2. The Siege of Danzig (1813)
Danzig, which in the spring of 1807 had passed through a siege of ten weeks, was once more, in the year 1813, from January 11 to November 29, subjected to the horrors of a siege, which for two reasons was even more horrible than the previous one; in the first place, the garrison was badly infected with disease, causing a severe epidemic to rage throughout the city; and in the second place, the defenders of the stronghold, which was most advantageously located to withstand a siege, were national enemies of the inhabitants. Consequently the latter were not only grossly disregarded in the distribution of supplies, but were actually obliged to turn over all they had to the French and then buy it back at exorbitant prices. And while the inhabitants, and toward the end of the siege the soldiers, too, suffered severely from a lack of the necessaries of life, the higher officers and the military officials lived in luxury until the day of the surrender.
Napoleon had assigned the defence of the city to General Rapp, who performed the task with great valour and ability. On the return march from Russia, some 40,000 men of Macdonald’s corps had congregated in Danzig, and 5,000 of them were sent away by Rapp; in the middle of January the total number of men in the garrison, including the military officials, was 35,934, consisting of Frenchmen, Poles, Bavarians, Westphalians, Spaniards, Italians, and Dutchmen. While Macdonald’s corps had fared pretty well, comparatively speaking, in the Russian campaign, the men were all very much exhausted, and furthermore, typhus fever was prevalent among them. As early as the latter part of January, accordingly, the number of sick soldiers was very large; in fact, only about 10,000 men were healthy and able to bear arms. ‘As there were no hospitals, beds, or remedies,’ says Friccius,[[328]] ‘many died from lack of care, and at the same time infectious diseases broke out and made great havoc. A heap of dead men and horses was a common sight in the streets, and in a short time many thousands of the troops, as well as of the inhabitants, were carried away.’
In January the death-rate remained comparatively low; of the garrison about 400 men died in the course of that month. But in February, which was a very cold month, typhus fever spread abroad with great rapidity, so that toward the end of the month some 130 soldiers died every day; no less than 15,000 men lay sick, and the total number of deaths for the entire month amounted to 2,000. When it began to thaw on February 24, the number of patients and deaths increased still more, so that 4,000 men died in March and 3,000 in April. From April on, the condition of health in the garrison improved, although the number of deaths in the month of May was still no less than 2,000.[[329]]
As early as February typhus fever had spread to the civil population, which before the siege had numbered some 40,000; a great many civilians, however, had fled from the city before the investment was yet complete. In the months of February and March, according to Blech,[[330]] some 200–300 persons died every week, ‘including representatives of all classes—physicians, preachers, jurists, merchants, down to the humblest people.’ The pestilence raged most furiously among the civil inhabitants in the latter part of March. ‘Almost every family was in mourning, and many families were wiped out entirely; the best and most estimable young men were carried away in the prime of their lives. Whole families perished, especially in certain streets which the pestilence seemed to have selected for its chief dwelling-place.’[[331]] These were especially the streets inhabited by the poorer classes.
It was not long before a lack of the necessaries of life began to make itself felt in the city. As early as February 27 the Russians had cut off the supply of water afforded by the Radaune, which fed the wells in the city, and this necessitated dependence upon rain-water. For the purpose of obtaining new supplies of food, a sortie along the Nehrung was undertaken on April 27; and while the enterprise was successful, the only persons who really derived any benefit from it were the higher officers and military officials, who sold butter, milk, and corned beef at exorbitant prices. Thus the well-to-do citizens, at least, were able to secure food by paying an excessive price for it. In May the conditions among the poor became a great deal worse; they were obliged to eat things that were positively disgusting; horse-meat and waste from the breweries were delicacies, while cats and dogs were also devoured. The rations of the soldiers grew smaller and smaller, although there was sufficient grain on hand to keep them supplied with bread. Says Friccius,[[332]] in regard to a sortie undertaken on June 9, ‘How hungry the troops in the garrison were is indicated by the fact that they cut up every horse that was killed in battle and took the edible parts with them.’
