IT REMAINS THE country’s worst natural disaster. Here there are no names by which to remember these people, nothing to say what part they played in their families and in our history. You can tell something was amiss—that here was a situation so urgent that the normal courtesies of death were waived.

In late 1918, right on the heels of World War I, an influenza pandemic swept around the world. The war had killed 16,500 New Zealanders in four years. Yet in just eight weeks, the flu wiped out 8600—at a time when the country’s total population was only just over a million. As soldiers arrived home, many found that they had just lost a sister or brother, their mother or father, their wife or a child, to this invisible enemy.

Before me lies only one of the burial grounds of the 1100 Aucklanders who perished. In the third week of that grisly November, a team of 36 council men and volunteers dug graves almost continuously in this strip of land to accommodate the new arrivals. Twice daily, after stopping at Mt Eden to pick up caskets and mourners, a train arrived from Auckland Central with more corpses. Overworked clergymen came in relays to bury them, while distressed relatives of the dead wandered about trying to identify the coffins and burial mounds of their loved ones.

With a twinge of superstition I pace the sodden turf above the hidden bones, close behind me the sound of a passing train—on the same tracks that brought all those bodies here 86 years ago.

Clearly this wasn’t flu as we know it, the annoying illness that puts us to bed for a few days. A wave of such flu earlier in the year, running up to October, had been no worse than usual. But a second wave, starting in late October in Auckland and exploding round the country within a week, proved a killer. The illness began mildly, with aches and pains, but ended terribly, with patients drowning in their own body fluids. Death could follow within hours of the first symptoms. Adding to the horror and grief, victims often turned a purplish black. At the height of the epidemic, in November, between a third and a half of the country’s population—and in some districts nearly everyone—was infected.

In most towns and cities, services were either scaled back or cut altogether because there were too few fit people to run them. Theatres, hotels, schools and banks closed. Coastal shipping stopped. Food and coal shortages were common. Maori were particularly hard hit: in some areas so many died that the few who were left had to move elsewhere. Puzzlingly, death was most likely to visit those aged between 20 and 45—not vulnerable children or the frail and elderly. And in New Zealand, unlike other parts of the world, the virus showed an unexplained predilection for young men.