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Title: Florence Nightingale - A Biography
Author: Matheson, Annie
Language: English
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[Illustration: Florence Nightingale.
(_From a model of the statue by A. G. Walker. By kind permission of the
Sculptor._)]
FLORENCE
NIGHTINGALE
A BIOGRAPHY
BY
ANNIE MATHESON
AUTHOR OF
“THE STORY OF A BRAVE CHILD (JOAN OF ARC)”
THOMAS NELSON AND SONS
LONDON, EDINBURGH, DUBLIN, AND NEW YORK
[Illustration: “The Lady with the Lamp.”
(_From the statuette in the Nightingale Home._)]
PREFACE.
It is hardly necessary to say that this little biography is based
mainly upon the work of others, though I hope and believe it is honest
enough to have an individuality of its own and it has certainly cost
endless individual labour and anxiety. Few tasks in literature are in
practice more worrying than the responsibility of “piecing together”
other people’s fragments, and “the great unknown” who in reviewing my
“Leaves of Prose” thought I had found an easy way of turning myself into
respectable cement for a tessellated pavement made of other people’s
chipped marble, was evidently a stranger to my particular temperament.
Where I have been free to express myself without regard to others, to use
only my own language, and utter only my own views, I have had something
of the feeling of a child out for a holiday, and of course the greater
part of the book is in my own words. But I have often, for obvious
reasons, chosen the humbler task, because, wherever it is possible, it
is good that my readers should have their impressions at first hand, and
in regard to Kinglake especially, from whose non-copyright volumes I
have given many a page, his masculine tribute to Miss Nightingale is of
infinitely more value than any words which could come from me.
My publisher has kindly allowed me to leave many questions of copyright
to him, but I wish, not the less—rather the more—to thank all those
authors and publishers who have permitted use of their material and whose
names will, in many instances, be found incorporated in the text or in
the accompanying footnotes. I have not thought it necessary in every
instance to give a reference to volume and page, though occasionally, for
some special reason of my own, I have done so.
Of those in closest touch with Miss Nightingale during her lifetime,
whose help with original material has been invaluable, not more than
one can be thanked by name. But to Mrs. Tooley for her large-hearted
generosity with regard to her own admirable biography—to which I owe far
more than the mere quotations so kindly permitted, and in most cases so
clearly acknowledged in the text—it is a great pleasure to express my
thanksgiving publicly.
There are many others who have helped me, and not once with regard to
the little sketch have I met with any unkindness or rebuff. Indeed, so
various are the acknowledgments due, and so sincere the gratitude I feel,
that I scarcely know where to begin.
To Miss Rickards, for the pages from her beautiful life of Felicia
Skene, I wish to record heartfelt thanks; and also to Messrs. Burns
and Oates with regard to lengthy quotations from the letters of Sister
Aloysius—a deeply interesting little volume published by them in 1904,
under the title of “A Sister of Mercy’s Memories of the Crimea;” to Dr.
Hagberg Wright of the London Library for the prolonged loan of a whole
library of books of reference and the help always accessible to his
subscribers; and to the librarian of the Derby Free Library for aid in
verifying pedigree. Also to Lord Stanmore for his generous permission to
use long extracts from his father’s “Life of Lord Herbert,” from which
more than one valuable letter has been taken; and to Mr. John Murray for
sanctioning this and for like privileges in relation to the lives of
Sir John MacNeill and Sir Bartle Frere. To Messrs. William Blackwood,
Messrs. Cassell, Messrs. G. P. Putnam and Sons, as well as to the editors
and publishers of the _Times_, _Daily Telegraph_, _Morning Post_, and
_Evening News_, I wish to add my thanks to those of my publisher.
To any reader of this book it will be clear how great a debt I owe to
General Evatt, and he knows, I think, how sincerely I recognize it. Mr.
Stephen Paget, the writer of the article on Miss Nightingale in the
Dictionary of National Biography, has not only permitted me to quote from
that—a privilege for which I must also thank Messrs. Smith Elder, and Sir
Sidney Lee—but has, in addition, put me in the way of other priceless
material wherewith to do honour to the subject of this biography. I
have long been grateful to him for the inspiration and charm of his own
“Confessio Medici”—there is now this other obligation to add to that.
Nor can I forgo cordial acknowledgments to the writer and also the
publisher of the charming sketch of Miss Nightingale’s Life published
some years ago by the Pilgrim Press and entitled “The Story of Florence
Nightingale.”
To my friend Dr. Lewis N. Chase I owe the rare privilege of an
introduction to Mr. Walker, the sculptor, who has so graciously permitted
for my frontispiece a reproduction of the statue he has just completed as
a part of our national memorial to Miss Nightingale.
I desire to thank Miss Rosalind Paget for directing me to sources of
information and bestowing on me treasures of time and of memory, as well
as Miss Eleanor F. Rathbone and the writer of Sir John MacNeill’s Life
for help given by their books, and Miss Marion Holmes for permission to
quote from her inspiring monograph; and last, but by no means least, to
express my sense of the self-sacrificing magnanimity with which Miss
E. Brierly, the present editor of _Nursing Notes_, at once offered me
and placed in my hands—what I should never have dreamed of asking,
even had I been a friend of old standing, instead of a comparative
stranger—everything she herself had gathered together and preserved as
bearing on the life of Florence Nightingale.
When, under the influence of certain articles in the _Times_, I
undertook to write this volume for Messrs. Nelson, I knew nothing of the
other biographies in the field. Nor had I any idea that an officially
authorized life was about to be written by Sir Edward Cook, a biographer
with an intellectual equipment far beyond my own, but who will not
perhaps grudge me the name of friend, since his courteous considerateness
for all leads many others to make a like claim, and the knowledge that
he would put no obstacle in my path has spared me what might have been
a serious difficulty. Had I known all this, a decent modesty might have
prevented my undertaking. But in every direction unforeseen help has been
showered upon me, and nothing but my own inexorable limitations have
stood in my way.
If there be any who, by their books, or in any other way, have helped me,
but whom by some unhappy oversight I have omitted to name in these brief
documentary thanks, I must earnestly beg them to believe that such an
error is contrary to my intention and goodwill.
CONTENTS
Introductory Chapter 15
I. Florence Nightingale: her home, her birthplace, and her
family 25
II. Life at Lea Hurst and Embley 41
III. The weaving of many threads, both of evil and of good 55
IV. The activities of girlhood—Elizabeth Fry—Felicia Skene
again 62
V. Home duties and pleasures—The brewing of war 71
VI. Pastor Fliedner 90
VII. Years of preparation 101
VIII. The beginning of the war—A sketch of Sidney Herbert 117
IX. The Crimean muddle—Explanations and excuses 134
X. “Five were wise, and five foolish” 142
XI. The expedition 162
XII. The tribute of Kinglake and Macdonald and the Chelsea
Pensioners 172
XIII. The horrors of Scutari—The victory of the Lady-in-Chief—The
Queen’s letter—Her gift of butter and treacle 200
XIV. Letters from Scutari—Kinglake on Miss Nightingale and her
dynasty—The refusal of a new contingent 216
XV. The busy nursing hive—M. Soyer and his memories—Miss
Nightingale’s complete triumph over prejudice—The
memories of Sister Aloysius 235
XVI. Inexactitudes—Labels—Cholera—“The Lady with the Lamp”—Her
humour—Letters of Sister Aloysius 247
XVII. Miss Nightingale visits Balaclava—Her illness—Lord
Raglan’s visit—The Fall of Sebastopol 261
XVIII. The Nightingale Fund—Miss Nightingale remains at her
post, organizing healthy occupations for the men off
duty—Sisters of Mercy—The Queen’s jewel—Its meaning 274
XIX. Her citizenship—Her initiative—Public recognition and
gratitude—Her return incognito—Village excitement—The
country’s welcome—Miss Nightingale’s broken health—The
Nightingale Fund—St. Thomas’s Hospital—Reform of
nursing as a profession 292
XX. William Rathbone—Agnes Jones—Infirmaries—Nursing in
the homes of the poor—Municipal work—Homely power
of Miss Nightingale’s writings—Lord Herbert’s death 312
XXI. Multifarious work and many honours—Jubilee Nurses—Nursing
Association—Death of father and mother—Lady Verney and
her husband—No respecter of persons—From within four
walls—South Africa and America 331
XXII. India—Correspondence with Sir Bartle Frere—Interest
in village girls—The Lamp 346
XXIII. A brief summing up 360
APPENDIX 367
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
Statue of Florence Nightingale by A. G. Walker _Frontispiece_
“The Lady with the Lamp.” Statuette _Facing p._ 8
Embley Park, Romsey, Hants ” 16
Florence Nightingale’s Father ” 32
Florence Nightingale (after Augustus Egg, R.A.) ” 88
Florence Nightingale in 1854 ” 112
At the Therapia Hospital ” 176
At Scutari ” 192
Miss Nightingale’s Medals and Decorations ” 280
The Nightingale Nursing Carriage ” 296
At the Herbert Hospital, Woolwich ” 304
A Letter from Miss Nightingale ” 320
Miss Nightingale’s London House ” 344
Florence Nightingale in her Last Days ” 352
INTRODUCTORY CHAPTER FOR THE ELDERS IN MY AUDIENCE.
It is my hope that my younger readers may find this volume all the
more to their liking if it is not without interest to people of my own
generation. Girls and boys of fourteen to sixteen are already on the
threshold of manhood and womanhood, but even of children I am sure it
is true that they hate to be “written down to,” since they are eagerly
drinking in hopes and ideas which they cannot always put into words, and
to such hopes and ideas they give eager sympathy of heart and curiosity
of mind.
[Illustration: Florence Nightingale’s Home, Embley Park, Romsey, Hants.]
For one of her St. Thomas’s nurses, among the first nine women to be
decorated with the Red Cross, the heroine of this story wrote what might
well be the marching orders of many a good soldier in the divine army,
and not least, perhaps, of those boy scouts and girl guides who would
like better a life of adventure than the discipline of a big school or
the “duties enough and little cares” of a luxurious home; and as the
words have not, so far as I am aware, appeared in print before, it may be
worth while to give them here:—
“Soldiers,” she wrote, “must obey orders. And to you the
‘roughing’ it has been the resigning yourself to ‘comforts’
which you detested and to work which you did not want, while
the work which wanted you was within reach. A severe kind
of ‘roughing’ indeed—perhaps the severest, as I know by sad
experience.
“But it will not last. This short war is not life. But all will
depend—your possible future in the work, we pray for you, O my
Cape of Good Hope—upon the name you gain here. That name I know
will be of one who obeys authority, however unreasonable, in
the name of Him who is above all, and who is Reason itself—of
one who submits to disagreeables, however unjust, for the
work’s sake and for His who tells us to love those we don’t
like—a precept I follow oh so badly—of one who never criticizes
so that it can even be guessed at that she has criticism in her
heart—and who helps her companions to submit by her own noble
example....
“I have sometimes found in my life that the very hindrances
I had been deploring were there expressly to fit me for
the next step in my life. (This was the case—hindrances of
_years_—before the Crimean War.)” And elsewhere she writes: “To
have secured for you all the _circumstances_ we wished for your
work, I would gladly have given my life. But you are made to
rise above circumstances; perhaps this is God’s way—His ways
are not as our ways—of preparing you for the great work which I
am persuaded He has in store for you some day.”
