Elizabeth Outka points to a telling difference between the fear of death in a war and a similar fear during a pandemic: Certainly the more pressing fear was the flu, which “by the end of September ” had infected “about one-quarter of the total camp, resulting in 757 deaths” ( CDC timeline). The conclusion of the May, 2020 post makes clear that besides experiencing a sort of nameless existential dread, Cummings mainly feared death, whether from combat at the front or from the influenza pandemic. Cummings at Camp Devens: The Influenza Pandemic of 1918,” reported how Cummings describes this “almost” craziness in an October 1918 letter to John Dos Passos as “an interior struggle, a spiritual combat, an invisible war, enormous and tiny,” that nevertheless was “very good for one’s health.” Cummings tells his friend and fellow writer that the source of this “interior struggle” is “fear, still, always, and every day, fear.”
Cummings was typing up the notebooks that he kept during basic training at Camp Devens, Mass., he wrote that the notes made him feel uneasy: “into me,as I perceive these hieroglyphics,is coming once again whatever it was that drove me almost crazy” (quoted in Rosenblitt 225). Grey troops at drill spliced into a colorized field in front of the woods at Camp Devens, Mass., circa 1917.
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