4. The Siege of Mayence (1813–14)
The terrible devastation caused by typhus fever in the strongholds along the Vistula, Elbe, and Rhine, which were so valorously defended by French generals in the years 1813–14, excited general consternation. Wittmann[[340]] furnishes a very accurate description of the misery undergone in the besieged cities, especially the city of Mayence. First he comments on the scarcity of supplies, observing that the vicissitudes of war can never be foreseen; furthermore, he asserts that the commanders of fortresses, when they anticipated a siege, purposely kept the inhabitants in uncertainty about it. In the case of Mayence, Napoleon ordered the city to be provisioned after the battle of Leipzig. Some 2,000 oxen were collected, and most of them were kept in the villages surrounding Mayence; but when the Allies crossed the Rhine the oxen were all quickly driven into the city, where they grew lean owing to lack of provender, and died of rinderpest in such large numbers that it became necessary to slaughter them all and salt the meat. This was done in such a careless way that a large part of the meat was spoiled; even after the stronghold surrendered, some of this salted meat was still on hand, and it was so rotten that it had to be destroyed. The citizens had learned of the danger too late, and numerous unscrupulous citizens bought up all the important necessaries of life and then took advantage of the situation by raising the prices so high that only the wealthy could procure food. Lack of good bread, which had been so scarce during the previous siege of Mayence (1793), does not seem to have been so severely felt in the siege of 1813. Particularly noticeable was the want of fuel, so that many soldiers froze to death in the exposed guard-rooms of the outworks. Legumes, especially peas, could not be thoroughly cooked, so that it was frequently necessary to throw them away. The supply of good fat, as well as of fresh vegetables, soon ran out, while the great quantity of alcoholic beverages stored up in Mayence had a very detrimental effect. Very inadequate provision was made for the sheltering of the soldiers; inasmuch as the siege took place in the winter, they could not camp in the open, and the barracks were not large or numerous enough to accommodate them. Consequently the officers were quartered in the homes of the wealthier citizens, one officer in each house, while the troops were housed in large numbers in the often insanitary homes of the poorer people. This of course greatly favoured the dissemination of infectious diseases.
According to Wittmann, there was not a single trace of an infectious disease in Mayence in September 1813. In October the field-lazarets of the army were transferred from Leipzig to the West, and most of them passed through Mayence; in the first part of November, moreover, the field-army itself passed through the city on its return march; thus sick and healthy soldiers conveyed typhus fever into the stronghold. ‘In the vicinity of the hospitals and churches, where sick soldiers were congregated, in the streets through which these doomed victims passed, and in the houses in which they were quartered together with healthy men, or into which they had crept from sheer inability to go further, contagious typhus broke out first and with the greatest severity.’[[341]] Dr. Petit, the commissary sent out by the government in Paris, did not have the courage to oppose the will of Marshal Marmont, who was in chief command, and so he sought to pacify the inhabitants by means of notices in the papers to the effect that the prevailing disease was neither epidemic nor infectious, and was only contagious typhus.
After the investment was complete, typhus fever caused terrible devastation throughout the city. When the siege began, Mayence had a garrison of some 30,000 men, while the civil inhabitants numbered about 24,500; to the latter, however, must be added a considerable number of refugees from the surrounding country. The bad hospital arrangements, as always happened at that time, greatly helped to spread the disease in Mayence. According to a report made out by two French physicians and reproduced by Wittmann, the air in the hospitals was terrible; every bed was occupied by two patients, while the straw under them and the blankets over them were never changed or washed, so that they must necessarily have constituted a source of infection. A report by Kerckhoffs[[342]] regarding the Mayence hospitals describes even worse conditions:
I was appointed to serve in the hospital established in the Municipal Octroi Building, and the first time that I went there I found the living and the dead, the wounded and the sick, scattered in confusion all over the place. The sick were stretched out on the floor, without even straw under them, covered with ordure. I was obliged to pick my way on tip-toe in order not to sink up to the ankles in filth. I saw sick men lying beside the dead bodies of their comrades. In effect, there were so many of them that they were lying on top of one another. In some of the rooms the windows were closed, so that no air could enter; in other rooms there was neither glass nor boarding in the doors or windows, notwithstanding the extreme cold. The sick men told me that they had been in that same position for two, three, and even four days, without having had a drop of water.