It is touching to find her adding in parenthesis that before her own work
was given to her by the Great Unseen Commander, she had ten years of
contradictions and disappointments, and adding, as if with a sigh from
the heart, “And oh, how badly I did it!”
There we have the humility of true greatness. All her work was amazing
in its fruitfulness, but those who knew her best feel sometimes that the
part of her work which was greatest of all and will endure longest is
just the part of which most people know least. I mean her great labour
of love for India, which I cannot doubt has already saved the lives of
millions, and will in the future save the health and working power of
millions more.
Florence Nightingale would have enriched our calendar of uncanonized
saints even if her disciplined high-hearted goodness had exercised an
unseen spell by simply _being_, and had, by some limitation of body or
of circumstance, been cut off from much active _doing_: for so loving
and obedient a human will, looking ever to the Highest, as a handmaiden
watches the eyes of her mistress, is always and everywhere a humane
influence and a divine offering. But in her life—a light set on a
hill—being and doing went hand in hand in twofold beauty and strength,
for even through those years when she lay on her bed, a secluded
prisoner, her activities were world-wide.
In addition to the work for which she is most widely revered and loved,
Miss Nightingale did three things—each leaving a golden imprint upon the
history of our time:—
She broke down a “Chinese wall” of prejudice with regard to the
occupations of women, and opened up a new and delightful sphere of hard,
but congenial, work for girls.
She helped to reconstruct, on the lines of feminine common sense,
the hygiene and the transport service of our army—yes, of the entire
imperial army, for what is a success in one branch of our dominions
cannot permanently remain unaccepted by the rest. And in all her work for
our army she had, up to the time of his death, unbounded help from her
friend, Lord Herbert.
Last, and perhaps greatest of all, she initiated, with the help of Sir
Bartle Frere, Sir John Lawrence, and other enlightened men of her time,
the reform of insanitary and death-dealing neglect throughout the length
and breadth of India, thus saving countless lives, not only from death,
but from what is far worse—a maimed or invalid existence of lowered
vitality and lessened mental powers.
One of her friends, himself a great army doctor holding a high official
position, has repeatedly spoken of her to me as the supreme embodiment
of citizenship. She did indeed exemplify what Ruskin so nobly expressed
in his essay on “Queens’ Gardens”—the fact that, while men and women
differ profoundly and essentially, and life would lose in beauty if they
did not, the state has need of them both; for what the woman should be
at her own hearth, the guardian of order, of health, of beauty, and of
love, that also should she be at that wider imperial hearth where there
are children to be educated, soldiers to be equipped, wounded lives to be
tended, and the health of this and future generations to be diligently
guarded.
“Think,” she said once to one of her nurses, “less of what you may
gain than of what you may give.” Herself, she gave royally—gave her
fortune, her life, her soul’s treasure. I read in a recent contemporary
of high standing a review which ended with what seemed to me a very
heathen sentence, which stamped itself on my memory by its arrogant
narrowness. “Woman,” wrote the reviewer, “is always either frustrate
or absorbed;” and there leaped to my heart the exclamation, “Here in
Florence Nightingale is the answer; for in her we have one, known and
read of all men, who was neither the one nor the other.” That there was
supreme renunciation in her life, none who is born to womanhood can
doubt; for where could there be any who would have been more superbly
fitted for what she herself regarded as the natural lot of woman as wife
and mother? But she, brilliant, beautiful, and worshipped, was called
to a more difficult and lonely path, and if there was hidden suffering,
it did but make her service of mankind the more untiring, her practical
and keen-edged intellect the more active in good work, her tenderness to
pain and humility of self-effacement the more beautiful and just.
It has been said, and said truly, that she did not suffer fools gladly,
and she knew well how very human she was in this and in other ways, as
far removed from a cold and statuesque faultlessness as are all ardent,
swift, loving natures here on earth. But her words were words of wisdom
when she wrote to one dear to her whom she playfully named “her Cape of
Good Hope”: “Let us be persecuted for righteousness’ sake, _but not for
unrighteousness_.”
The italics are mine, because in their warning they seem so singularly
timely. And the entire sentence is completely in tune with that fine note
with which she ends one of her delightful volumes on nursing—
“I would earnestly ask my sisters to keep clear of both the jargons
now current everywhere (for they are equally jargons): of the jargon,
namely, about the ‘rights’ of women which urges women to do all that men
do, including the medical and other professions, merely because men do
it, and without regard to whether this _is_ the best that women can do;
and of the jargon which urges women to do nothing that men do, merely
because they are women, and should be ‘recalled to a sense of their duty
as women,’ and because ‘this is women’s work,’ and ‘that is men’s,’ and
‘these are things which women should not do,’ which is all assertion and
nothing more. Surely woman should bring the best she has, _whatever_ that
is, to the work of God’s world, without attending to either of these
cries. For what are they, both of them, the one _just_ as much as the
other, but listening to the ‘what people will say,’ to opinion, to the
‘voices from without’? And as a wise man has said, no one has ever done
anything great or useful by listening to the voices from without.
“You do not want the effect of your good things to be, ‘How wonderful
for a _woman_!’ nor would you be deterred from good things by hearing
it said, ‘Yes, but she ought not to have done this, because it is not
suitable for a woman.’ But you want to do the thing that is good,
whether it is ‘suitable for a woman,’ or not.
“It does not make a thing good, that it is remarkable that a woman should
have been able to do it. Neither does it make a thing bad, which would
have been good had a man done it, that it has been done by a woman.
“Oh, leave these jargons, and go your way straight to God’s work, in
simplicity and singleness of heart.”
CHAPTER I.
_Florence Nightingale: her home, her birthplace, and her
family._
In the heart of Derbyshire there is a quaint old church, once a private
chapel, and possessing, instead of a churchyard, a bit of quiet
greenness, of which the chief ornament, besides the old yew tree at the
church door, is a kind of lovers’ bower made by two ancient elder trees
which have so intertwined their branches as to form an arbour, where in
summer-time sweethearts can gossip and the children play. It belonged to
a world far away from the world of to-day, when, in the high-backed pews
reserved for the “quality,” little Florence Nightingale, in her Sunday
attire that was completed by Leghorn hat and sandal shoes, made, Sunday
after Sunday, a pretty vision for the villagers, in whose cottages she
was early a welcome visitor. It was just such a church as we read of in
George Eliot’s stories, clerk and parson dividing the service between
them, and the rustic bareness of the stone walls matched by the visible
bell-ropes and the benches for the labouring people. But the special
story that has come down from those days suggests that the parson was
more satirical than Mr. Gilfil or Mr. Tryan, and it is to be feared that
when he remarked that “a lie is a very useful thing in trade,” the people
who quoted him in Derby market-place merely used his “Devil’s text” as
a convenience and saw no satire in it at all. Have we really travelled
a little way towards honesty since those days, or have we grown more
hypocritical?
The little girl in the squire’s pew grew up in a home where religious
shams were not likely to be taken at their face value.
Her father, who was one of the chief supporters of the cheap schools
of the neighbourhood, had his own ways of helping the poor folk on his
estate, but used to reply to some of the beseeching people who wanted
money from him for local charities that he was “not born generous.”
Generous or not, he had very decided views about the education of his
two children, Florence and Parthe. They enjoyed nearly a hundred years
ago (Florence was born in 1820) as liberal a course of study as any High
School girl of to-day, and no doubt it is true that the orderliness of
mind and character, at which his methods aimed, proved of countless value
to Florence in those later days, when her marvellous power in providing
for minutest details without unnecessary fuss or friction banished the
filth and chaos of the first Crimean hospitals, and transformed them
into abodes of healing and of order. She grew up to be a beautiful and
charming woman, for whom men would gladly have laid down their lives; yet
her beauty and her charm alone could not have secured for our wounded
soldiers in the Crimea, tortured by dirt and neglect, the swift change to
cleanness and comfort and good nursing which her masterly and unbending
methods aided her commanding personal influence to win.
But this is leaping too far ahead. As yet she is only Parthenope’s
little playfellow and schoolfellow in the room devoted to “lessons” at
Lea Hall, the small maiden who climbs the hill on Sundays to the church
where the yew tree guards the door, and on week-days is busy or at play
in the house that has been the home of her father’s family through many
generations, and in the grounds of the manor that surround it.
Lea Hall is in that part of the country which Father Benson has described
in his novel, “Come Rack, come Rope,” and the Nightingale children
were within easy reach of Dethick Hall, where young Anthony Babington
had lived. It must have added zest to their history lessons and their
girlish romancings to hear of the secret passage, which was supposed to
lead right into Wingfield Manor, from the underground cellar close to
the old wall that showed still where Dethick had once reared its stately
buildings. The fact that the farm bailiff now kept his potatoes there
and could not find the opening, would only make it a constant new ground
for adventure and imagination. For they would be told of course—these
children—how Mary Stuart had once been a prisoner at Dethick, and Anthony
had vowed to be her servant in life or death and never cease from the
struggle to set her free so long as life was in him. Nor did he; for he
died before her, and it was not at Wingfield, but at Fotheringay, as
these little students very well knew, no doubt, that her lovely head soon
afterwards was laid upon the block.
Enviable children to have such a playground of imagination at their
doors! But, indeed, all children have that, and a bare room in a slum,
or a little patch of desert ground, may for them be danced over by Queen
Mab and all her fairies, or guarded by the very angel who led St. Peter
out of prison. Still, it is very exciting to have history written beside
the doorstep where you live, and if you grow up in a home where lesson
books are an important part of the day’s duties, it is pleasant to find
them making adventures for you on your father’s own estate. It mattered
nothing that the story would all be told by those contending against
Anthony’s particular form of religion, who would be ready to paint him
with as black an ink as their regard for justice would allow. To a child,
that would rather enhance the vividness of it all. And there was the
actual kitchen still standing, with its little harmless-looking trapdoor
in the roof that leads into the secret chamber, where the persecuted
priests used to hide when they came to celebrate a secret Mass. No
wonder the two children delighted in Dethick, and wove many a tale
about it. For had they not seen with their very own eyes the great open
fireplace in that kitchen, where venison used to be roasted, and the very
roasting-jack hanging from its central beam where all the roof-beams were
black with age and dark with many tragic memories?
Dethick is but one of the three villages included in the ancient manor,
the other two are Lea and Holloway; and in the days of King John, long
before it came to the Nightingales, the De Alveleys had built a chapel
there. Those who have read Mr. Skipton’s life of Nicholas Ferrar and know
their John Inglesant, will be interested to hear that half this manor had
passed through the hands of the Ferrars among others, and another portion
had belonged to families whose names suggest a French origin. But the
two inheritances had now met in the hands of the Nightingales.
