The malady communicated itself to the 27th battalion of the _chasseurs- à-pied_, and soon assumed alarming proportions. It could not well be otherwise with hospitals crowded to overflowing, and no temporary hospitals yet erected. Even as late as the 10th September I received the following letter:—“We are here in a terrible plight from a sanitary point of view. It is positively inhuman to treat the sick as we are forced to do. A few beds and mattresses have just arrived. We have utilised them for the worst cases. The others are lying on the ground between two rugs or in litters. They are all dressed, without sheets, and are placed side by side. I have two basins for the use of eighty typhoid patients, and hardly any medicines. It is now three months that A—— has been garrisoned. Of 2500 men, 500 have gone into hospital, 300 are convalescent, 85 are dead, and 80 are still down with more or less severe typhoid fever. This is the sanitary condition at ——. It is the same thing everywhere.” Ten days later another of my colleagues wrote to me in a similar strain:—“I have 125 sick in my hospital. Nearly all of them are down with typhoid fever, and unfortunately of an aggravated form, for I have already lost twenty. It is like this all over the country. Medicines, comforts, and above all linen, are everywhere wanting. We cannot even attempt to put our poor typhoid patients on beds. If we only had a sufficient number of litters, or even some clean sheets and coverlids! But we have nothing of the kind. We are forced to leave the sick dressed and without sheets between two blankets. Any attempt to wash or disinfect them is out of the question, and we have been in the field already for six months!” A third writes:—“In three months I have treated 1200 sick, of which 80 died. In 78 of these cases the disease was typhoid fever. Like the rest of my colleagues I received orders to send to the Algerian hospitals all the sick who were not absolutely in a dying condition. How many of them will survive the journey performed while the disease is at its height?” Now comes perhaps the gravest side of this sad story; another phase of the same policy of external and internal deception and duplicity:—