After the conclusion of the armistice, which became known in Danzig on June 10, there was a pause in the siege lasting until August 18; during this time the besiegers brought food to the garrison every five days, but absolutely no provision was made for the civil inhabitants. During the armistice many citizens left the city; indeed the French expelled from the city all persons who were not sufficiently provided with the necessaries of life. At first the Russians allowed the fugitives to pass through their lines, but later on they raised objections, so that a large number of the unfortunate inhabitants were obliged to live in the open fields between the besiegers and the besieged, where many of them died of starvation. In the latter part of September General Rapp allowed some 300 of them, who had managed to keep alive, to return into the city. Blech asserts that the emigration of beggars and others of the poor reduced the population of the city by some 16,000.[[333]]
In October, lack of the necessaries of life reached a climax, so that rats and mice were eaten. Since the scarcity of provender made it necessary to slaughter almost all the horses, the soldiers were supplied with large quantities of horse-meat. On November 1 the granaries, in which were kept the provisions of the garrison, were destroyed by fire, resulting in the loss of about two-thirds of the provisions. This made it necessary to reduce the soldiers’ bread-rations, and the bread with which they were supplied was made of half-burned flour and of rusks fished out of the stinking Mottlau; ‘it was so disgusting that only ravenous hunger could induce anybody to eat it.’[[334]]
In consequence of hunger and the unnatural food eaten, the mortality among the civil inhabitants, the number of whom had dwindled down to 16,000, became very high; the number of deaths per week in the month of October was no less than 50–80, to which, according to Blech, must be added the deaths among the poor which were no longer reported. In the first part of November there were some 80–90 deaths per week. On November 29 General Rapp surrendered the city to the Russians and Prussians; but since the conditions of capitulation could not be agreed upon until January 1, 1814, there was an interval of about a month during which the French garrison, but not the civil population, was supplied with food; consequently the death-rate among the citizens remained high. Furthermore, the besiegers, among whom a virulent typhus had been raging since October, communicated the infection to the inhabitants, 107 of whom succumbed to it in the last week of November, 133 in the first week of December, and 138 in the following week. On December 1, permission was obtained to establish a market, and from that time on, the citizens could once more provide themselves with food in a regular way.
The loss of human life inside the besieged stronghold was terrible; of the 35,900 troops in the garrison, 15,736 according to Friccius died in the lazarets; at the time of the capitulation only 16,532 men were left, and of these 1,482 were sick and had to be left in the city. According to Blech, a total of 5,592 civilians died, 1,142 of them in the last three months (October-December) of the year; the number of deaths in December alone was 473. Toward the end of the siege some ninety persons died of starvation.[[335]]
3. The Siege of Torgau (1813)[[336]]
On May 10, 1813, when Napoleon had appeared in Saxony, and the King, after considerable hesitation, had decided in his favour, the Saxon garrison of Torgau, at that time a place of 5,000 inhabitants, was replaced by a French army-corps. In the course of the summer large transports of sick soldiers from various lazarets arrived at Torgau, and on July 18 alone 3,000 sick men and 1,000 convalescents came from Dresden. Consequently the number of sick in the stronghold was very large even before the siege began; all public buildings had been converted into lazarets. But even these were not numerous or large enough to accommodate all the patients, who numbered some 6,000 in the month of September, so that the occupants of houses along entire streets were driven out of their homes, which were used for lazarets and barracks. ‘A virulent, putrid fever’ raged in all the lazarets, and at least one-third of the persons who contracted it died; the inhabitants and the Frenchmen quartered in the homes of citizens were at first spared by the disease.
After the battle of Dennewitz (September 6, 1813) the head-quarters of the third and fourth French army-corps was transferred to Torgau, where also numerous fugitives took refuge; at the same time the large French head-quarters from Dresden arrived, so that the size of the garrison was increased by 10,000 men and 5,000 horses. After the battle of Leipzig the stronghold was besieged by the Prussians, and presently the supply of food ran low and the uncleanliness in the streets and houses grew incredibly worse. ‘Then the pestilence began to spread at an alarming rate among the inhabitants and among the Frenchmen quartered in the homes of citizens, so that the entire city of Torgau came to resemble a large, overcrowded lazaret.’[[337]]
‘The regular lazarets now became veritable hot-beds of misery; they were scarcely able to accommodate the large number of patients, who numbered at least 12,000, and whom it was necessary to place so close together that they almost touched one another. There was a lack of straw and of other necessities, of sick-attendants and physicians, of effective remedies, and especially of order and proper superintendence.’ The patients suffered partly from severe, fetid diarrhoea, and partly from typhus. In the courtyards there were enormous accumulations of dirt and refuse, and the doors leading into many of the sick-rooms could scarcely be opened owing to the collections of foul matter which covered the floor ankle-deep; in order to reach the sick it was necessary to wade through this and to climb over dead bodies. Absolutely no thought was given to keeping the rooms warm. ‘Thus it is quite natural that among these horrible surroundings the slightest wound, the most insignificant indisposition, could easily have a fatal termination, and that it was like sentencing a man to death to bring him to the lazaret.’ The number of deaths exceeded 8,000 in the month of November alone.
Equally terrible were the conditions in the other parts of the city; all the private houses were overcrowded with patients and filled with dirt. A sickening odour permeated the atmosphere; in the ditches around the fortress and in every corner of the city lay dead horses, rotting straw sacks, ragged uniforms, and even human corpses. Refuse of the worst kind was piled up in the streets, often as high as the second story. ‘At this time’, says Lehmann, ‘Torgau looked more like a lazaret than a city inhabited by healthy persons; for who would have been able to find a house in which there were no persons suffering from nerve-fever? Parlours, bedrooms, halls, stables, kitchens, and cellars—all were filled with patients.’ The barracks and guard-rooms resembled hospitals. In a few weeks more than 600 inhabitants died; entire families were wiped out by the epidemic, and there was scarcely one which was not mourning the loss of one of its members.
Up to the beginning of December the number of patients steadily increased; in the lazarets alone, 300 soldiers died every day.
