease independently of the inoculation.

When Florence Nightingale said bluntly that if you overcrowded your soldiers in dirty quarters there would be smallpox among them, she was snubbed as an ignorant female…."

Shaw was not a medical man, but shows exemplary understanding of vaccines in the passage:

When, as in the case of smallpox…the germ has not yet been detected, what you inoculate is simply undefined matter…. And, lest you should kill it, you take no precautions against other germs being in it as well. Anything may happen as a result of such an inoculation.

Shaw was not alone in his opposition to mandatory vaccination; some saw the issue in terms of civil liberties while others believed vaccination was dangerous. On June 28, 1900, London’s Morning Post gave wide publicity to the disturbing plight of newly inoculated troops aboard the Dunstlar Castle. That same year, a young Winston Churchill published an article describing haggard forms crawling about the deck in extreme discomfort and high fever after receiving typhoid inoculations. This article was still being quoted in 1914. Mandatory vaccination was abolished in Britain in 1909.

The United States, on the other hand, made vaccination compulsory in 1911. Dr. Eleanora McBean, in her book, The Poison Needle: Suppressed Facts About Vaccination, contends after vaccinations became mandatory, not only did typhoid increase rapidly, but all other vaccinal diseases increased at an alarming rate. Dr. McBean is a neuropath and is said to hold a graduate degree (PhD). She describes the horrors of the enforcement of the program:

I have talked to GIs who testified that those who refused to line up for the shots were seized by military police and forcibly held while the medics injected the poison serums into them—all fourteen shots. I have also seen the records of several soldiers who were given long prison terms (seven years) at Fort Leavenworth for resisting vaccination. Other penalties were also imposed on the soldiers…

WOODROW WILSON AND HOMELAND SECURITY

When the United States entered the war in 1917, President Woodrow Wilson implemented draconian laws unequaled in United States history creating an atmosphere of despotism on the home front. Under his Espionage Act, the mail, public opinion, library and press were censored. All news broadcasts were taken over by the military and censored. The American Protective League was created, who along with vigilantes and police, hunted down and punished anyone who did not conform to Wilson’s political or religious orthodoxy. Neighbor spied on neighbor.

The government nationalized nearly every faucet of activity in the United States. The War Industries Board controlled the factories, the National War Labor board set wages, the railroad administration nationalized the American railroad industry, and the Fuel Administration regulated use of energy and instigated Daylight Savings Time. The government even commandeered science and medicine; the army incorporated the Red Cross and the Rockefeller Institute. Top appointments were based on politics. William Welsh was appointed president of the National Academy of Sciences and empowered with the directing of great sums of money to an institution with no formal review. The Rockefeller Institute became the only Army Auxiliary Laboratory. All medical and scientific research shifted to something war related.

SCIENTIFIC EXPERIMENTS

For security reasons, research on the development of vaccines was not published during the war, but by mid-December of 1918 articles began to appear in scientific journals. These articles confirmed that Pfieffer’s bacillus was thought to be the etiological cause of influenza. In March of 1919, a Report to the Medical Research Committee from the Royal Army Medical Corps was published in the British Medical Journal describing the inoculation of baboons and Macacus rhesus monkeys with sputum and blood from patients with influenza in an effort to produce a vaccine against influenza.

But Nature held a deadly secret. The influenza virus has a unique method of reproduction that could not even have been imagined at the time. Passing human bacteria through an alternate primate host serves to attenuate the strain. Passing human viruses through an alternative primate host can potentially produce a mutant hybrid that, while it maintains the ability to infect humans, carries material so foreign as to induce a violent immune response.

In the words of Thomas Huxley, The great tragedy of science—a beautiful hypothesis slain by an ugly fact.

PROLOGUE

September 18, 1918

Camp Upton Army Training Camp, New York

Captain Parker poised his scalpel over the young corpse and made an incision down the center of the chest. The pathologist wrested the ribcage open and exposed the chest cavity. What they saw was shocking; the cavity was filled with fluid and the lungs were blue and swollen. A tremor of fear surged through Nicholas Wareing.

Parker reached into the chest cavity and cut out the left lung. A bloody froth exuded from the insubstantial tissue. A second bolt of fear struck Nicholas; this time with such force that his body jumped involuntarily. Captain Parker turned to look briefly at him, and then turned back to the cadaver.

