Typhoid fever and dysentery were chiefly responsible for this high mortality. As at Metz, so also at Sedan and Paris, the troops suffered severely from typhoid fever. Large numbers of typhoid-fever patients were taken to lazarets in Germany; the Prussian lazarets alone took in 30,507, of whom 1,376 died. Typhoid fever raged furiously among the French prisoners of war, who usually brought the germ of the disease with them from the scene of the hostilities. ‘Most observers’, we read in the German Health Report,[240] ‘agree that the disease was most prevalent during the first three weeks after the arrival of large transports of prisoners at their place of detention; after that it gradually abated, and finally appeared only sporadically.’ The military prisons, however, while they often formed new sources of infection, did not help to disseminate the disease, owing to the advanced season of the year. It made considerable difference from what part of the scene of the war the prisoners came; those coming from Strassburg and Toul were much less severely infected with typhoid fever than those from Sedan and Metz. This applies particularly to General Bourbaki’s men, who manifested the least power of resistance to the disease. In Rastatt, for example, there were at one time sixty prisoners suffering from typhoid fever; of those who had come from Strassburg, Neubreisach, and Schlettstadt 13·3 per cent died; of those from Metz 14·5 per cent died, and of those from Bourbaki’s army 40·6 per cent died. Of the French prisoners confined in Germany (the maximum number was 374,995 and the average number 262,496) 15,020 contracted typhoid fever and 3,835 succumbed to it. The prevalence of the disease among the German troops, as compared with its prevalence among the French prisoners, is indicated by the following table: _No. per 1,000 that _No. that died per 100 succumbed to typhoid treated._ fever._ Mobile German army 11·2 12·0 Immobile German army[241] 3·0 4·1 French prisoners 14·6 25·6