The terrors of the bombardment had a very disastrous effect upon the inhabitants of the city, since it compelled them to live in damp, unhealthy, infected cellars. Not until the latter part of December did the epidemic begin to abate and to lose, at the same time, its virulent character; the arrival of very cold weather, as well as the diminution of the number of people, and the fact that the infection had practically run its course among the inhabitants and the garrison, were at least partly responsible for this abatement; furthermore, there was now less crowding, and it became possible to establish better order.
The lack of system in the French lazarets is shown by the fact that the authorities were never once able to give an account of the number of persons that died in them. From grave-diggers’ records and church registers Richter managed to compile the following table of statistics indicating the number of deaths:[[338]]
| French soldiers. | Saxon soldiers. | Civil inhabitants. | Total. | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| January-August (1813) | 222 | |||
| September | 1,107 | 64 | 43 | 1,214 |
| October | 4,803 | 36 | 66 | 4,905 |
| November | 8,209 | 3 | 228 | 8,440 |
| December | 4,886 | 258 | 5,144 | |
| January 1–10 (1814) | 649 | 83 | 732 | |
| January 11–31 | 314 | 91 | 405 | |
| February | 400 | 79 | 479 | |
| March | 100 | 52 | 152 |
According to this table there died, between September and January 10, 19,654 French soldiers, 103 Saxon soldiers, and 678 civilians. But Richter says in regard to the above figures: ‘There is no doubt, however, that the figures pertaining to the French soldiers are much too small, since they include only those that were actually buried by the grave-diggers in public burial-grounds. All those who died in private houses, in the tête-de-pont, in the various forts, in the lunettes, or in any of the outworks of the fortress are not included; their number was by no means small, and many of them were buried unceremoniously by citizens or by their comrades, while large numbers of bodies were left lying in the open.’ In the month of May it was impossible to find a grave-digger to bury the heaps of corpses, which were consequently thrown in masses into the Elbe; this of course interfered with the operation of the floating mills along the river. Nor are the bodies disposed of in this way included in the above table. Accordingly, Richter estimates the total number of deaths among the French soldiers at between 29,000 and 30,000 men.
The pestilence continued to rage even after the surrender of the stronghold, and did not begin to abate until the latter part of January. Although the Prussian troops were not quartered in the city, and entered it only in the day-time, the pestilence nevertheless spread to them and carried away more than 300 men in the course of three months. Not until the end of February did the pestilence among the civil inhabitants begin to abate; the mortality was still high in March, but in April it sank to normal again.
According to Richter, two-thirds of the patients in the military lazaret were suffering from ‘colliquative, dysenteric diarrhoea’, and only one-third from ‘true typhus’, whereas among the civil inhabitants the latter was by far the more common. There were two forms of diarrhoea observed; it appeared either as an acute attack of dysentery, which rarely lasted longer than two weeks and then terminated in either death or recovery, or else as a chronic, dysenteric diarrhoea, which caused general weakness and finally death.
Typhus fever began always with a frequently recurring chill, and with a violent headache and general indisposition; this was followed by a stage of dry fever, accompanied by stupor, dizziness, and often wild delirium; as a rule the first few days were characterized by obstinate constipation, and bleeding at the nose was very common. Later on, somnolence manifested itself, and the original constipation changed to a copious, fetid diarrhoea. Petechiae appeared frequently, but not invariably; at first small, bright-red spots showed themselves, and later on they assumed a darker colour, grew larger, and finally turned black. Their size varied considerably; sometimes they were the size of a pin-head, while often they were from one to one-and-a-half centimetres in diameter. Most of the patients died between the tenth and fifteenth days; but if the disease progressed favourably, signs of improvement usually showed themselves suddenly on the fourteenth or fifteenth day; as a rule, convalescence was of short duration.
The two forms of ‘nerve-fever’ mentioned by Richter doubtless include various other diseases. That many cases of typhus fever were among the fever patients may be inferred from the fact that the disease was very prevalent among the French troops, and also from Richter’s description; he expressly mentions the sudden appearance of the disease, the initial chill, the remission of the fever in the third week, and the rapid convalescence—all of them characteristic signs of typhus fever. Moreover, typhoid fever doubtless prevailed more or less extensively. Richter describes ‘a pituitous modification of typhus’, with a lingering development;[[339]] the crisis always came late, frequently not until the sixth or seventh week, and was invariably uncertain, so that convalescence was very slow and often interrupted by relapses. Deuteropathic complications were of almost regular occurrence. There can be no doubt that we have to do here with a good description of typhoid fever, which revealed its presence chiefly among the newly-conscripted young French soldiers.
Regarding the enormous loss of life caused by the epidemic in Torgau, Richter, who was a Prussian military physician, says: ‘The devastation that it caused among the Frenchmen, and unfortunately among the inhabitants of the ill-fated city as well, was indeed terrible; in fact there is happily scarcely a parallel to it in the history of the world. One may safely say that the misery experienced by the French troops throughout the entire course of that disastrous war reached its climax inside the walls of Torgau. The French lazarets in the city represented scenes of horror such as repel human nature, and such as one must actually witness in order to appreciate fully their dreadfulness.’