The removal of the troops to Fundeni temporarily checked the dissemination of plague in Bucharest, but in the middle of August it broke out again, presumably in consequence of the arrival of more troops from the scene of the war; some thirty or forty villages were attacked by this epidemic, which lasted until the middle of November. In January 1829, plague was conveyed by troops to Moldau and Jassy, which they were to make their winter quarters; but the disease, notwithstanding the fact that it was wrongly diagnosed and declared to be typhus fever, was soon checked by energetic measures of precaution. Regarding the number of plague patients in the Russian army, which was also attacked by several other diseases, especially malaria, diarrhoea, dysentery, and fever, no information is available; the Russian army numbered 150,000 men, and, according to Seidlitz, 134,882 men were received into the lazarets and 75,226 men into the regimental sick-rooms up to the end of February 1829; thus 210,108 men contracted disease in a period of ten months.[[187]]
In March 1829, plague broke out anew. Surgeon-General Witt, who had his head-quarters in Jassy, declared that the disease was not plague, but an endemic fever, and put an end to all measures of precaution in March. ‘After the patients were no longer quarantined,’ says Czetyrkin,[[188]] ‘the disease, bringing destruction in its train, in the spring and summer began to make headway and spread over Moldavia, Wallachia, and Bulgaria; it also accompanied the Russian army across the Balkan Peninsula and appeared in Rumelia, where it completely wiped out several hospitals. Those divisions of the army which were kept constantly on the march and were thus exposed to the fresh air, rain, and dew, suffered less severely; but the garrisons in the cities and strongholds were more furiously attacked by the dreaded enemy. The overcrowded condition of the lazarets, the lack of competent nurses and physicians (most of whom were exterminated by plague), the uncertainty regarding the nature of the disease—all this constituted the reason why the pestilence could not be checked.’
The disease first appeared in March 1829 throughout Wallachia, but after the middle of May it also revealed its presence south of the Danube; Galatz, Babadag, Kustendji, Mangalia, Bazardschik, and Kavarna were attacked in succession.
Varna suffered very severely; according to Petersenn, the first cases occurred there in May 1829, in the infantry regiment Witepsk. The patients were housed in tents on the sea-shore outside the city, and since the number of people who contracted the disease continued to increase, all the patients in the hospitals were soon taken there. The city was finally completely evacuated and closed up, after the inhabitants had been assigned to definite places to live in the open fields and in a near-by forest. The plague reached its climax in the latter part of June. ‘There was not a hospital,’ says Petersenn,[[189]] ‘not a quarter of the city, not a division of troops, not a family, not a single place, which had escaped infection, and everywhere one came across victims of the pestilence, some dying and some dead; for it spared neither sex nor age nor class.’ And in another place the same physician says:[[190]] ‘If the inside of the plague-camp afforded a terrible sight, where sick men tossed about, gasping in the burning summer heat, between the dead and dying, the conditions outside of the plague-camp were no more pleasant to witness; for along the roads from the city to the hospitals, on fields and meadows, behind every shrub, in every ditch, dead and dying men were stretched out everywhere.’ And Seidlitz, who visited Varna when the plague was at its height, asserts that the corpses were piled up ‘like logs’ and carried away ‘by cartloads’. According to Petersenn,[[191]] the number of patients that died in the plague-hospital at Varna was:
| From June 5 to 30 | 2,238 |
| From July 1 to 31 | 1,484 |
| From August 1 to 26 | 210 |
At the end of August there were only a few plague-patients in Varna. Of forty-one physicians, twenty-eight contracted the disease and twenty succumbed to it.
Conditions were as bad in many other places as they were in Varna; Slobodzie, Kustendji, and Mangalia were likewise devastated. In Brailow the first cases of plague occurred in March; in April 132 persons succumbed to the disease, in May 150, in June 774, and in July the pestilence abated.[[192]]
After the Russians crossed the Balkan Peninsula in the summer of 1829, Adrianople, which was reached on August 12, 1829, was free from plague, and it remained free until the end of the war. In the first part of November, however, the plague broke out there in the large old barrack which had been converted into a hospital and had become greatly overcrowded. Patients, especially persons suffering from dysentery, had been sent there from all sides, so that their number had increased on August 17 to 1,616, on August 27 to 3,666, and on September 1 to 4,641. On November 1, when the head-quarters were removed from there, 6,000 sick and healthy persons were left behind, the great majority of whom fell victims to the plague. According to Rinck, in the latter part of November ten or twenty soldiers suffering from plague were taken there every day, and in the middle of December not one of the 300 sick-rooms was spared; from fifty to sixty plague-patients were taken in every day at this time.[[193]] In the middle of January 1830 the fury of the disease abated a little among the Russians, but it raged more and more destructively among the civil inhabitants, who numbered some 80,000. In almost all the army-divisions stationed south of the Balkans, plague broke out in the winter of 1829–30; the entire army, therefore, before returning to Russia, had to be quarantined twice for a period of twenty-one days.
Plague also revealed its presence in Transcaucasia, where fighting was likewise going on. In Armenia it had broken out shortly before the beginning of the Russo-Turkish War, as also in Erzerum. The reinforcements coming from there had brought plague to Kars, where it spread rapidly in the Turkish army.[[194]] In June 1828, when the stronghold of Kars was stormed, the disease was borne by Turkish prisoners back to the Russian army; but the strict measures of Field-Marshal Count Paskewitsch prevented it from spreading further in the army.[[195]] But the inhabitants of Kars resisted these orders, and the result was that plague continued to rage there, partly in the garrison, which in twenty days had 530 plague-patients, and partly among the inhabitants, until September. The plague was conveyed by Turkish prisoners to Eriwan, to the region of Tiflis, and to other places. In the stronghold of Achalzich, situated midway between Batum and Tiflis, plague broke out in the year 1829; in the latter part of February the stronghold was besieged by the Turks, who were infected with plague. In consequence of a sortie of the small garrison on March 6, which resulted in the withdrawal of the Turks, since at the same time Russian reinforcements were approaching, the plague was conveyed to Achalzich, where the first cases occurred on March 10 in the garrison, and shortly afterwards among the inhabitants. On May 23 that part of the garrison which had been spared by the plague was marched out into the open country, and the stronghold was thoroughly cleansed, after which no more cases were reported. In the fall of 1829 plague completely disappeared from among the Transcaucasian troops, and from the territory under their control.