It is a very enchanting part of the Midlands. The silvery Derwent
winds through the valleys, keeping fresh the fields of buttercups and
meadowsweet and clover, and in the tall hedges wild roses mingle their
sweetness with the more powerful fragrance of the honeysuckle, until both
yield to the strange and overwhelming perfume of the elder tree. The
limestone hills, with their bold and mountainlike outline, their tiny
rills, and exquisite ferns, had been less spoiled in those days by the
tramp of tourists; and the purity of the air, the peacefulness of the
upland solitudes, would have a wholesome share in the “grace that can
mould the maiden’s form by silent sympathy.”
[Illustration: Florence Nightingale’s Father.]
It was a very youthful little maiden as yet who had been transplanted
into these English wilds from the glory and the sunshine of the Italy
where she was born. After the valley of the Arno and the splendours of
Florence, it may have seemed somewhat cold and bracing at times. Rightly
or wrongly, the father of the little girls—for our heroine’s sister,
named after another Italian city, shared all her life at this time—seems
to a mere outsider a little cold and bracing too. He came of a very old
family, and we hear of his “pride of birth.” His wife, on the other
hand, whom Florence Nightingale resembled, lives before us in more warm
and glowing colours, as one who did much to break down the barriers of
caste and, with a heart of overflowing love, “went about doing good.”
Both were people of real cultivation—good breeding being theirs by a
happy inheritance—and each seems to have had a strong and distinctive
personality. It might not be easy to say to which of the two the little
daughter, who grew to such world-wide fame, owed most; but probably
the equipment for her life-work was fairly divided between the two.
There is no magnet so powerful as force of character, and it is clear
that her father possessed moral and intellectual force of a notable
sort. Love, in the sense of enthusiasm for humanity, will always be the
heaven-born gift of one in whom religion is such a reality as it was with
Florence Nightingale, but religious ardour may be sadly ineffective
if defeated by the slack habits of a lifetime, or even by a moral and
mental vagueness that befogs holy intentions. Mr. Edward Nightingale’s
daughters were disciplined in a schoolroom where slackness and disorder
were not permitted, and a somewhat severe training in the classics was
supplemented by the example of Mrs. Nightingale’s excellent housewifery,
and by that fine self-control in manners and behaviour which in the
old-fashioned days used to be named “deportment.” Sports and outdoor
exercises were a part—and a delightful part—of the day’s routine.
But let us go back a few years and give a few pages to the place of
Florence Nightingale’s birth and the history of her family. Her name,
like that of another social reformer among Englishwomen, was linked
with Italy, and she took it from the famous old Italian town in
whose neighbourhood she was born. I have tried in vain to trace the
authorship[1]—was it Ruskin or some less known writer?—who said of
that town, “if you wish to see it to perfection, fix upon such a day as
Florence owes the sun, and, climbing the hill of Bellosguardo, or past
the stages of the Via Crucis to the church of San Miniato, look forth
upon the scene before you. You trace the course of the Arno from the
distant mountains on the right, through the heart of the city, winding
along the fruitful valley toward Pisa. The city is beneath you, like a
pearl set in emerald. All colours are in the landscape, and all sounds
are in the air. The hills look almost heathery. The sombre olive and
funereal cypress blend with the graceful acacia and the clasping vine.
The hum of the insect and the carol of bird chime with the blithe voices
of men; while dome, tower, mountains, the yellow river, the quaint
bridges, spires, palaces, gardens, and the cloudless heavens overhanging,
make up a panorama on which to gaze in trance of rapture until the spirit
wearies from the exceeding beauty of the vision.”
When on May 12, 1820, Florence Nightingale was born, her parents were
staying at the Villa Colombaia, near to this beautiful City of Flowers;
and when the question of a name for her arose, they were of one mind
about it—she must be called after the city itself. They had no sons, and
this child’s elder sister, their only other daughter, having been born at
Naples, had taken its ancient and classical name of Parthenope.[2]
Their own family name had changed. Mr. Nightingale, who was first known
as William Edward Shore, was the only son of Mr. William Shore of Tapton,
in Derbyshire, and the child who was to reform England’s benighted views
of nursing, and do so much for the health, not only of our British
troops, but also of our Indian Army, was related through that family
to John Shore, a famous physician in Derby in the reign of Charles the
Second, as well as to the Governor-General of India who, twenty-three
years before her birth, took the title of Baron Teignmouth. It was
through her father’s mother, the only daughter of Mr. Evans of Cromford,
that she was linked with the family of the Nightingales, whose name her
father afterwards took. Mary Evans, her paternal grandmother, was the
niece of “Old Peter,” a rich and roystering squire, who was well liked
in his own neighbourhood, in spite of his nickname of “Madman Peter”
and the rages that now and then overtook him. Florence Nightingale
was, however, no descendant of his, for he never married, and all his
possessions, except those which he sold to Sir Richard Arkwright, the
famous cotton-spinner, came to his niece, who was the mother of Miss
Nightingale’s father. When all this landed property came into the
hands of Mr. Edward Shore, three years before his marriage and five
years before Florence was born, his name was changed under the Prince
Regent’s sign manual from Shore to Nightingale, in accordance with Peter
Nightingale’s will. But he continued to live in Italy for a great part of
every year until Florence was nearly five years old, though the change of
ownership on the English estate was at once felt under the new squire,
who was in most ways the very opposite of that “Old Peter,” of whom we
read that when he had been drinking, as was then the fashion, he would
frighten away the servant-maids by rushing into the kitchen and throwing
the puddings on the dust-heap.
Mr. Edward Nightingale, our heroine’s father, bore a character without
fear or reproach. Educated at Edinburgh and at Trinity, Cambridge, he had
afterwards travelled a good deal, at a time when travel was by no means
the commonplace that it is now.
He is described as “tall and slim,” and from the descriptions we have of
him it is clear that no one, even at a glance, could have missed the note
of distinction in his bearing, or mistaken him for other than that which
he was proud to be, the cultivated and enlightened son of a fine old
family.
When we read that the lady he married was daughter of a strong
Abolitionist, Mr. William Smith of Parndon, in Essex, we feel that the
very name of Abolitionist belongs to a bygone past.
In those days the American Civil War was still to come, but the horizon
was already beginning to blacken for it, just as in Europe, while two
happy little girls were playing hide-and-seek in the gardens of Lea Hall
and racing with their dogs across the meadows to Dethick, the hush
before the tempest did not blind wise statesmen to those dangers in the
Near East which were to overwhelm us in so terrible a war.
Mr. Smith, in desiring ardently the abolition of slavery, was ahead of
many Englishmen of his day. He was an eager philanthropist, who for half
a century represented Norwich in Parliament, and had therefore real power
in urging any good cause he had at heart. His daughter Frances, when she
became Mrs. Nightingale, did not cease to labour among the poor in the
spirit of her father and of her own benevolent heart. She was a beautiful
and impressive woman, and in her untiring service of others seems to have
been just the wife for Mr. Nightingale, who was ready to further every
good work in his own neighbourhood. He, in his artistic and scholarly
tastes, was as humane and enlightened as was the woman of his choice in
her own skill of hand and charm of household guidance.
For Mrs. Nightingale was not only a notable housekeeper and her
husband’s companion in the world of books, she was also a woman whose
individuality of thought and action had been deepened by her practical
faith, so that even at a time when England was still tied and bound by
conventions of rank, from which the last fifty years have released many
devotees, she felt the call of the Master to a deeper and wider sense of
brotherhood, and had a great wish to break through artificial barriers.
As a matter of fact, she found many innocent ways of doing so. But she
did not know in these early days that in giving to the world a little
daughter who was akin to her in this, she had found the best way of all;
for that daughter was to serve others in the very spirit of those great
ones of old—S. Teresa and S. Catharine and the Blessed Joan of Arc—to
whom the real things were so real and so continually present that the
world’s voices were as nothing in comparison. This was true also of Mrs.
Browning, whose memory has already come to mind, as linked, like that
of Florence Nightingale, though for quite other reasons, with the City
of Flowers; and although a life of action in the ordinary sense was
impossible for the author of “Aurora Leigh,” yet it is remarkable how
much she also did to arouse and set free her sisters, for she too, like
the others, was a woman of great practical discernment.
The little peasant maid of France, who was born to be a warrior and the
deliverer of her people, had this in common with the little English girl
born to a great inheritance and aiming at a higher and humbler estate
wherein she was the queen of nurses, that both cared so much for the
commands from above as to be very little influenced by the gossip round
about.
CHAPTER II.
_Life at Lea Hurst and Embley._
Florence was between five and six years old when the Nightingales moved
from Lea Hall into their new home at Lea Hurst, a house commanding a
specially beautiful outlook, and built under Mr. Nightingale’s own
supervision with much care and taste, about a mile from the old home. It
is only fourteen miles out of Derby, though there would seem to be many
sleepy inhabitants of that aristocratic old town—like the old lady of
Hendon who lived on into the twentieth century without having been into
the roaring city of London hard by—who know nothing of the attractions
within a few miles of them; for Mrs. Tooley tells an amusing story of a
photographer there who supposed Lea Hurst to be a distinguished man and a
local celebrity.
To some it seemed that there was a certain bleakness in the country
surrounding Lea Hall, but, though the two dwellings are so short a
distance apart, Lea Hurst is set in a far more perfect landscape. Hills
and woodlands, stretching far away to Dovedale, are commanded by the
broad terrace of upland on which the house stands, and it looks across to
the bold escarpment known as Crich Stand, while deep below, the Derwent
makes music on its rocky course. Among the foxglove and the bracken, the
gritstone rocks jutting forth are a hovering place for butterflies and a
haunt of the wild bee.
The house itself—shaped like a cross, gabled and mullioned, and
heightened by substantial chimney-stacks—is solid, unpretending,
satisfying to the eye. Above the fine oriel window in the drawing-room
wing is the balcony pointed out to visitors where, they are told, after
the Crimea “Miss Florence used to come out and speak to the people.”
The building of the house was completed in 1825, and above the door that
date is inscribed, together with the letter N. The drawing-room and
library look south, and open on to the garden, and “from the library
a flight of stone steps leads down to the lawn.” In the centre of the
garden front an old chapel has been built into the mansion, and it may
be that the prayers of the unknown dead have been answered in the life
of the child who grew up under its shadow, and to whom the busy toiling
world has owed so much.
The terraced garden at the back of the house, with its sweet
old-fashioned flowers and blossoming apple trees, has doubtless grown
more delightful with every year of its advancing age, but what an
interest the two little girls must have had when it was first being
planted out and each could find a home for her favourite flowers!
Fuchsias were among those loved by little Florence, who, as has already
been noted, was only six years old when she and her sister and father and
mother moved into Lea Hurst, and there was a large bed of these outside
the chapel. The old schoolroom and nursery at the back of the house
look out upon the hills, and in a quiet corner of the garden there is a
summer-house where Florence and her only sister, who had no brothers to
share their games, must often have played and worked.
Lea Hurst is a quiet, beautiful home, characteristically English and
unpretending, with a modest park-gate, and beyond the park those Lea
Woods where the hyacinths bloom and where it is still told how “Miss
Florence” loved to walk through the long winding avenue with its grand
views of the distant hills and woods.
But the Nightingales did not spend the whole year at Lea Hurst. In the
autumn it was their custom to move to Embley, in Hampshire, where they
spent the winter and early spring. They usually sent the servants on
ahead with the luggage, and drove by easy stages in their own carriage,
taking the journey at leisure, and putting up at inns by the way.