The lungs are distended by an exudation of fluid… Captain Parker continued dictating, but Nicholas did not hear him. Only unthinkable thoughts and Philip’s words thundered in his mind …healthy young men dropping like flies…the whole division terrified…averaging a hundred deaths a day…the Surgeon General called for you to help find out what in hell is going on and stop it…. Flashes of grotesque tortured bodies, faces blackened beyond recognition, lying side by side with a comrade in a sea of bloodstained drab olive wool burned in his mind. The baboon! Nicholas thought.

What’s your take on it, Nick? the pathologist asked, but Nicholas was lost in his thoughts.

Are you okay, Nick? Captain Parker was looking at Nicholas with concern. You look like you need some air.

PART I. THE DEVIL AND THE DOCTOR’S DECISION

SCENE

April 1 to May 11, 1918

1. MONDAY - APRIL 1, 1918

Six months earlier

Nicholas leaned back in his chair and sighed. Hours of pouring over medical journals had done nothing to allay his feeling of uneasiness. His eyes watered, and his body ached from being in one position far too long. He brushed his hair back off his face and, glancing at his watch, saw that it was nearly eight o’clock. Nellie would be keeping his dinner warm again tonight. He rose and moved toward the circulation desk.

The library closes in ten minutes, Dr. Wareing, the librarian announced.

"Just taking these latest issues of Nature and Scientific American home with me," he replied. The librarian stamped the inside cover of the journals, and Nicholas felt her gaze follow him out the doors.

Nicholas lit the headlamp on his bicycle and began the quiet ride home. As he rode, rays of moonlight pierced the trees and mottled the roadway with luminescence. Pungent smells of thawing rot wafted through the air and mingled with the smell of acetylene from his lamp. It had been an unusually harsh winter, and the promise of spring was welcome. The long single trill of an eastern screech owl broke the stillness. The tranquil New York setting was a sharp contrast to the trenches on the western front. The nightmare of war hung over the countryside, as it did over the world.

A mist began to settle over lower-lying ground, and a slight wind picked up. The night air revived Nicholas’s senses. He mulled over the information he had been consuming all afternoon.

Seems pretty well accepted that Pfeiffer’s bacillus is the bacteria that causes influenza, he thought. Accepted but not established! There was that unsettling British article. There has to be some plausible explanation.

As he crested a hill, Nicholas knew he was close to home and coasted down toward a patch of fog that hung in the valley below. Deep in thought, he did not hear the pounding of hooves on the muddy road. A horse carrying a phantom rider erupted out of the mist and startled him. Moonlight danced off the white stallion. The horse was in full gallop but strangely was not breathing hard. Even stranger no mud or splatter caked the horse’s hooves or legs. The rider wore a black hooded cape that billowed out behind him, and his pale face and hands glistened in the dark. The ghostly sight sent shivers through Nicholas. He stopped his bicycle and looked back, but the apparition had vanished into the night just as suddenly as it had appeared. As Nicholas stood motionless listening to the thud of retreating hooves, a dark cloud passed over the moon and plunged the heavens into blackness. The darkness was so intense that it could be felt. A tremor of fear shook Nicholas to his inner core, so much so that his body wrenched involuntarily. Reservations about his project gushed through his veins and bloated his head, and a passage from Revelation thundered in the hollows of his mind:

And I looked, and behold, a pale horse

and his name that sat on him was Death,

and Hell followed with him;

and power was given unto them over a fourth part of

the earth, to kill with sword and with hunger and

with disease…

Nicholas stood frozen in a night cloaked in darkness, the silence broken only by the haunting sound of giggles and groans. What nocturnal animal or bird would make such a hideous sound? Could it be a coyote laughing? Nicholas wondered. The Trickster! he thought. This is April Fools’ Day. The Devil is playing with me. I should run from this project; turn back before it is too late. Paralyzed by fear, and unable to ride his bicycle in the blackness, Nicholas remained motionless in the silent night air. In time, the darkness lifted and, with the light, his fear began to ease.

Nicholas wrestled with the wisdom of his fear. I must be rational. These are superstitions, he thought. They mean nothing. He righted his bicycle and continued toward home, his fear crumbling with every thrust of the pedal.

At the bottom of the hill, Nicholas turned his bicycle onto the side street where he and Nellie had lived since they arrived in this small countryside community of New York City. The lights were on in the kitchen, and a sense of security swept over him, as it had done for sixteen years. The swing hanging from the great oak tree in the front yard swayed with the wind and bumped against the trunk. Across the yard, bed sheets flapped in the breeze, and the clothesline sagged with their weight. Liam’s bicycle lay on the lawn.

