The number of men in the army increased from 217,446 in April 1877, to 418,000 in March 1878. The military lazarets played an important and disastrous rôle in the dissemination of typhus fever, just as they had done in the Napoleonic Wars. ‘The lazaret-system adopted by the Roumanians’, says Niedner,[305] ‘proved utterly inadequate for the Russians. Scarcely a third of the regular division-hospitals and military hospitals were made mobile, and their number, as well as their equipment, was insufficient. The lazarets were supervised by the Hospital Department, and consequently lacked all medical management and were always missing wherever they were needed. The few available lazarets were overcrowded, and being full of dirt and refuse they merely constituted an added danger for the patients and for the inhabitants. Not until after long delay were additional barracks constructed, and these were so badly arranged that they offered very little relief from the condition of overcrowding in the hospitals. Above all, there was a lack of means for disinfection and of clean linen, and this rendered it inevitable that large quantities of infectious material should accumulate in the lazarets, and that convalescents discharged from these hospitals should be more likely to infect other people with whom they came in contact along the military roads.’ The transporting of these convalescents back to Russia began in the first part of the campaign; they not only spread the disease all along the military roads, but large numbers of them conveyed it back to Russia itself, where it appeared in countless localities and soon developed into a widespread epidemic of typhus fever. At the end of the campaign, to be sure, conditions improved; in the spring of the year 1878 a commission appointed for the purpose finally succeeded in establishing certain rules governing sanitation in the lazarets, and in bringing it about that typhus fever patients were everywhere isolated. When the war was over the troops were transported back home across the Black Sea, along the coast of which, in the ports of Réni, Nikolayev, Sebastopol, and Odessa, health-committees had been appointed to see to it that the sick soldiers were congregated by themselves.