Many died here, but the greater number was left
to its fate during the retreat of the army.
The quarters at Moscow until October 19th. improved the condition of the
army very little. Devoured by hunger, in want of all necessities, the army
had arrived. The terrible fire of the immense city had greatly reduced the
hope for comfortable winter quarters. Although the eatables which had been
saved from the fire were distributed among the soldiers who, during the
weeks of their sojourn, had wine, tea, coffee, meat, and bread, all
wholesome and plentiful, yet dysentery continued and in most patients had
assumed a typhoid character. [Footnote: The word typhoid means "resembling
typhus," and in Europe this term is correctly employed to designate a
somnolent or other general condition in all kinds of feverish diseases
which remind one of typhus symptoms. What English and American physicians
call typhus or typhus fever is known to European physicians under the name
of exanthematic or petechial typhus, indicating a symptom by which it is
distinguished from abdominal typhus.]
Besides, real typhus had now made its appearance in the army and, spreading
rapidly through infection, caused great loss of life and brought the misery
to a climax. The great number of the sick, crowded together in unfit
quarters; the stench of the innumerable unburied and putrefying cadavers of
men and animals in the streets of Moscow, among them the corpses of several
thousand Russians who had been taken prisoners and then massacred, not to
speak of the putrefying cadavers on the battlefields and roads over which
the army had marched, all this had finally developed into a pest-like
typhus.
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