In chapter 10 of TEA (on page 109 of the UK paperback version) Thursday says to Liz Barrett-Browning, the receptionist at the Finis Hotel: "If Mr Parke-Laine calls again, tell him I died of hemorrhagic fever or something."

Hemorrhagic fevers usually are fatal, so that part of the claim would be plausible, but as they're not exactly a common occurrence in Britain I have to wonder not only just how ridiculous Thursday intended this attempted brush-off to sound but also why that particular sort of disease popped up in her thoughts anyway ... and I have a possible answer to the latter question, which I'm going to share with you here.
The most notorious of the hemorrhagic fevers in our own world is probably the horrific (but fortunately very rare) 'Ebola', although that is basically confined to certain regions of Africa. However there is also one called 'Crimea-Congo Fever', which is named after the first two regions where outbreaks of it were identified: In our history the initial cases were amongst German troops in the Crimea, during WW II, but as the history of Thursday's world differs from ours (and we don't even know whether Germany went to war with Russia during the 1940s...) maybe in the NExtian world it was British troops who suffered _ at some date between the first stage of the Crimean War and the campaign in which Thursday herself participated _ instead? I suspect that if so then it wasn't actually while Thursday & Landen were out there, because if that had been the case then one or both of them might well have known some of the victims and thus this remark would have been in worse taste than I'd expect of Thursday, but if it had been amongst British forces who were stationed there earlier on then they might have been warned about the possibility...

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"God rot Botchkamos Istochnik!"

wasn't a lot of what Florence Nightingale and her nurses were trying to treat in the (Outworld) Crimea know then as haemorragic fever? In which case if it also occurred in the Nextian Crimea at the beginning of the war it would have been a common fact of the war which all conscripts would pretty much be bound to have heard of (?)



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If the English language made any sense, a catastrophe would be an apostrophe with fur.

I'll have to check: I thought that that was mostly Cholera and/or Typhus, although of course that isn't necessarily what they called it there & then...

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"God rot Botchkamos Istochnik!"