Sometimes, of course, they travelled by coach. Those of us who only know
the Derby road in the neighbourhood of towns like Nottingham and Derby
now that its coaching glories are past, find it difficult to picture
its gaiety in those old coaching days, when the very horses enjoyed
the liveliness of the running, and the many carriages with their gay
postilions and varied occupants were on the alert for neighbour or friend
who might be posting in the same direction.
Whether in autumn or in spring, the drive must have been a joy. The
varied beauty of the Midlands recalls the lines in “Aurora Leigh” which
speak of
“Such nooks of valleys lined with orchises,
Fed full of noises by invisible streams;
And open pastures where you scarcely tell
White daisies from white dew, ...
... the clouds, the fields,
The happy violets hiding from the roads
The primroses run down to, carrying gold;
The tangled hedgerows, where the cows push out
Impatient horns and tolerant churning mouths
’Twixt dripping ash-boughs,—hedgerows all alive
With birds and gnats and large white butterflies
Which look as if the May-flower had caught life
And palpitated forth upon the wind;
Hills, vales, woods, netted in a silver mist,
Farms, granges, doubled up among the hills;
And cattle grazing in the watered vales,
And cottage-chimneys smoking from the woods,
And cottage-gardens smelling everywhere,
Confused with smell of orchards.”
Derbyshire itself, with its wild lilies of the valley, its ferns and
daffodils and laughing streams, is hardly more “taking” than the country
through which winds the silver Trent, past Nottingham Castle, perched
on its rock and promontory above the fields where the wild crocus in
those days made sheets of vivid purple, and the steep banks of Clifton
Grove, with its shoals of blue forget-me-not, making a dim, tree-crowned
outline, with here and there a gleam of silver, as seen by the chariots
“on the road.” Wollaton Park, with its great beeches and limes and
glimpses of shy deer, would give gold and crimson and a thousand shades
of russet to the picture.
And farther south, at the other end of the journey, what miles of
orchards and pine woods and sweet-scented heather—what rolling Downs and
Surrey homesteads along the turnpike roads!
Though Parthenope and Florence had no brothers to play with them, they
seem to have had a great variety of active occupations, both at Lea
Hurst and at Embley. Of course they had their dolls, like other little
girls; but those which belonged to Florence had a way of falling into the
doctor’s hands—an imaginary doctor, of course—and needing a good deal of
tender care and attention. Florence seemed never tired of looking after
their various ailments. In fact, she had at times a whole dolls’ hospital
to tend. She probably picked up a little amateur knowledge of medicine
quite early in life; for the poor people in the neighbourhood used to
come to her mother for help in any little emergency, and Mrs. Nightingale
was, like many another Lady Bountiful of her generation, equipped with a
certain amount of traditional wisdom and kindly common sense, aided in
her case by wider reading and a better educated mind than the ordinary.
Florence, having somehow escaped measles and whooping-cough, was not
allowed to run into infection in the cottages, but that did not prevent
the sending of beef-teas and jellies and other helpful and neighbourly
gifts, which could be tied to her pony’s saddle-bow and left by her at
the door. She learned to know the cottagers with a frank and very human
intimacy, and their homely wit touched her own, their shrewdness and
sympathy met their like in her, and as she grew older, all this added
to her power and her charm. She learned to know both the north and
the south in “her ain countree,” and when, later in life, she was the
wise angel of hope to the brave “Tommies,” recruited from such homes,
meeting them as she did amid unrecorded agonies that were far worse
than the horrors of the battlefield, she understood them all the better
as men, because she had known just such boys as they had been and was
familiar with just such homes as those in which they grew up. According
to Mrs. Tooley’s biography, the farmhouse where Adam Bede fell in love
with Hetty was just the other side of the meadows at Lea Hurst, and the
old mill-wheel, where Maggie Tulliver’s father ground the corn of the
neighbourhood, was only two or three miles away. Marian Evans, of whom
the world still thinks and speaks by her pen-name of George Eliot, came
sometimes to visit her kinsfolk in the thatched cottage by Wirksworth
Tape Mills, and has left us in her earlier novels a vivid picture of the
cottage life that surrounded our heroine during that part of the year
which she spent in the Derbyshire home. The children, of course, had
their own garden, which they dug and watered, and Florence was so fond
of flowers and animals that that again was an added bond with her rustic
neighbours. Flower-missions had not in those days been heard of, but she
often tied up a nosegay of wild flowers for invalid villagers, or took
some of her favourites out of her own garden to the sick people whom she
visited.
The story of her first patient has already been told several times in
print, but no biography would be complete without it.
She had nursed many dolls back to convalescence—to say nothing of
“setting” their broken limbs—tempted their delicate appetites with
dainties offered on toy plates, and dressed the burns when her sister let
them tumble too near the nursery fire; but as yet she had had no real
human patient, when one day, out riding with her friend the vicar over
the Hampshire Downs near Embley, they noticed that Roger, an old shepherd
whom they knew very well, was having endless trouble in getting his sheep
together.
“Where’s Cap?” asked the vicar, drawing up his horse, for Cap was a very
capable and trusted sheep-dog.
“T’ boys have been throwing stones at ‘n and they’ve broken t’ poor
chap’s leg. Won’t ever be any good no more, a’m thinkin’. Best put him
out of ‘s misery.”
“O Roger!” exclaimed a clear young voice, “poor Cap’s leg broken? Can’t
we do anything for him?”
“Where is he?” added Florence eagerly, for the voice was that of the
future “Queen of Nurses.” “Oh, we can’t leave him all alone in his pain.
Just think how cruel!”
“Us can’t do no good, miss, nor you nayther. I’se just take a cord to him
to-night; ’tis the only way to ease his pain.”
But Florence turned to plead with the vicar, and to beg that some further
effort should be made.
The vicar, urged by the compassion in the young face looking up to his,
turned his horse’s head in the right direction for a visit to Cap. In a
moment Florence’s pony was put to the gallop, and she was the first to
arrive at the shed where the poor dog was lying.
Cap’s faithful brown eyes were soon lifted to hers, as she tenderly tried
to make him understand her loving sympathy, caressing him with her little
hand and speaking soothingly with her own lips and eyes; till, like the
suffering men whose wounds would in the far-off years be eased through
her skill, the dog looked up at her in dumb and worshipping gratitude.
The vicar was equal to the occasion, and soon discovered that the leg was
not broken at all, but badly bruised and swollen, and perhaps an even
greater source of danger and pain than if there had merely been a broken
bone.
When he suggested a “compress,” his child-companion was puzzled for a
moment. She thought she knew all about poultices and bandages, and I
daresay she had often given her dolls a mustard plaster; but a “compress”
sounded like something new and mysterious. It was, of course, a great
relief when she learned that she only needed to keep soaking cloths in
hot water, wringing them out, and folding them over Cap’s injured leg,
renewing them as quickly as they cooled. She was a nimble little person,
and, with the help of the shepherd boy, soon got a fire of sticks kindled
in a neighbouring cottage and the kettle singing on it with the necessary
boiling water. But now what to do for cloths? Time is of importance in
sick-nursing when every moment of delay means added pain to the sufferer.
To ride home would have meant the loss of an hour or two, and thrifty
cottagers are not always ready to tear up scant and cherished house-linen
for the nursing of dogs. But Florence was not to be baffled. To her great
delight she espied the shepherd’s smock hanging up behind the door. She
was a fearless soul, and felt no doubt whatever that her mother would
pay for a new smock. “This will just do,” she said, and, since that
delightful vicar gave a nod of entire approval, she promptly tore it into
strips.
Then back to Cap’s hut she hastened, with her small henchman beside
her carrying the kettle and the basin; for by this time he, the boy
shepherd, began to be interested too, and the vicar’s superintendence was
no longer needed. A message of explanation was sent to Embley that Mr.
and Mrs. Nightingale might not be anxious, and for several hours Florence
gave herself up to nursing her patient. Cap was passive in her hands, and
the hot fomentations gradually lessened the pain and the swelling.
Imagine the wonder and gratitude of old Roger when he turned up with
the rope in his hand and a leaden weight on his poor old heart! Cap,
of course, knew his step and greeted him with a little whine of
satisfaction, as if to be the first to tell him the good news.
“Why, missy, you have been doing wonders,” he said. “I never thought to
see t’ poor dog look up at me like that again.”
“Yes,” exclaimed the happy young nurse; “doesn’t he look better? Well,
Roger, you can throw away the rope. I shall want you to help me make
these hot compresses.”
“Miss Florence is quite right, Roger,” interposed the vicar; “you’ll
soon have Cap running about again.”
“I’m sure I cannot thank you and the young lady enough, yer riv’rence.
And I’ll mind all the instrooctions for he.”
As the faithful dog looked up at him, eased and content, it was a very
happy man that was old Roger. But the doctor-nurse was not prepared to
lose her occupation too quickly.
“I shall come and see him again to-morrow, Roger,” she said; “I know
mamma will let me, when I just explain to her about it all.”
CHAPTER III.
_The weaving of many threads, both of evil and of good._
While Florence Nightingale and her sister were working hard at history
and languages and all useful feminine arts, romping in the sunny
Hampshire gardens, or riding amongst the Derbyshire hills, the big world
outside their quiet paradise was heaping fuel for the fires of war,
which at last, when after a quarter of a century it flared up out of its
long-prepared combustibles, was “to bring to death a million workmen and
soldiers, consume vast wealth, shatter the framework of the European
system, and make it hard henceforth for any nation to be safe except by
sheer strength.” And above all its devastation, remembered as a part of
its undying record, the name of one of these happy children was to be
blazoned on the page of history.
Already at the beginning of the century the first Napoleon had said that
the Czar of Russia was always threatening Constantinople and never taking
it, and by the time Florence Nightingale was twelve years old, it might
be said of that Czar that while “holding the boundless authority of an
Oriental potentate,” his power was supplemented by the far-reaching
transmission of his orders across the telegraph wires, and if Kinglake
does not exaggerate, “he would touch the bell and kindle a war, without
hearing counsel from any living man.”
The project against Constantinople was a scheme of conquest continually
to be delayed, but never discarded, and, happen what might, it was
never to be endured that the prospect of Russia’s attaining some day to
the Bosphorus should be shut out by the ambition of any other Power.
Nicholas was quite aware that multitudes of the pious throughout his
vast dominions dwelt upon the thought of their co-religionists under
the Turkish rule, and looked to the shining cross of St. Sophia, symbol
of their faith above the church founded by Constantine, as the goal of
political unity for a “suppliant nation.”
And Kinglake tells us with an almost acid irony of Louis Napoleon, that
he who was by the Senatus-Consulte of 1804 the statutory heir of the
great Bonaparte, and after his exile and imprisonment had returned to
France, laboured to show all men “how beautifully Nature in her infinite
wisdom had adapted that same France to the service of the Bonapartes;
and how, without the fostering care of these same Bonapartes, the
creature was doomed to degenerate, and to perish out of the world, and
was considering how it was possible at the beginning of the nineteenth
century to make the coarse Bonaparte yoke of 1804 sit kindly upon her
neck.”
