The Saxon strongholds along the Elbe fared worst of all; regarding the terrible devastation caused by typhus fever in Torgau we shall have something to say in the tenth chapter. Magdeburg and Merseburg were also severely attacked; this is evident from the fact that one-half of the physicians in Magdeburg (nine in number) succumbed, according to Roloff, to hospital fever.[142] In Wittenberg, whither typhus fever was borne in February 1813 by infected French soldiers, and where it had subsequently disappeared, the mortality was very high during the siege, which lasted from October 28, 1813, to January 14, 1814; of 6,000 or 7,000 inhabitants, upwards of 4,000 had left the city before the siege began. In the course of seven months (July 1813 to January 1814) 590 people died there, whereas the average number of deaths had been only 300 per annum. When the city was captured by the Prussians the death-rate increased; no less than 331 persons died between January 14 and April 14, 1814.[143] After the battle of Leipzig the defeated army marched back through Weissenfels, Naumburg, Weimar, and Erfurt to the Main. There was now no active effort made to supply food to the army, which still numbered some 100,000 men; the soldiers had to eat whatever they could pick up along the way. ‘Extreme misery and exhaustion’, says Beitzke,[144] ‘led to great excesses; the places along the route were made to suffer, and worst of all, the region through which the French army hurried back was generally infected with the germ of typhus fever.’ ‘The route of the army, clear to Mayence,’ says Giraud,[145] ‘was again strewn with corpses and débris.’