Silesia was hit extremely hard. The pestilence was conveyed there in the months of October, November, and December 1812 by transports of Russian prisoners, and it appeared in Trebnitz, Striegau, Krottkau, Friedenwalde, Trachenberg, Breslau, Parchwitz, Quaritz, &c. The officers on duty, the persons who lifted the patients from the wagons, the physicians, and the sick-attendants were always the first to be infected.[127] With the opening of spring the disease disappeared, but broke out anew after the battle on the Katzbach. In Breslau the disease appeared in a very virulent form, since the infected soldiers were housed there in overcrowded lazarets, which in the month of November took in some 6,300 patients daily; numerous physicians (statements vary between 16 and 22) also succumbed to typhus fever. Among the civil inhabitants, to be sure, the disease did not become very widespread; out of a population of 62,789, only 3,055 died in the year 1812, 3,095 in the year 1813, and 3,301 in the year 1814. From the middle of September 1813 to February 1814, 478 civilians and some 1,800 soldiers succumbed in Breslau to typhus fever; the total number of soldiers that died between the middle of September and the beginning of March was 3,400.[128] In the governmental district of Liegnitz, having a population of 600,000, according to Kausch[129] only 13 physicians (excluding the surgeons) died. The disease was borne by transports of infected soldiers into other parts of Silesia, and at the end of the year 1813 all the military lazarets in Silesia were infected. In Waldenburg and vicinity (Obersalzbrunn, &c.) typhus fever broke out after the soldiers had marched through on October 20 and November 25, 1813, and seventeen days later the disease was very widespread, all the members of many families having contracted it. In Bunzlau typhus fever raged with unusual fury; in the military lazaret 12,000 men are said to have died between June 1813 and March 1814. Presently typhus fever appeared, with the arrival of the remnants of the Grand Army, in regions further away from the Russian border. Häser[130] describes the manner in which the disease spread, always along military roads, as follows: ‘French soldiers returning from Russia’, he says, ‘spread the contagion of various diseases over a large part of Central Europe. Almost naked, or clothed in torn and half-burned rags, without shoes, their feet covered with straw, and their frozen limbs covered with festering sores, they marched through Poland and Germany. Typhus fever and other diseases associated with it marked their course. The inhabitants of the country were forced to house the sick; but teamsters also conveyed the infection to villages which the soldiers did not visit. The disease raged most furiously in the hospitals, which scarcely anywhere were able to meet even the most modest demands made upon them.’