In Alsace an epidemic of bubonic plague broke out in August 1636; it had been brought there by the troops of the Count-Palatine von Birkenfeld and became very widespread among the fugitives in the overcrowded city of Strassburg. From thirty to forty bodies were buried in a single day, and in the entire year there were 5,546 deaths, including 1,000 fugitives and soldiers. The disease continued to reveal its presence until the next spring, and by that time 8,000 persons are said to have died in Strassburg. In the year 1635–6, owing to the perpetual condition of war, which made it impossible to cultivate the fields, there ensued a terrible famine, and this did a great deal to further the dissemination of pestilence. Zabern, where there was a strong garrison, and where many soldiers were quartered, suffered terribly in the year 1634, and again in the years 1635–6 widespread pestilences broke out; in 1636 the Imperialists died there ‘like cattle’. Lorraine also suffered terribly. In the year 1635 Bernhard von Weimar and Cardinal La Valette were obliged to retreat before Gallas to the vicinity of Metz, where they arrived on October 1; the troops brought fever, dysentery, and ‘Swedish plague’ with them; the last-named disease, which has been held to be typhus fever, became more widespread in Metz in the year 1636 than it had ever been before—it was _la plus meurtrière et la plus désastreuse des temps modernes dans notre pays_.[43] The precautionary measures of the city administration—cleaning of the streets, isolation of the patients, closing of infected houses—were of no avail. Many bodies were cast into the Mosel, and before the gates of the city the streets and fields were covered with dead men and horses. Also in the neighbouring cities, especially in Verdun and Nancy, the losses in consequence of the pestilence were great. Conditions were equally bad in the adjacent Luxemburg. ‘The French as enemies,’ says Lammert,[44] ‘the Croats, Hungarians, and Poles as defenders, committed the most terrible devastations in the country through which they passed. Famine, poverty, and a furious pestilence completed the misery. Entire villages were wiped out; in the city of Luxemburg the churchyards no longer had room for the bodies, and places for burial had to be prepared within the fortifications. Throughout the entire province 11,000 persons, one-third of the inhabitants, lost their lives.’ In the year 1637 Count Bernhard von Weimar transferred the scene of the war into southern Baden, where, during the siege of Breisach, from July 5 to December 18, 1638, an epidemic of scurvy caused increased misery. In the year 1639 large numbers of people in the Lörrach district were carried away by the pestilence, among them Count Bernhard himself. _3. North Germany (1636–40)_