All evidence supports the view that the Spanish flu was a clearly circumscribed event, identified at the time as a pandemic which spread through every populated region of the world and even into the polar regions. The tragic irony of the story has often been underlined, in which the end of the war coincided with the peak of the flu: in Auckland, New Zealand, it was given the name of the Armistice epidemic. The timing of the flu raised questions about the role the war played in causing or disseminating it. The Great War had on the contrary seen major progress in the control of wartime disease. The symbol of this success was the effectiveness of the systematic campaign of vaccination of soldiers against typhoid on the Western Front, and to which was attributed the quasi-disappearance of an epidemic which had been raging in 1914.