According to Wittmann, there was not a single trace of an infectious disease in Mayence in September 1813. In October the field-lazarets of the army were transferred from Leipzig to the West, and most of them passed through Mayence; in the first part of November, moreover, the field-army itself passed through the city on its return march; thus sick and healthy soldiers conveyed typhus fever into the stronghold. ‘In the vicinity of the hospitals and churches, where sick soldiers were congregated, in the streets through which these doomed victims passed, and in the houses in which they were quartered together with healthy men, or into which they had crept from sheer inability to go further, contagious typhus broke out first and with the greatest severity.’[341] Dr. Petit, the commissary sent out by the government in Paris, did not have the courage to oppose the will of Marshal Marmont, who was in chief command, and so he sought to pacify the inhabitants by means of notices in the papers to the effect that the prevailing disease was neither epidemic nor infectious, and was only contagious typhus. After the investment was complete, typhus fever caused terrible devastation throughout the city. When the siege began, Mayence had a garrison of some 30,000 men, while the civil inhabitants numbered about 24,500; to the latter, however, must be added a considerable number of refugees from the surrounding country. The bad hospital arrangements, as always happened at that time, greatly helped to spread the disease in Mayence. According to a report made out by two French physicians and reproduced by Wittmann, the air in the hospitals was terrible; every bed was occupied by two patients, while the straw under them and the blankets over them were never changed or washed, so that they must necessarily have constituted a source of infection. A report by Kerckhoffs[342] regarding the Mayence hospitals describes even worse conditions: I was appointed to serve in the hospital established in the Municipal Octroi Building, and the first time that I went there I found the living and the dead, the wounded and the sick, scattered in confusion all over the place. The sick were stretched out on the floor, without even straw under them, covered with ordure. I was obliged to pick my way on tip-toe in order not to sink up to the ankles in filth. I saw sick men lying beside the dead bodies of their comrades. In effect, there were so many of them that they were lying on top of one another. In some of the rooms the windows were closed, so that no air could enter; in other rooms there was neither glass nor boarding in the doors or windows, notwithstanding the extreme cold. The sick men told me that they had been in that same position for two, three, and even four days, without having had a drop of water.