The day was drawing near when a great war would seem to him to offer just
the opportunity he wanted.
Far away as yet was that awful massacre of peaceful citizens in Paris in
1851, with which the name of Louis Napoleon was associated as responsible
for the _coup d’état_—a massacre probably the result of brutal panic on
the part of the soldiers, the civilians, and that craven president,
Louis Napoleon himself, whose conscience made a coward of him, and whose
terror usually took the form of brutality—but long before that date, by
his callous plotting and underhand self-seeking, he was preparing forces
which then made for death and terror, and by that time had more or less
broken the manhood of his beautiful Paris.
Yet all over the world at all times, while the enemy is sowing tares in
the field, the good seed is ripening also in the ground for the harvest;
and through these same years far-off threads were being woven, ready to
make part of the warp and woof of a life, as yet busied with the duties
and joys of childhood, but one day to thrill the hearts of Europe and be
remembered while time shall last.
Elizabeth Fry, who was to be one of its decisive influences, was bringing
new light and hope into the noisome prisons of a bygone century, and we
shall see how her life-work was not without its influence later on the
life of the child growing up at Embley and Lea Hurst.
And a child nearly of Florence Nightingale’s own age, who was one day to
cross her path with friendly help at an important crisis, was playing
with her sister Curlinda—Sir Walter Scott’s nickname for her real name
of Caroline—and being drilled in manners in French schools in Paris and
Versailles, before her family moved to Edinburgh and her more serious
lessons began. This was Felicia Skene, who was afterwards able to give
momentary, but highly important help, at a critical moment in Florence
Nightingale’s career. Like Florence herself, she was born amid romantic
surroundings, though not in Italy but in Provence, and was named after
her French godmother, a certain Comtesse de Felicité. Her two earliest
recollections were of the alarming and enraged gesticulations of Liszt
when giving a music lesson to her frightened sisters, and the very
different vision of a lumbering coach and six accompanied by mounted
soldiers—the coach and six wherein sat Charles the Tenth, who was soon
afterwards to take refuge in Holyrood. That was in Paris, where her
family went to live when she was six years old, but at the time of Cap’s
accident they had already moved to Edinburgh, where her chief friends and
playmates were the little Lockharts and the children of the murdered Duc
de Berri. It was there that Sir Walter Scott, on the day when he heard of
his bankruptcy, came and sat quietly by the little Felicia, and bade her
tell him fairy stories, as he didn’t want to talk much himself. He was an
old and dear friend of her father, one link between them being the fact
that Mr. Skene was related by marriage to the beautiful Williamina Stuart
with whom Scott in his early days had fallen deeply and ardently in love.
The little Felicia was at this time a very lively child and full of
innocent mischief. Her later devotion to the sick and poor did not
begin so early as was the case with Florence Nightingale, though there
came a time when she and Florence met in after life as equals and
fellow-soldiers in the great campaign against human suffering. Her
travels and adventures in Greece and her popularity at the Athenian
court were still hidden in the future, and while Florence at Embley
and Lea Hurst was gradually unfolding a sweetness of nature that was by
no means blind to the humorous side of things, and a highly practical
thoroughness in all she undertook, Felicia was enjoying a merry home-life
under the governorship of Miss Palmer, whom she nicknamed Pompey, and
being prepared for confirmation by her father’s friend, Dean Ramsay. We
are told of her that she might have said with Coppée, “J’ai eu toujours
besoin de Dieu.” Full of fun and of interest in life’s great adventure,
for others quite as much as for herself, religion was the moving force
that moulded the soul of her to much unforeseen self-sacrifice as yet
undreamed.
CHAPTER IV.
_The activities of girlhood—Elizabeth Fry—Felicia Skene again._
But we are wandering away from Embley and from the two daughters of the
squire, who were already the delight of the village.
Cap was by no means the only animal who owed much to Florence, and Peggy,
a favourite old pony, now holiday-making in the paddock, looked for
frequent visits and much sport between lesson hours.
“Poor old Peggy, then; would she like a carrot?”
“Well, where is it, then? See if you can find it, Peggy.”
And then a little game followed, to which the beloved pony was quite
accustomed—snuffing round her young mistress and being teased and
tantalized for a minute or two, just to heighten the coming pleasure,
until at last the pocket was found where the precious delicacy was
hidden, and the daily feast began, a feast not of carrots only, for
caresses were of course a part of the ritual.
Florence had much good fellowship also with the wild squirrels of the
neighbourhood, especially in one long avenue that was their favourite
abode. They were not in the least afraid of her, and would come leaping
down after the nuts that she dropped for them as she walked along.
Sometimes she would turn sharp round and startle them back into their
homes, but it was easy to tempt them down again. She was quick at finding
and guarding the nests of brooding birds, and suffered very keenly as a
child when the young ones were taken away from their mothers.
Lambs and calves soon learned that she was fond of them, and the
affection was not on her side only. But among the pets that the two girls
were allowed to have, the ailing ones were always the most interesting to
the future nurse.
It cannot, however, be too strongly stated that there was nothing
sentimental or lackadaisical in the very vigorous and hard-working life
that she led. It was not by any means all songs and roses, though it
was full of the happiness of a well-ordered and loving existence. Her
father was a rigid disciplinarian, and nothing casual or easygoing was
allowed in the Embley schoolroom. For any work carelessly done there was
punishment as well as reproof, and no shamming of any sort was allowed.
Hours must be punctually kept, and, whether the lesson for the moment was
Latin, Greek, or mathematics, or the sewing of a fine and exquisite seam,
it must come up to the necessary standard and be satisfactorily done. The
master-mind that so swiftly transformed the filthy horrors of Scutari
into a well-ordered hospital, and could dare to walk through minor
difficulties and objections as though they did not exist, was educated
in a severe and early school; and the striking modesty and gentleness of
Florence Nightingale’s girlhood was the deeper for having grappled with
enough real knowledge to know its own ignorances and limitations, and
treat the personality of others with a deference which was a part of her
charm.
And if study was made a serious business, the sisters enjoyed to the
full the healthy advantages of country life. They scampered about the
park with their dogs, rode their ponies over hill and dale, spent long
days in the woods among the bluebells and primroses, and in summer
tumbled about in the sweet-scented hay. “During the summer at Lea Hurst,
lessons were a little relaxed in favour of outdoor life; but on the
return to Embley for the winter, schoolroom routine was again enforced on
very strict lines.”[3]
In Florence Nightingale’s Derbyshire home the experiments in methods of
healing which dispensed with drugs could not fail to arouse attention
and discussion, for Mr. John Smedley’s newly-built cure-house stood at
the foot of the hill below Lea Hurst, and before Florence Nightingale
was twenty she had already begun to turn her attention definitely in the
direction of nursing. Everything tended to deepen this idea. She was
already able to do much for the villagers, and in any case of illness
they were always eager to let her know. The consumptive girl whose room
she gladdened with flowers was but one of the many ailing folk who found
comfort and joy in her presence. “Miss Florence had a way with her that
made them feel better,” they said.
In those days nursing as a profession did not exist. When it was not done
wholly for love by the unselfish maiden aunt or sister, who was supposed,
as a matter of course, to be always at the disposal of the sick people
among her kinsfolk, it had come to be too often a mere callous trade,
carried on by ignorant and grasping women, who were not even clean or
of good character. The turning of a Scutari hell into a hospital that
seemed heaven by comparison, was a smaller miracle than that which Miss
Nightingale’s influence was destined later to achieve in changing a
despised and brutalized occupation throughout a whole empire into a noble
and distinguished art.
Of course it must never be forgotten that through all the centuries since
the Christian Church was founded, there had been Catholic sisterhoods
with whom the real and the ideal were one—Sisters of Mercy, who were
not only refined and cultivated gentlewomen, but the most devoted and
self-sacrificing of human souls.
And now in England, in that Society of Friends, which among Christian
communities might seem outwardly farthest away from a communion valuing
as its very language the ancient symbols and ritual of the Catholic
Church, yet was perhaps by its obedience to the inward voice more in
sympathy with the sisterhoods of that Church than were many other
religious groups, there had been lifted up by Elizabeth Fry a new
standard of duty in this matter, which in her hands became a new standard
of nursing, to be passed on in old age by her saintly hands into the
young and powerful grasp of the brilliant girl who is the heroine of
our story. The name of Elizabeth Fry is associated with the reform of
our prisons, but it is less commonly known that she was also a pioneer
of decent nursing. She understood with entire simplicity the words, “I
was sick and in prison, and ye visited me.” Perhaps it was not mere
coincidence that the words occur in the “lesson” appointed for the 15th
of February—the day noted in Elizabeth Fry’s journal as the date of that
visit to Newgate, when the poor felons she was yearning to help fell on
their knees and prayed to a divine unseen Presence. In a recent number of
the _Times_ which celebrates her centenary a quotation from her diary is
given which tells in her own words:—
“I heard weeping, and I thought they appeared much tendered;
a very solemn quiet was observed; it was a striking scene,
the poor people on their knees around us, in their deplorable
condition.”
And the _Times_ goes on to say, “nothing appears but those qualities of
helpfulness, sympathy, and love which could tame the most savage natures,
silence the voice of profanity and blasphemy, and subdue all around her
by a sense of her common sisterhood even with the vilest of them in the
love of God and the service of man.... But the deepest note of her nature
was an intense enthusiasm of humanity. It was this which inspired and
sustained all her efforts from first to last—even in her earlier and more
frivolous days—for the welfare and uplifting of her fellow-creatures;
and it is only right to add that it was itself sustained by her deep and
abiding conviction that it is only by the love of God that the service
of man can be sanctified and made to prosper.” A letter followed next
day from Mr. Julian Hill, who actually remembers her, and tells how the
Institution of Nursing Sisters which she organized grew out of her deep
pity for the victims of Sairey Gamp and her kind.
All this was preparing the way for the wider and more successful nursing
crusade in which her memory and influence were to inspire the brave young
soul of Florence Nightingale. Speaking of all the difficulties that a
blindly conventional world is always ready to throw in the way of any
such new path, her old friend writes: “Such difficulties Mrs. Fry and
Miss Nightingale brushed contemptuously aside.”
But in our story Miss Nightingale is as yet only lately out of the
schoolroom. And Elizabeth Fry’s life was by no means alone, as we have
seen, in its preparation of her appointed path, for about the time that
Florence Nightingale was taking her place in the brilliant society that
met about her father’s board, and Felicia Skene was “coming out,” a new
experiment was being made by a devout member of the Lutheran Church, an
experiment which was to play an important part in the world’s history,
though so quietly and unobtrusively carried out.
We must not anticipate—we shall read of that in a later chapter.
CHAPTER V.
