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By Toni Reinhold
NEW YORK (Reuters) – The jubilant New Yorkers took to the streets at the end of the Great War, the eleventh day of the eleventh month of 1918, the eleventh hour of my late mother's birthday.
Brooklyn's waterfront neighborhood, where she lived, was highly celebrated, but a dark legacy of the war had even more deadly consequences.
"People have filled the streets. It was so exciting, even though I was not quite sure what was going on, "recalls Marie Starace years later. "They were laughing, crying and singing. Some men fired shots in the air.
"A woman fell to her knees in the street, her hands clasped, as if she were praying. She was crying so hard that looking at her made me cry too. Despite the passage of time, my grandmother's eyes filled with tears as she described the scene.
Later in life, during many teatime storytelling sessions about her life, Armistice Day remained a living memory for my grandmother.
The cessation of hostilities had been anticipated for days. An armistice had even been reported inaccurate on 7 November. It was finally adopted on November 11, when the adventurous little girl, mostly called Mary, would surely remember everything.
A lot of people are going to the 14th Regiment Armory on 8th Avenue in Brooklyn, "she said," and my grandmother took the long walk from the docks with them. To date, a bronze depicting a "doughboy", named after the soldiers of the American Expeditionary Forces, bears this name on behalf of the "men of the 14th Infantry Regiment engaged in the 1917-1918 war." The sculpture was given. by families who have lost loved ones to the war.
The crowd swelled and headed towards the place where the soldiers were gathering near Prospect Park, near the commemorative bow of soldiers and sailors, dedicated to those who were are beaten to defend the union in the American Civil War. The sight of the soldiers brought the crowd to a fever.
"The soldiers were already walking when I arrived at the park. When I saw the parade, I thought they were celebrating my birthday!
She walked with them, she said, fondly reminding a soldier who had given him a penny. It was a precious gift, useful for a small bag of flour or apples in a neighborhood where families, including his own, sometimes struggled to make ends meet, difficult moments made more difficult by the war.
On the steps of a house not far from home, my grandmother saw a young man sitting quietly. "I wondered why he looked so sad," she recalls. She asked her mother, my great-grandmother, about her. "Mom said, 'Leave him alone, Mary. He is in shock.
The suffering and privations caused by the war weighed heavily on Europe and the United States, as much flaming smoke as peoples struggled to restore balance in a broken world.
The soldiers returned home broken, mentally and physically injured, some with lungs burned by mustard gas, others with the Spanish flu, called The Flu in Europe and "The Flu" in Brooklyn. The war to end all wars has claimed 17 million lives.
The pandemic has killed at least 50 million people worldwide, including about 675,000 in the United States, according to estimates from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, celebrated in the 100th anniversary of the influenza pandemic.
For the daughter of the pilot of the ship, Salvatore Starace and Antonia Esposito, "the flu" was another indelible memory of childhood. The New York City Department of Health fought to contain the disease, quarantining affected households and restricting public gatherings.
My grandmother said that bodies were put on ice in horse-drawn trucks as the morgues filled up. The hospital staff was exhausted by the flu and my grandmother spoke of men who had been doctors in the Army.
His maternal uncle, Alexander Esposito, who served in the US Army, was one of them. "Uncle Allie volunteered to help the hospital because he had received training in medicine," she said. "Mum was worried that he would catch the flu and die."
According to almanacs published in 1918 and 1920 by the Brooklyn Daily Eagle newspaper, 4,514 people died of the flu from a population of 1,798,513 in Brooklyn.
Until her death in 1996, whenever my grandmother saw me coming out with an open coat, she warned, "Let me know where you'll get the flu."
According to many written and photographic accounts, the city of New York has thrown caution in the wind on Armistice Day.
"I've never seen anything like it," she said.
(Report by Toni Reinhold, edited by Clive McKeef)
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