![]() On leaving the Church of St Thomas Aquinas, the mourners set off eastwards towards Père Lachaise Cemetery. His funeral was held four days later–two days after the armistice was signed. Having survived a shrapnel wound to the head and the drilling of a hole into his skull, he died of Spanish flu at the age of thirty-eight, and was declared 'mort pour la France'. A leading light of the French avant-garde movement, the man who invented the term 'surrealist' and inspired such figures as Pablo Picasso and Marcel Duchamp, he had signed up to fight in 1914. ![]() ' À bas Guillaume!' Death to Wilhelm! Down with Wilhelm! Meanwhile, high above the city's seventh arrondissement, the poet Guillaume Apollinaire lay on his deathbed. Kaiser Wilhelm of Germany abdicated on 9 November 1918 and in the streets of Paris there was jubilation. Terence Ranger, The Spanish Influenza Pandemic of 1918–19 (2003) 1 The brevity of the influenza pandemic of 1918 posed great problems to doctors at the time… It has posed great problems to historians ever since. ![]()
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