_Home duties and pleasures—The brewing of war._
Florence was very happy as her mother’s almoner, and in her modest and
unobtrusive way was the life and soul of the village festivities that
centred in the church and school and were planned in many instances by
her father and mother. It is one of the happy characteristics of our time
that much innocent grace and merriment have been revived in the teaching
of beautiful old morris dances and other peasant festivities that had
been banished by the rigour of a perverted Puritanism, and the squire of
Lea Hurst and his wife were before their time in such matters. There was
a yearly function of prize-giving and speech-making and dancing, known
as the children’s “Feast Day,” to which the scholars came in procession
to the Hall, with their wreaths and garlands, to the music of a good
marching band provided by the squire, and afterwards they had tea in
the fields below the Hall garden, served by Mrs. Nightingale and her
daughters and the Hall servants, and then ended their day with merry
outdoor dancing. For the little ones Florence planned all kinds of games;
the children, indeed, were her special care, and by the time the evening
sun was making pomp of gold and purple in the sky above the valley of
the Derwent, there came the crowning event of the day when on the garden
terrace the two daughters of the house distributed their gifts to the
happy scholars.
Mrs. Tooley in her biography calls up for us in a line or two a vision
of Florence as she was remembered by one old lady, who had often been
present and recalled her slender charm, herself as sweet as the rose
which she often wore in her neatly braided hair, brown hair with a glint
of gold in it, glossy and smooth and characteristic of youth and health.
We have from one and another a glimpse of the harmonious simplicity also
of her dress—the soft muslin gown, the little silk fichu crossed upon
her breast, the modest Leghorn bonnet with its rose. Or in winter, riding
about in the neighbourhood of Embley and distributing her little personal
gifts at Christmas among the old women—tea and warm petticoats—her
“ermine tippet and muff and beaver hat.”
She helped in the training of young voices in the village, and was
among the entertainers when the carol-singers enjoyed their mince-pies
and annual coins in the hall. The workhouse knew her well, and any
wise enterprise in the neighbourhood for help or healing among the
poor and the sad was sure of her presence and of all the co-operation
in the power of her neighbours, Mr. and Mrs. Sidney Herbert, with whom
for some years before the Crimea she shared much companionship in such
work. This friendship was an important influence in our heroine’s life,
for Mr. Herbert was of those who reveal to the dullest a little of the
divine beauty and love, and his wife was through all their married life
his faithful and devoted friend, so that they made a strong trio of
sympathetic workers; for “Liz,” as her husband usually called her in his
letters to their common friend Florence Nightingale, seemed to have fully
shared his unbounded faith in the noble powers and high aims of the said
Florence, whom she too loved and admired. She was a daughter of General
Charles Ashe à Court, and she and Sidney Herbert had known one another as
children. Indeed, it was in those early days, when she was quite a little
child, that Elizabeth, who grew up to be one of the most beautiful women
of her day, said of Sidney, then, of course, a mere boy, that that was
the boy she was going to marry, and that she would never marry any one
else. Many a long year, however, had rolled between before he rode over
to Amington from Drayton, where he often met her, though no longer such
near neighbours as in the early Wiltshire days, and asked the beautiful
Elizabeth to be his wife. The intimacy between the two families had never
ceased, and General à Court, himself member for Wilton, had worked hard
for Sidney’s first election for the county. We shall hear more of these
dear and early friends of Florence Nightingale as her story unfolds, but
let us turn now for a moment to herself.
Her life was many-sided, and her devotion to good works did not arise
from any lack of knowledge of the world. She was presented, of course,
like other girls of her order, and had her “seasons” in London as well
as her share in country society. A young and lovely girl, whose father
had been wise enough to give her all the education and advantages of
a promising boy, and who excelled also in every distinctive feminine
accomplishment and “pure womanliness,” had her earthly kingdom at her
feet. But her soul was more and more deeply bent on a life spent in
service and consecrated to the good of others. Her Sunday class, in the
old building known as the “Chapel” at Lea Hurst, was but one of her many
efforts in her father’s special domain in Derbyshire, and girls of every
faith came to her there without distinction of creed. They were mostly
workers in the hosiery mills owned by John Smedley, and many of them,
like their master, were Methodists. She sang to them, and they still
remember the sweetness of her voice and “how beautifully Miss Florence
used to talk,” as they sat together through many a sunny afternoon in the
tiny stone building overlooking Lea Hurst gardens. Cromford Church, built
by Sir Richard Arkwright, was then comparatively new, and time had not
made of it the pretty picture that it is now, in its bosoming trees above
the river; but it played a considerable part in Florence Nightingale’s
youth, when the vicar and the Arkwright of her day—old Sir Richard’s
tomb in the chancel bears the earlier date of 1792—organized many a kind
scheme for the good of the parish, in which the squire’s two daughters
gave their help.
But Miss Nightingale was not of a type to consider these amateur
pleasures a sufficient training for her life-work, and that life-work was
already taking a more or less definite shape in her mind.
She herself has written:—
“I would say to all young ladies who are called to any
particular vocation, qualify yourselves for it as a man does
for his work. Don’t think you can undertake it otherwise.
Submit yourselves to the rules of business as men do, by which
alone you can make God’s business succeed, for He has never
said that He will give His success and His blessing to sketchy
and unfinished work.” And on another occasion she wrote that
“three-fourths of the whole mischief in women’s lives arises
from their excepting themselves from the rules of training
considered needful for men.”
It has already been said that her thought was more and more directed
towards nursing, and in various ways she was quietly preparing herself to
that end.
Her interview with the Quaker-saint, Elizabeth Fry, though deliberately
sought and of abiding effect, was but a brief episode. It was about
this time that they met in London. The serene old Quakeress, through
whose countenance looked forth such a heavenly soul, was no doubt keenly
interested in the ardent, witty, beautiful girl who came to her for
inspiration and counsel. They had much in common, and who knows but the
older woman, with all her weight of experience, her saintly character,
and ripened harvest, may yet in some ways have felt herself the younger
of the two; for she had come to that quiet threshold of the life beyond,
where a soul like hers has part in the simple joys of the Divine Child,
and looks tenderly on those who are still in the fires of battle through
which they have passed.
Her own girlhood had defied in innocent ways the strictness of the Quaker
rule. Imagine a young Quakeress of those days wearing, as she had done on
occasion, a red riding habit!
She had been fond of dancing, and would have, I suspect, a very healthy
human interest in the activities of a girl in Society, though she would
enter into Florence Nightingale’s resolve that her life should not be
frittered away in a self-centred round, while men and women, for whom her
Master died, were themselves suffering a slow death in workhouses and
prisons and hospitals, with none to tend their wounds of soul and body.
Be this as it may—and without a record of their conversation it is easy
to go astray in imagining—we do know that like all the greatest saints
they were both very practical in their Christianity, and did not care
too much what was thought of their actions, so long as they were right
in the sight of God. In their common sense, their humility, their warm,
quick-beating heart of humanity, they were kindred spirits.
The interview bore fruit even outwardly afterwards in a very important
way. For it was from Elizabeth Fry that Florence Nightingale first heard
of Pastor Fliedner and his institute for training nurses at Kaiserswerth,
as well as of Elizabeth Fry’s own institute for a like purpose in London,
which first suggested the Kaiserswerth training home, thus returning in
ever-widening blessing the harvest of its seed.
Her desire was for definite preparatory knowledge and discipline, and
we of this generation can hardly realize how much searching must have
been necessary before the adequate training could be found. Certificated
nursing is now a commonplace, and we forget that it dates from Miss
Nightingale’s efforts after her return from the Crimea. We have only
to turn to the life of Felicia Skene and her lonely labour of love at
the time when the cholera visited Oxford—some twelve years later than
Florence Nightingale’s seventeenth birthday, that is to say, in 1849-51,
and again in 1854—to gain some idea of the bareness of the field. Sir
Henry Acland, whose intimate friendship with Felicia dates from their
common labours among the cholera patients, has described one among the
terrible cases for which there would, it seems, have been no human aid,
but for their discovery of the patient’s neglected helplessness.
“She had no blanket,” he says, “or any covering but the ragged
cotton clothes she had on. She rolled screaming. One woman,
scarcely sober, sat by; she sat with a pipe in her mouth,
looking on. To treat her in this state was hopeless. She was
to be removed. There was a press of work at the hospital, and
a delay. When the carriers came, her saturated garments were
stripped off, and in the finer linen and in the blankets of a
wealthier woman she was borne away, and in the hospital she
died.”
This is given, it would seem, as but one case among hundreds.
Three old cattle-sheds were turned into a sort of impromptu hospital, to
which some of the smallpox and cholera patients were carried, and the
clergy, especially Mr. Charles Marriott and Mr. Venables, did all they
could for old and young alike, seconding the doctors, with Sir Henry
at their head, in cheering and helping every one in the stricken town;
and Miss Skene’s friend, Miss Hughes, Sister Marion, directed the women
called in to help, who there received a kind of rough-and-ready training.
But more overwhelming still was Miss Skene’s own work of home nursing
in the cottages, at first single-handed, and afterwards at the head of
a band of women engaged by the deputy chairman as her servants in the
work, of whom many were ignorant and needed training. “By day and by
night she visited,” writes Sir Henry. “She plied this task, and when she
rested—or where as long at least as she knew of a house where disease had
entered—is known to herself alone.”
Meanwhile a critical moment had arisen in the affairs of Europe. Our
own Premier, Lord Aberdeen, had long been regarded as the very head and
front of the Peace Movement in England, and when he succeeded the wary
Lord Palmerston, it is said that Nicholas, the Czar of Russia, made no
secret of his pleasure in the event, for he saw tokens in England of
what might at least leave him a chance of pulling Turkey to pieces.
He seems also to have had a great personal liking for our ambassador,
Sir Hamilton Seymour, who was fortunately a man of honour as well as a
man of discretion and ready wit. The account given by Kinglake of the
conversations in which the Emperor Nicholas disclosed his views, and
was not permitted to hint them merely, makes very dramatic reading. The
Czar persisted in speaking of Turkey as a very sick man, whose affairs
had better be taken out of his hands by his friends before his final
dissolution. Sir Hamilton courteously intimated that England did not
treat her allies in that manner; but Nicholas was not to be put off, and
at a party given by the Grand Duchess Hereditary on February 20, 1853, he
again took Sir Hamilton apart, and in a very gracious and confidential
manner closed his conversation with the words, “I repeat to you that the
sick man is dying, and we can never allow such an event to take us by
surprise. We must come to some understanding.”
The next day he explained how the partition should in his opinion
be made. Servia and Bulgaria should be independent states under his
protection. England should have Egypt and Candia. He had already made
it clear that he should expect us to pledge ourselves not to occupy
Constantinople, though he could not himself give us a like undertaking.
“As I did not wish,” writes Sir Hamilton Seymour, “that the Emperor
should imagine that an English public servant was caught by this sort
of overture, I simply answered that I had always understood that the
English views upon Egypt did not go beyond the point of securing a safe
and ready communication between British India and the mother country.
‘Well,’ said the Emperor, ‘induce your Government to write again upon
these subjects, to write more fully, and to do so without hesitation. I
have confidence in the English Government. It is not an engagement, a
convention, which I ask of them; it is a free interchange of ideas, and
in case of need the word of a “gentleman”—that is enough between us.’”
In reply, our Government disclaimed all idea of aiming at any of the
Sultan’s possessions, or considering the Ottoman Empire ready to fall to
bits; and while accepting the Emperor’s word that he would not himself
grab any part of it, refused most decisively to enter on any secret
understanding.