The soldiers under arrest, who were compelled to clean out the hospitals, all died, no more sick-attendants were to be found, and a large number of physicians perished in the performance of their duties; all the persons employed in the hospital entirely neglected their duties, and most of them were drunk all the time, since large quantities of wine were on hand for the patients.
The result was that the epidemic gradually attained to enormous dimensions. ‘The infection’, says Wittmann,[[343]] ‘carried away all the grave-diggers one by one, and it was impossible to find anybody who was willing to do that dangerous work. Thousands of dead bodies of citizens and soldiers lay for weeks in front of the Münstertor, where they were piled up like logs pending burial.’ In December and January the epidemic reached its climax; after that it gradually abated, but did not come to an end until May 3, 1814, when the siege terminated and the Allies entered the city.
In the period between November 1, 1813, and May 3, 1814, 7,000 deaths among the soldiers are recorded in the civil register of the city; according to statements of the grave-diggers, some 10,000 or 11,000 more soldiers were buried, whose names were not entered in the register for the reason that they could not be ascertained; nor do the above figures include the number of deaths in the stronghold of Kastel on the other side of the Rhine. Of the civil inhabitants, 2,445 (about one-tenth of the population) died; a large number of physicians contracted the disease, and four physicians and five surgeons succumbed to it.
5. The Siege of Paris (1870–1)[[344]]
After the battle of Sedan the Germans immediately began to march toward Paris; on September 15, 1870, the first cavalrymen appeared before the capital, and on September 19 the investment was complete.
An exhaustive account by H. Sueur and a large number of other reports offer us very full information regarding the condition of health in Paris during the siege, since the administrative apparatus never stopped running. The approach of the German armies caused numerous well-to-do citizens to leave the city; some went south, some to Switzerland, and some to England. Sueur estimates their number from the reports of the railroad companies at 300,000. On the other hand, a large number of the inhabitants of the surrounding country sought refuge in the city; their number is estimated at 180,000. Furthermore, the size of the garrison was considerably increased; the number of men in the regular army on November 4, 1870, is estimated at 236,941, and this does not include 8,000 men in the First Division of the First Corps. To the above, moreover, must be added the number of soldiers who died between the beginning and the end of the siege. Thus the number of men in the regular army at the beginning of the siege was some 246,000; of these some 56,000 were already in the city in the middle of the summer, while the remaining 190,000 arrived later. Accordingly, the total number of people in the city shortly before the siege began was increased by 70,000. Legoyt estimated the population of the city on July 1, 1870, at 1,890,000, so that on the opening day of the investment there were 1,960,000 (in round numbers, 2,000,000) people in Paris. The arrival of the 190,000 soldiers altered the composition of the population, since the increase augmented only the number of males between the ages of 20 and 40.
A severe epidemic of small-pox raged in Paris, as stated above, even before the siege took place. In the first part of the siege, moreover, the disease raged with even greater fury in the city, since most of the young newly-enlisted mobile guards had never been vaccinated. The maximum of deaths caused by it were reported between November 6 and November 27. We have already described the course of the small-pox epidemic in Paris.[[345]] It was influenced neither by hunger nor by cold, but developed chiefly for the reason that it was impossible to congregate and isolate the large number of unvaccinated and susceptible persons.
