This cartoon set at the Austrian border with the Russian Empire is accompanied by a bit of nasty verse entitled “Cholera Russica” (in my slapdash translation):
The Slavic danger — how should I
Just say it? — is not an empty delusion;
On the contrary, it swells menacingly
In the south and in the east.
Defending against it, cannons are
Dispensable and rifles, too;
Only from sanitation troops alone
Can we make successful use.
In the south, where it is more primitive,
Yet still fruitless,
It besets us with vermin,
In the east with epidemics.
Now due to this realization the eastern one
Terrifies us especially clearly,
Since its main pathogen is just now
Loosing the prohibited heart of the epidemic;
Even though the tightest quarantine,
That we usually put in place,
Sets hardly more conditions than those,
That the Tsar himself always imposes.
And as for the man himself, it was not
A plague that instilled fear in him,
For whom the greatest of all plagues
Hasn’t yet withered him: his regime!
(Die Muskete, Vienna, 1910) (Or this bit of German verse in a similar vein.)
Sic Transit Pestilentia 