All through 1853 these parleyings were kept secret, and in the meantime
the Czar had failed in his rôle of tempter. In the interval the Sultan,
who perhaps had gained some inkling of what was going on, suddenly
yielded to Austria’s demand that he should withdraw certain troops that
had been harassing Montenegro, and thereby rousing the Czar’s religious
zeal on behalf of his co-religionists in that province. Everything for
the moment lulled his previous intention of a war against Turkey.
But the Emperor Louis Napoleon had in cold blood been driving a wedge
into the peace of the world by reviving a treaty of 1740, which had given
to Latin monks a key to the chief door of the Church of Bethlehem, as
well as the keys to the two doors of the Sacred Manger, and also the
right to place a silver star adorned with the arms of France in the
Sanctuary of the Nativity. That the Churches should fight for the key to
the supposed birthplace of the Prince of Peace is indeed grotesque. But
the old temple had in His day become a den of thieves; and even the new
temple, built through His own loving sacrifice, is ever being put to uses
that are childish and greedy.
It is not difficult to understand that, by means of this treaty,
awakening the vanity and greed that cloak themselves under more decent
feelings in such rivalries, Louis Napoleon made his profit for the
moment out of the powers of evil.
The Czar’s jealousy for his own empire’s Greek version of the faith made
the triumph of this treaty wormwood to him and to his people. “To the
indignation,” Count Nesselrode writes, “of the whole people following the
Greek ritual, the key of the Church of Bethlehem has been made over to
the Latins, so as publicly to demonstrate their religious supremacy in
the East.” ...
“A crowd of monks with bare foreheads,” says Kinglake, “stood
quarrelling for a key at the sunny gates of a church in
Palestine, but beyond and above, towering high in the misty
North, men saw the ambition of the Czars.”
The Czars did not stand alone: “some fifty millions of men in Russia held
one creed, and they held it too with the earnestness of which Western
Europe used to have experience in earlier times.... They knew that in the
Turkish dominions there were ten or fourteen millions of men holding
exactly the same faith as themselves ... they had heard tales of the
sufferings of these their brethren which seemed,” they blindly thought,
“to call for vengeance.”
Nicholas himself was a fanatic on such questions, and the end of it
was that his rage hoodwinked his conscience, and he stole a march upon
England and France, which destroyed their trust in his honour. He had
already gathered troops in the south, to say nothing of a fleet in the
Euxine; and having determined on an embassy to Constantinople, he chose
Mentschikoff as his messenger, a man who was said to hate the Turks and
dislike the English, and who, according to Kinglake, was a wit rather
than a diplomat or a soldier. Advancing with much of the pomp of war, and
disregarding much of the etiquette of peace, his arrival and behaviour
caused such a panic in the Turkish capital that Colonel Rose was besought
to take an English fleet to the protection of the Ottoman Empire.
Colonel Rose’s friendly willingness, though afterwards cancelled by our
Home Government, at once quieted the terror in Constantinople; but the
Emperor of the French cast oil upon the smouldering flame by sending a
fleet to Salamis. This greatly angered Nicholas, and, although he was
pleased to find England disapproved of what France had done, Mentschikoff
offered a secret treaty to Turkey, with ships and men, if she ever needed
help, and asked in return for complete control of the Greek Church. This
broke all his promises to the Western Powers, and England at once was
made aware of it by the Turkish minister.
Prince Mentschikoff meanwhile drew to himself an army, and the English
Vice-consul at Galatz reported that in Bessarabia preparations were
already made for the passage of 120,000 men, while battalions from all
directions were making southward—the fleet was even then at Sebastopol.
[Illustration: Florence Nightingale.
(_From the painting in the National Portrait Gallery by Augustus Egg,
R.A._)]
The double-dealing of Russia was met by a gradual and tacit alliance
between England and the Sultan; and Lord Aberdeen, whose love of peace
has been described by one historian as “passionate” and “fanatical,” was
unknowingly tying his own hands by the advice he gave in his despatches
when consulted by Turkey. Moreover, in Turkey, our ambassador, Lord
Stratford de Redcliffe, stiffened the back of Ottoman resistance against
the Czar’s wily handling of “the sick man.” Lord Stratford’s tact and
force of character had moulded all to his will, and our admiral at Malta
was told to obey any directions he received from him. Our fleets were
ordered into the neighbourhood of the Dardanelles, and Lord Stratford
held his watch at Therapia against the gathering wrath of the Czar. Only
a very little kindling touch was needed to light the fires of a terrible
conflict in Europe.
CHAPTER VI.
_Pastor Fliedner._
A pebble thrown into a lake sends the tiny circling ripples very far,
and one good piece of work leads to others of a quite different kind.
Pastor Fliedner, inspired by love to his Master and deeply interested
in Elizabeth Fry’s efforts, began to help prisoners. Finding no nurses
for those of them who were ill, he was led to found the institution at
Kaiserswerth, where Miss Nightingale afterwards received a part of her
training.
His story is a beautiful one. His father and grandfather had both been
pastors in the Lutheran Church, and, like so many sons of the Manse, he
was exceedingly poor, but he lived to justify his name of Theodor. He was
born twenty years before Miss Nightingale, in the village of Eppstein,
and perhaps he was the more determined to prove to himself and others
that he had a soul, because he was one of those plump children who
get teased for looking like dumplings, and when his father laughingly
called him the “little beer-brewer” he didn’t like it, for he was a bit
thin-skinned. He worked his way bravely through school and college,
Giessen and Göttingen, and not only earned his fees by teaching, but also
his bread and roof; and when teaching was not enough, he had the good
sense to turn shoeblack and carpenter and odd man. He valued all that
opens the eyes of the mind and educates what is highest and best. Many
a time, heedless of hardship and privation, he would, in his holidays,
tramp long distances that he might see more of God’s world and learn
more of men and things. He taught himself in this way to speak several
languages, learned the useful healing properties of many herbs, and
other homely knowledge that afterwards helped him in his work among the
sick. Then, too, the games and songs that he picked up on his travels
afterwards enriched his own kindergarten. While tutoring at Cologne,
he did quite informally some of the work of a curate, and, through
preaching sometimes in the prison, became interested in the lot of
discharged prisoners. It was at Cologne too that he received from the
mother of his pupils kindly suggestions as to his own manners, which
led him to write what is as true as it is quaint, that “gentle ways and
polite manners help greatly to further the Kingdom of God.”
He was only twenty-two when he became pastor of the little Protestant
flock at Kaiserswerth, having walked there on foot and purposely taken
his parishioners by surprise that they might not be put to the expense
of a formal welcome. His yearly salary was only twenty pounds, and he
helped his widowed mother by sharing the parsonage with a sister and two
younger brothers, though in any case he had to house the mother of the
man who had been there before him. Then came a failure in the business
of the little town—the making of velvet—and though there were other rich
communities that would have liked to claim him, he was true to his own
impoverished flock, and set forth like a pilgrim in search of aid for
them. In this apostolic journey he visited Holland and England as well
as Germany, and it was in London that, in Elizabeth Fry, he found a noble
kindred spirit, much older, of course, than himself, as we count the time
of earth, but still full of all the tender enthusiasm of love’s immortal
youth. Her wonderful work among the prisoners of Newgate sent him back to
his own parish all on fire to help the prisoners of his own country, and
he began at once with Düsseldorf, the prison nearest home. Through him
was founded the first German organization for improving the discipline of
prisons.
Most of all he wanted to help the women who on leaving the prison doors
were left without roof or protector.
With his own hands he made clean his old summer-house, and in this
shelter—twelve feet square—which he had furnished with a bed, a chair,
and a table, he asked the All-father to lead some poor outcast to the
little home he had made for her.
It was at night that for the first time a poor forlorn creature came
in answer to that prayer, and he and his wife led her in to the place
prepared for her. Nine others followed, and, by the time the number had
risen to twenty, a new building was ready for them with its own field and
garden, and Fliedner’s wife, helped by Mademoiselle Gobel, who gave her
services “all for love and nothing for reward,” had charge of the home,
where many a one who, like the woman in the Gospel, “had been a great
sinner” began to lead a new life and to follow Christ.
For the children of some of these women a kindergarten arose; but the
work of all others on which the pastor’s heart was set was the training
of women to nurse and tend the poor; for in his own parish, where there
was much illness and ignorance, there was no one to do this. Three years
after his earlier venture, in 1836 when Miss Nightingale in her far-away
home was a girl of sixteen still more or less in the schoolroom, this new
undertaking was begun, this quiet haven, from which her own great venture
long afterwards took help and teaching, was built up by this German saint.
The failure of the velvet industry at Kaiserswerth, in the pastor’s
first year, had left an empty factory which he turned into a hospital.
But when it was opened, the faith needed was much like the faith of
Abraham when great blessing was promised to a son whom the world thought
he would never possess; for the Deaconess Hospital, when the wards were
fitted up by its pastor with “mended furniture and cracked earthenware,”
had as yet no patients and no deaconesses.
There is, however, one essential of a good hospital which can be bought
by labour as well as by money; and by hard work the hospital was kept
admirably clean.
The first patient who knocked at its doors was a servant girl, and
other patients followed so quickly that within the first year sixty
patients were nursed there and seven nurses had entered as deaconess and
probationers. All the deaconesses were to be over twenty-five, and though
they entered for five years, they could leave at any moment. The code
of rules drawn up by the pastor was very simple, and there were not any
vows; but the form of admission was a solemn one and included the laying
on of hands, while the pastor invoked the Threefold Name, saying: “May
God the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, three Persons in one God,
bless you; may He stablish you in the Truth until death, and give you
hereafter the Crown of Life. Amen.”
It all had a kind of homely grace, even in outward things. The
deaconesses wore a large white turned-down collar over a blue cotton
gown, a white muslin cap tied on under the chin with a large bow, and a
white apron—a dress so well suited to the work that young and old both
looked more than usually sweet and womanly in it.
The story of how the deaconesses found a head, and Fliedner a second
helper after the death of his first wife, reads rather like a Hans
Andersen fairy tale.
He travelled to Hamburg to ask Amalie Sievekin to take charge of the
Home, and as she could not do so, she advised him to go to her friend and
pupil Caroline Berthean, who had had experience of nursing in the Hamburg
Hospital.
The pastor was so pleased with Miss Caroline that he then and there
offered her the choice of becoming either his wife or the Superintendent
of the Deaconesses’ Home.
She said she would fill _both_ the vacant places, and their honeymoon was
spent in Berlin that they might “settle” the first five deaconesses in
the Charité Hospital.
Caroline, young though she was, made a good Deaconess Mother,[4] and she
seems also to have been an excellent wife, full of devotion to the work
her husband loved, through all the rest of her life. The deaconesses give
their work, and in a sense give themselves. They do not pay for their
board, but neither are they paid for their work, though they are allowed
a very simple yearly outfit of two cotton gowns and aprons, and every
five years a new _best_ dress of blue woollen material and an apron of
black alpaca. Also their outdoor garb of a long black cloak and bonnet
is supplied to them, and each is allowed a little pocket money. Their
private property remains their own to control as they please, whether
they live or die.