Typhoid fever, dysentery, and diarrhoea, because of the unfavourable conditions brought about by the siege, became very widespread and virulent. Whereas in the year 1869 there were 630 deaths caused by typhoid fever, during the siege of 1870 no less than 3,475 persons succumbed to that disease. Dupinet[[346]] thinks that the above number is too small, because the disease was often not recognized, and pneumonia, a common complication, was entered as the cause of death. Inasmuch as typhoid fever was endemic in Paris, and as the native inhabitants had acquired immunity by recovery from an attack in the early part of their lives, those who were most severely afflicted by the disease were chiefly the soldiers in the army and the refugees from the surrounding country. The largest number of deaths was reported in the twentieth week of the siege, i.e. between January 14 and 20.[[347]] No less than 375 persons succumbed to typhoid fever in the course of that week, whereas in the corresponding week of the previous year only sixteen deaths had been reported. The largest number of deaths caused by dysentery and diarrhoea in a single week was reported somewhat later; the limited prevalence of these diseases during the siege is indicated by the fact that in the half-year 1869–70 the number of deaths caused by them was never more than twenty per week. From statistics compiled by Sueur we have arranged the following table (p. 323), which also includes the deaths caused by bronchitis and pneumonia, but not the victims buried on the battle-fields, of whom there were some 3,000.
The table indicates the gradual diminution of the food-supply. In December the quality of the bread grew worse and worse; white bread could no longer be baked, and in its place an almost inedible form of brown bread was made out of bran, wheat, rye, rice, barley, and oats. Particularly noticeable was the lack of good fats, making it necessary to prepare foods with a bad-tasting tallow that was sold under the name of ‘Beurre de Paris’. Since the cattle had to be slaughtered (those that were not killed died of various diseases), there was very soon a great scarcity of milk, making it very difficult to feed infants.[[348]]
Several persons have maintained that the extreme cold exerted considerable influence upon the death-rate; and a glance at the two columns in the table indicating the number of deaths caused by pneumonia and bronchitis would seem to justify this contention. How great the difference was, as compared with normal years, will be obvious when we call attention to the fact that, whereas in the twenty-second week of the siege (January 28–February 3) 627 persons succumbed to bronchitis, in the preceding year only seventy-six deaths were caused by that disease between January 30 and February 5, and that, whereas from 465 to 468 persons succumbed to pneumonia between January 21 and February 18, 1871, the number of deaths caused by that disease in the corresponding period of the previous year varied from 90 to 119 per week.
According to the unanimous verdict of the Paris physicians, typhus fever did not make its appearance during the siege.
| Mortality during the Siege of Paris | ||||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| No. of the week. | First and last day of the week. | Important ordinances and events. | Average no. deaths in the years 1867–9. | Total no. deaths during the siege. | No. of deaths during the siege caused by | |||||
| Small-pox. | Typhoid Fever. | Dysentery. | Diarrhoea. | Pneumonia. | Bronchitis. | |||||
