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.