In the early 20th century, Charles Corning, the former mayor of Concord and a judge in the Merrimack County probate court, was an assiduous chronicler of just about everything. In his diary he mused on topics from the weather to the ideological underpinnings of World War I to the number of callers he received in a forenoon, alternately empathizing with and disparaging world leaders and taking it upon himself to assess the character of his neighbors.

But on Sept. 21, 1918, something else entered the mix. Influenza, or "grip,"as Corning noted by way of explanation, combined with the war and the U.S. Senate candidacy of George Moses, a Republican, "make a burden hard to bear," he wrote.

It would only get worse. The following day, Corning recorded the "untimely" death of Edward Cummings, a congressional candidate he had known as a young lawyer. The next day, he mourned the passing of his colleague, Judge A. Chester Clark of the Concord Municipal Court. By Sept. 27, Corning sized up the situation like this:

"Grippe is sweeping over Mass, and N.H. as fire shrivels the fields, laying out communities and taking a toll of death unprecedented," he wrote.

The next day he was even more dramatic:

"A heavy sense of anxiety and apprehension like a dismal cloud in midsummer weighs heavily upon us because of the deadly ravages of the so called Spanish influenza," he wrote. "Funerals jostle one another so the sable procession goes on."

The deadliest pandemic since the Black Death, the 1918 influenza killed between 20 million and 50 million people worldwide, including more U.S. citizens than all of the country's wars put together. It was the first truly global disease spread by humans (the Black Death was spread by rats) and made clear just how small the world had become.

"What really occurred was the beginning of globalization. We stopped being a world of separate micro-ecologies, and we became a single macro-ecology,"said Jeffrey Salloway, an epidemiologist at the University of New Hampshire.

New Hampshire, though largely rural, was hardly immune. The state's proximity to Boston - one of the epicenters of the disease - meant the germs didn't have very far to go, and the state's southern cities were especially hard hit. Almost 2,500 people died from influenza in

New Hampshire in 1918, according to state records. In Concord the death toll was 167.

Unlike traditional influenzas, which tend to strike the very old and the very young, the Spanish flu took the majority of its victims in the prime of their lives. And it killed in the grizzliest of ways, filling patients' lungs with bloody fluid until their skin turned blue and it became "simply a struggle for air until they suffocate," one doctor wrote at the time.

But for all its horror, the Spanish flu was also, strangely, overlooked -both in the newspapers of the time, which buried it under news of the Allies' advance and the race to buy Liberty bonds, and in the history books since, which have treated it as a footnote in the story of the war.

But with the prospect of an avian flu pandemic, the 1918 flu has taken on a new and sudden importance as medical researchers compare the 1918 virus to the H5N1 bird flu strain that has already accounted for more than 60 human deaths.

Experts disagree on whether the historical analogy is a good one. Some say an unknown influenza virus would level humans the same way in 2005 as in 1918 because we don't have an immune system capable of protecting us against a newly mutated killer. Plus, modern travelers zigzagging across the globe could spread a deadly virus at astronomic rates. But pandemic naysayers argue that our understanding of disease is vastly improved, as is our ability to fight secondary infections, like pneumonia. Our public health system is more organized than the piecemeal infrastructure of the early 20th century, too.

The 1918 flu was frighteningly quick, inexplicable and, as Corning's diary shows, intensely personal for those who lived through it. But mostly, it was boundless.

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