It was a gruesome sight to see the wagons full of naked corpses, thrown together in the most horrible positions, drive away from the hospitals and set out for their destination. Many bodies are said to have been cast into the Elbe. The terrible days began about the middle of May, when many house-owners were obliged to quarter as many as two, three, and even four hundred men. Presently persons suffering from wounds, scurvy, and infectious disease began to arrive from Bautzen, some straggling along piteously on foot, others being rolled along in ghastly groups on pushcarts. This disease-spreading mass was now housed in the homes of citizens, since the twenty-five hospitals were no longer able to accommodate them. The houses, yards, streets, and public squares were full of dirt and refuse. Dearth of food, resulting from the breakdown of means of supply, added to the general misery. Entire families were wiped out, and many houses are still standing empty (1814). Wagons bearing the dead clattered on all the streets, and there were few inhabitants who did not wear some outward sign of mourning for lost relatives. Leipzig suffered even greater hardships. The pestilence was conveyed thither by French soldiers in February 1813, and on the 27th of that month there were thirty-eight fever patients in the Jacobsspital. In the summer of 1813, when the war was going on in Saxony, the disease raged there furiously. After the battle of Dresden a large percentage of the wounded were brought to Leipzig, and more than 20,000 sick and wounded soldiers were kept there for several months. As usual, typhus fever broke out in the city in consequence of it, and carried away large numbers of soldiers and citizens. After the battle of Leipzig upwards of 30,000 wounded soldiers, mostly Frenchmen, were housed in the city. ‘Virulent nerve-fever,’ says Beitzke,[138] ‘which had been prevalent in the city for some time, now broke out with tenfold severity, not only in the city itself, but also in the surrounding country, and carried away large numbers of people. The arrival of the cold weather, which helped to check the disease, was under these circumstances a great blessing.’ In the year 1813 some 80,000 French soldiers, according to the hospital lists, succumbed to wounds, war-typhus, and other diseases, in Leipzig. From February 1813 to January 1814, seventeen young physicians died there of typhus fever. The number of civilians buried in Leipzig in the year 1813 was 3,499, in the year 1814 it was 2,022; the average number of interments in the years 1810–12 was 1,443, and in the years 1815–17 it was 1,187. The number buried (including the still-births, but not the soldiers) was, by months:[139]