When war was declared in Europe in 1914, there was only one military hospital in Van, Turkey, which was soon overcrowded with wounded and sick people. The conditions were extremely bad; There were only two surgeons and no nurses, only male soldiers helping. The conditions on the whole in the Ottoman army were almost bad beyond description. Soldiers, even at the front and who received the best care in comparative terms, were often (a) undernourished, (b) underclothed; troops deployed at high altitude in the mountains of Eastern Anatolia often had only summer clothes; Ottoman soldiers in Palestine often took great risks just to rob the British dead of their boots and even clothing; and (c) largely suffering from diseases (primarily cholera and typhus), which took many more lives than the actual fighting. The German general Friedrich Freiherr Kress von Kressenstein, in a report he wrote to army group headquarters on 20 October 1917, describes how a division (the 24th) that departed from Istanbul-Haydarpaşa Terminal with 10,057 men arrived at the Palestinian Front with only 4,635. 19% of the men had to be admitted to hospitals since they were suffering from various diseases, 24% had deserted and 8% were allocated on the way to various local needs.