Syndemic
The worst of the 20th century influenza pandemics was the 1918 pandemic, where between 20-40 percent of the world’s population became ill between 40-100 million people died. More people died of the so-called Spanish flu (caused by the H1N1 viral strain) pandemic in the single year of 1918 than during all four-years of the Black Death. The pandemic had devastating effects as disease spread along trade and shipping routes and other corridors of human movement until it had circled the globe. InIndia, the mortality rate reached 50 per 1,000 population. Arriving during the closing phase of the World War I, the pandemic impacted mobilized national armies. Half of U.S. soldiers who died in the "Great War," for example, were victims of influenza. It is estimated that almost ¾ of a million Americans died during the pandemic. In part, the death toll during the pandemic was caused by viral pneumonia characterized by extensive bleeding in the lungs resulting in suffocation. Many victims died within 48 hours of the appearance of the first symptom. It was not uncommon for people who appeared to be quite healthy in the morning to have died by sunset. Among those who survived the first several days, however, many died of secondary bacterial pneumonia. It has been argued that countless numbers of those who expired quickly from the disease were co-infected with tuberculosis, which would explain the notable plummet in TB cases after 1918.
British yeomanry during the First World War
The British yeomanry did not have the same huge casualty lists, common among the infantry regiments. The Queen's Own Worcestershire Hussars with 215 had the highest total dead, while the 1st County of London Yeomanry (Middlesex, Duke of Cambridge's Hussars) only had eight dead. The greatest loss on one day was ninety-three from the Leicestershire Yeomanry on 13 May 1915, during the Second Battle of Ypres. Out of the fifty-four regiments, three had over 200 dead, ten of them over 100 dead, sixteen had fifty or more dead and the remainder less than fifty dead. According to the Commonwealth War Graves Commission the yeomanry regiments total dead during the First World War was 3,867 men,
among that total was Brigadier-General Wight-Boycott of the Warwickshire Yeomanry, and nineteen lieutenant-colonels some while serving with other units.