Of very great importance, as far as the war operations were concerned, was the fact that typhus fever, which in former years had played such a fatal rôle, did not make its appearance among the troops; according to most observers, the disease did not break out at all during the war. The Prussian troops along the Russian border were never entirely free from typhus fever; according to the German Health Report, 91 soldiers contracted the disease in the year 1867, 99 in the year 1868, and 37 in the year 1869. France itself had apparently been free from the disease for a long time, but there was always a possibility that it would be conveyed into the country from Algiers, where in the year 1868 a severe epidemic had raged in consequence of a great famine the year before; of the army in Algiers the disease had carried away 252 men (3·94 per cent).[246] Consequently both the Germans and the French watched very carefully any outbreaks of a disease involving symptoms of typhus fever. Cases of a disease held by the authorities to be typhus fever were reported from Nancy, Châlons-sur-Marne, Lunéville, and Metz, but careful investigations by von Niemeyer indicate that they were merely cases of typhoid fever exhibiting unusually well developed roseola. Several French physicians (Chauffard, Léon Colin, Kelsch) likewise testify to the fact that typhus fever did not appear in the French army during the entire war. Grellois, to be sure, asserts that typhus fever broke out about the middle of the siege of Metz and then suddenly disappeared. But even this assertion may fairly be questioned; at all events there was not a single soldier in the garrison suffering from the disease at the time of the capitulation, as Grellois himself admits.