| 1 | Sept. 4–10 | 889 | 981 | 116 | 39 | 8 | 25 | 54 | 45 | |
| 2 | Sept. 11–17 | 852 | 1263 | 168 | 45 | 10 | 65 | 66 | 55 | |
| 3 | Sept. 18–24 | Sept. 19, investment completed | 821 | 1272 | 158 | 45 | 9 | 43 | 62 | 61 |
| 4 | Sept. 25–Oct. 1 | 766 | 1344 | 210 | 56 | 23 | 46 | 46 | 36 | |
| 5 | Oct. 2–8 | Oct. 8, meat ration fixed at 100 gr. for adults, 50 gr. for children | 754 | 1483 | 212 | 54 | 18 | 69 | 50 | 56 |
| 6 | Oct. 9–15 | 737 | 1610 | 311 | 54 | 26 | 72 | 64 | 55 | |
| 7 | Oct. 16–22 | 761 | 1746 | 360 | 55 | 23 | 76 | 66 | 70 | |
| 8 | Oct. 23–9 | 754 | 1878 | 378 | 62 | 49 | 99 | 71 | 77 | |
| 9 | Oct. 30–Nov. 5 | Oct. 30, requisition of fuel | 767 | 1762 | 380 | 61 | 32 | 87 | 69 | 72 |
| 10 | Nov. 6–12 | 781 | 1885 | 419 | 62 | 39 | 91 | 79 | 82 | |
| 11 | Nov. 13–19 | 780 | 2064 | 431 | 94 | 25 | 91 | 73 | 92 | |
| 12 | Nov. 20–26 | Nov. 21, requisition of potatoes | 793 | 1927 | 386 | 103 | 25 | 92 | 81 | 89 |
| 13 | Nov. 27–Dec. 3 | 833 | 2023 | 412 | 140 | 25 | 76 | 92 | 99 | |
| 14 | Dec. 4–10 | 833 | 2455 | 398 | 137 | 33 | 83 | 108 | 107 | |
| 15 | Dec. 11–17 | Dec. 15, horse-meat ration fixed at 50 gr. per head | 884 | 2728 | 391 | 173 | 38 | 103 | 131 | 190 |
| 16 | Dec. 18–24 | Dec. 19, reduction of bread ration to 300 gr. for adults, 150 gr. for children | 854 | 2728 | 388 | 221 | 30 | 73 | 147 | 172 |
| 17 | Dec. 25–31 | 856 | 3280 | 454 | 250 | 51 | 98 | 201 | 258 | |
| 18 | Jan. 1–6 | Jan. 4, beginning of bombardment | 838 | 3680 | 329 | 251 | 52 | 151 | 262 | 343 |
| 19 | Jan. 7–13 | 902 | 3982 | 339 | 301 | 46 | 143 | 390 | 457 | |
| 20 | Jan. 14–20 | 903 | 4465 | 380 | 375 | 42 | 137 | 426 | 598 | |
| 21 | Jan. 21–7 | 936 | 4376 | 327 | 313 | 48 | 134 | 478 | 548 | |
| 22 | Jan. 28–Feb. 3 | 951 | 4671 | 258 | 324 | 63 | 150 | 465 | 627 | |
| 23 | Feb. 4–10 | Feb. 4, armistice. First supplies brought in | 955 | 4451 | 225 | 260 | 57 | 144 | 468 | 593 |
| 24 | Feb. 11–17 | 974 | 4103 | 174 | 298 | 59 | 158 | 471 | 539 | |
| 25 | Feb. 18–24 | 995 | 3941 | 134 | 301 | 52 | 181 | 410 | 557 | |
| 26 | Feb. 25–Mar. 3 | 984 | 3500 | 147 | 260 | 50 | 190 | 338 | 424 | |
| 27 | Mar. 4–10 | 1020 | 2993 | 85 | 258 | 60 | 142 | 267 | 379 | |
| 28 | Mar. 11–17 | 975 | 2576 | 98 | 229 | 49 | 104 | 188 | 301 | |
| 24148 | 75167 | 8068 | 4821 | 1042 | 2923 | 5623 | 6982 | |||
Scurvy broke out, but did not become at all widespread; sporadic cases of the disease were observed among the civil inhabitants, while in the prisons and hospitals it was somewhat more prevalent. Delpech[[349]] attributes the appearance of the disease to the lack of fresh vegetables, which were very expensive and could not be given out in the public establishments. Among the soldiers the disease broke out only in Fort Bicêtre, the garrison in which consisted of 800 marines, of whom some seventy or seventy-five contracted it. None of them were given any salted meat, and Grenet[[350]] contends that the outbreak was caused by the lack of light and air in the small casemates, and by arduous service, especially in the night. But here, too, the real cause was probably to be found in the lack of fresh vegetables, which Grenet does not mention.
The death-rate in Paris during the siege was about three times as high as normal. Sueur has estimated that in the years 1867–9 the mortality in the twenty-eight weeks corresponding with those in the above table was 13·1 per 1,000 inhabitants, whereas in the twenty-eight weeks of the siege the mortality was 38·6 per 1,000.