The two-and-a-half-story house, on the corner of Old Orchard Road and Lilac Street, struck an imposing silhouette against the night sky. When Nicholas and Nellie first bought the house sixteen years earlier, they thought five bedrooms might be a bit excessive, but they had fallen in love with the place at first sight. The high curved ceilings, Victorian moldings, French doors connecting the dining room and the parlor, walnut floors, the two stone fireplaces and the spiral staircase that led to the second floor conferred charm and elegance on the house. At the same time, the large country-style kitchen, veranda that wrapped around the front and side of the house and the large yard provided functionality. At present, with five children and another one on the way, it proved to have been an excellent choice. Over the years Nellie had transformed the untamed yard into an oasis with fruit trees, vegetable garden, frog pond and play area. The weeping willow that graced the back yard was planted that first spring from a twig. When they first moved here, the house was in the country, a ten-minute walk to the town. Now houses sprawled around them, and sidewalks lined the graveled streets.

Nicholas opened the front door and was greeted by the sweet smell of freshly baked bread.

I’m home, he called. He expected to find Nellie in the parlor playing the piano, but tonight the lights were off in the parlor. The bench to the Heintzman was pulled out and the cover open, exposing the ivories. A vase of pussy willows sat on the mahogany table in the center of the room. Nicholas hung his coat on the hall-tree, and turned to catch his reflection in the mirror that hung over an ornate mahogany chest in the vestibule. The chest and much of the furnishings in the house had traveled across the Atlantic from Ireland with Nellie’s grandmother. On the chest stood a picture. Two young people looked out from the photograph. A tall, handsome man of twenty-six, his face full of confidence, held the hand of his bride. The bride wore a lace dress with a high neckline and long sleeves. The fitted bodice accentuated her eighteen-inch waist. Her hair was swept up on her head, framing a delicate face, and she looked resolutely into the camera, revealing strength far beyond her tender years and diminutive figure. The two exuded an eagerness to take on the future.

Nicholas walked down the hallway and into the kitchen. The room was hot and moist, and the washing machine stood by the sink. He could hear Nellie coming down the stairs.

I rang the Center this afternoon, she said. The operator said you weren’t in. Did you get the message? She went to the stove, lifted the two lids, poked up the embers and pushed in a stick of wood.

I was at the university library all afternoon. I tried to ring, but the line was busy.

Oh, that Arlene Eberly, Nellie said disgustedly. She’s on the telephone all day long. When she isn’t gossiping to the neighbors, she’s listening in on someone else’s conversation.

Nicholas walked toward the stove, and kissed the back of Nellie’s neck. Her skin felt moist. He stood behind her and wrapped his arms around her in a playful embrace, swaying her from side to side. She broke free with a little giggle.

You’ll have to wait a few minutes for your supper, Nick. I need to tend to the bread. There’s a fresh pot of coffee on the back of the stove. Nellie took six loaves of golden brown bread from the oven, set them on the back of the stove and brushed the tops with butter.

Are you done with the washing machine? Nicholas asked.

Yes, that was the last batch, she said, wiping the sweat from her forehead. Just take the wringer off and push it out to the back veranda for me, will you?

Why do you bake bread and do laundry on the same day? Nicholas asked, a hint of reproach in his voice. It’s too much, especially in your condition.

Because, she said, Rachel and George have been sick all day, and their bedding had to be washed. And we need bread for lunches tomorrow.

Perhaps you should get someone in to help you for the next couple of months, Nicholas suggested, but before Nellie could respond, they were interrupted by the sound of soft giggles. Two little girls in white nightgowns stood by the door to the kitchen.

Daddy! they squealed in unison.

Katie and Hanna! You are supposed to be in bed. Get back upstairs, Nellie scolded.

But we want to see Daddy, they whimpered.

It’s all right, Nellie, Nicholas said. I’ll tuck them in. He swooped them up in his arms, and carried them upstairs.

He returned to the kitchen to find Nellie slicing potatoes and carrots into a cast iron frying pan. She took gravy from the warming oven, and sliced pork onto a dinner plate. She set the food on the table in front of Nicholas, poured a glass of milk for herself and sank down into a chair across from her husband. She wiped her face on her apron. Wisps of her red hair had come loose from the pins that held her upswept hairdo and fell by the sides of her face and at the nap of her neck. She arched her back with one hand on her lumbar area. At five months, her back bothered her after the long day. What happened today to keep you so late?

Yes, well, I want to discuss something with you, Nellie, but if you’re too tired tonight it can wait until morning.

Nellie sat up in her chair and looked across at her husband. "I’m fine.