The little account of Kaiserswerth which Miss Nightingale wrote is most
rare and precious, having long been out of print, but from the copy in
the British Museum I transfer a few sentences to these pages, because of
their quaintness and their interest for all who are feeling their way in
the education of young children:—
“In the Orphan Asylum,” wrote Miss Nightingale, “each family
lives with its deaconess exactly as her children. Some of
them have already become deaconesses or teachers, some have
returned home. When a new child is admitted, a little feast
celebrates its arrival, at which the pastor himself presides,
who understands children so well that his presence, instead of
being a constraint, serves to make the little new-comer feel
herself at home. She chooses what is to be sung, she has a
little present from the pastor, and, after tea, at the end of
the evening, she is prayed for....
“One morning, in the boys’ ward, as they were about to have
prayers, just before breakfast, two of the boys quarrelled
about a hymn book. The ‘sister’ was uncertain, for a moment,
what to do. They could not pray in that state of mind, yet
excluding them from the prayer was not likely to improve them.
She told a story of her own childhood, how one night she had
been cross with her parents, and, putting off her prayers till
she felt good again, had fallen asleep. The children were quite
silent for a moment and shocked at the idea that anybody should
go to bed without praying. The two boys were reconciled, and
prayers took place....”
In the British Museum also is a copy of the following letter:—
“MESSRS. DUBAW,—A gentleman called here yesterday from you,
asking for a copy of my ‘Kaiserswerth’ for, I believe, the
British Museum.
“Since yesterday a search has been instituted—but only two
copies have been found, and one of those is torn and dirty. I
send you the least bad-looking. You will see the date is 1851,
and after the copies then printed were given away I don’t think
I have ever thought of it.
“I was twice in training there myself. Of course, since then
hospital and district nursing have made great strides. Indeed,
district nursing has been invented.
“But never have I met with a higher love, a purer devotion than
there. There was no neglect.
“It was the more remarkable because many of the deaconesses had
been only peasants (none were gentlewomen when I was there).
“The food was poor—no coffee but bean coffee—no luxury but
cleanliness.
“FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE.”
CHAPTER VII.
_Years of preparation._
Florence Nightingale, like Felicia Skene, had that saving gift of humour
which at times may make bearable an otherwise unbearable keenness of
vision.
Here, for instance, is her account of the customary dusting of a room
in those days (is it always nowadays so entirely different as might be
wished?):—
“Having witnessed the morning process called ‘tidying the
room’ for many years, and with ever-increasing astonishment,
I can describe what it is. From the chairs, tables, or sofa,
upon which ‘things’ have lain during the night, and which are
therefore comparatively clean from dust or blacks, the poor
‘things’ having ‘caught it,’ they are removed to other chairs,
tables, sofas, upon which you could write your name with your
finger in the dust or blacks. The other side of the things is
therefore now evenly dirtied or dusted. The housemaid then
flaps everything or some things not out of her reach with a
thing called a duster—the dust flies up, then resettles more
equally than it lay before the operation. The room has now been
‘put to rights.’”
You see the shrewd humour of that observation touches the smallest
detail. Miss Nightingale never wasted time in unpractical theorizing. In
discussing the far-off attainment of ideal nursing she says:—
“Will the top of Mont Blanc ever be made habitable? Our answer
would be, it will be many thousands of years before we have
reached the bottom of Mont Blanc in making the earth healthy.
Wait till we have reached the bottom before we discuss the top.”
Did she with her large outlook and big heart see our absurdity as
well as our shame when, pointing a finger of scorn at what we named
the superstition of other countries, we were yet content to see Spain
and France and Italy sending out daily, in religious service to the
poor, whole regiments of gentle and refined women trained in the arts
of healing and the methods of discipline, while even in our public
institutions—our hospitals and workhouses and prisons—it would hardly
have been an exaggeration to say that most of the so-called “nurses” of
those days were but drunken sluts?
She herself has said:—
“Shall the Roman Catholic Church do all the work? Has not the
Protestant the same Lord, who accepted the services not only of
men, but also of women?”
One saving clause there is for England concerning this matter in the
history of that time, in the work of a distinguished member of the
Society of Friends, even before Florence Nightingale or Felicia Skene
had been much heard of. We read that “the heavenly personality of
Elizabeth Fry (whom Miss Nightingale sought out and visited) was an
ever-present inspiration in her life.” From Elizabeth Fry our heroine
heard of Pastor Fliedner’s training institute for nurses at Kaiserswerth,
already described in the foregoing chapter; but, before going there,
she took in the meantime a self-imposed course of training in Britain,
visiting the hospitals in London, Edinburgh, and Dublin, though, so far
as the nursing was concerned, the criticisms in her own _Nursing Notes_
of later years would certainly suggest that what she learned was chiefly
what _not_ to do. Her gracious and winning dignity was far indeed from
the blindness of a weak amiability, and it can hardly be doubted that
what she saw of the so-called “nurses” in our hospitals of those days,
went far to deepen her resolve to devote herself to a calling then in
dire neglect and disrepute. Dirt, disorder, drunkenness—these are the
words used by a trustworthy biographer in describing the ways of English
nurses in those days—of whom, indeed, we are told that they were of a
very coarse order—ill-trained, hard-hearted, immoral. There must surely
have been exceptions, but they seem to have been so rare as to have
escaped notice. Indeed, it was even said that in those days—so strong
and stupefying is the force of custom—decent girls avoided this noble
calling, fearing to lose their character if found in its ranks.
But whatever were Florence Nightingale’s faults—and she was by no means
so inhuman as to be without faults—conventionality of thought and action
certainly cannot be counted among them; and what she saw of the poor
degraded souls who waited on the sick in our hospitals did but strengthen
her resolve to become a nurse herself.
Since she found no good school of nursing in England, she went abroad,
and visited, among other places, the peaceful old hospital of St. John
at Bruges, where the nuns are cultivated and devoted women who are well
skilled in the gentle art of nursing.
To city after city she went, taking with her not only her gift of
discernment, but also that open mind and earnest heart which made of her
life-offering so world-wide a boon.
I do not think I have used too strong a word of the gift she was
preparing. For the writer of an article which appeared in _Nursing
Notes_[5] was right when, at the end of Miss Nightingale’s life, she
wrote of her:—
“Miss Nightingale belongs to that band of the great ones of
the earth who may be acclaimed as citizens of the world; her
influence has extended far beyond the limits of the nation to
which she owed her birth, and in a very special sense she will
be the great prototype for all time to those who follow more
especially in her footsteps, in the profession she practically
created. We must ever be grateful for the shining example she
has given to nurses, who in her find united that broad-minded
comprehension of the ultimate aim of all their work, with a
patient and untiring devotion to its practical detail, which
alone combine to make the perfect nurse.”
But as yet she was only humbly and diligently preparing herself for the
vocation to which she had determined, in face of countless obstacles, to
devote herself, little knowing how vast would be the opportunities given
to her when once she was ready for the work.
During the winter and spring of 1849-50 she made a long tour through
Egypt with Mr. and Mrs. Bracebridge. On her way there she met in Paris
two Sisters of the Order of St. Vincent de Paul, from whom she took
introductions to the schools and “miséricorde” in Alexandria. There she
saw the fruits of long and self-denying discipline among the Nursing
Sisters, and in the following year she visited Pastor Fliedner’s
Institute at Kaiserswerth, where, among Protestant deaconesses, the life
of ordered simplicity and service showed some of the same virtues.
Miss Nightingale’s first visit to Kaiserswerth was comparatively short,
but in the following year, 1852, she went there again and took four
months of definite training, from June to October.
A deep and warm regard seems to have arisen between the Fliedners and
their English pupil, and the pastor’s friendship for Miss Nightingale’s
revered counsellor, Elizabeth Fry, must have been one pleasant link in
the happy bond.
Fliedner was certainly a wonderful man, and Miss Nightingale’s comment on
the spirit of his work was as true as it was witty. “Pastor Fliedner,”
she said, “began his work with two beds under a roof, not with a castle
in the air, and Kaiserswerth is now diffusing its blessings and its
deaconesses over almost every Protestant land.” This was literally true.
Within ten years of founding Kaiserswerth he had established sixty
nurses in twenty-five different centres. Later he founded a Mother-house
on Mount Zion at Jerusalem, having already settled some of his nurses
at Pittsburg in the United States. The building for the Jerusalem
Mother-house was given by the King of Prussia, and, nursing all sick
people, without any question of creed, is a school of training for nurses
in the East.
Alexandria, Beyrout, Smyrna, Bucharest—he visited them all, and it is due
to his efforts nearer home that to-day in almost all German towns of any
importance there is a Deaconess Home, sending out trained women to nurse
in middle-class families at very moderate fees, and ready to nurse the
poor without any charge at all.
When, in 1864, “he passed to his glorious rest”—the words are Miss
Nightingale’s—there were already one hundred such houses, and during part
of Miss Nightingale’s visit to Kaiserswerth, Pastor Fliedner was away a
good deal on the missionary journeys which spread the Deaconess Homes
through Germany, but they met quite often enough for each to appreciate
the noble character of the other. In all his different kinds of work for
helping the poor she was eagerly interested, and it may be that some of
her wise criticisms of district visiting in later years may have been
suggested by the courtesy and good manners that ruled the visiting of
poor homes at Kaiserswerth in which she shared. It was there also that
she made warm friendship with Henrietta Frickenhaus, in whose training
college at Kaiserswerth 400 pupils had already passed muster. It should
be added that Henrietta Frickenhaus was the first schoolmistress of
Kaiserswerth.
Mr. Sidney Herbert visited Kaiserswerth while Miss Nightingale was there,
and when, in the great moment that came afterwards, he asked her to go
out to the Crimea, he knew well how detailed and definite her training
had been.
Pastor Fliedner’s eldest daughter told Mrs. Tooley how vividly she
recalled her father’s solemn farewell blessing when Miss Nightingale was
leaving Kaiserswerth; laying his hands on her bent head and, with eyes
that seemed to look beyond the scene that lay before him, praying that
she might be stablished in the Truth till death, and receive the Crown of
Life.
And even mortal eyes may read a little of how those prayers for her
future were fulfilled.
She left vivid memories. “No one has ever passed so brilliant an
examination,” said Fliedner, “or shown herself so thoroughly mistress of
all she had to learn, as the young, wealthy, and graceful Englishwoman.”
Agnes Jones, who was trained there before her work in Liverpool left a
memorable record of life spent in self-denying service, tells how the
workers at Kaiserswerth longed to see Miss Nightingale again, how her
womanliness and lovableness were remembered, and how among the sick
people were those who even in dying blessed her for having led them to
the Redeemer; for throughout her whole life her religion was the very
life of her life, as deep as it was quiet, the underlying secret of
that compassionate self-detachment and subdued fire, without which her
wit and shrewdness would have lost their absolving glow and underlying
tenderness. Hers was ever the gentleness of strength, not the easy
bending of the weak. She was a pioneer among women, and did much to break
down the cruel limitations which, in the name of affection and tradition,
hemmed in the lives of English girls in those days. Perhaps she was among
the first of that day in England to realize that the Christ, her Master,
who sent Mary as His first messenger of the Resurrection, was in a fine
sense of the word “unconventional,” even though He came that every jot
and tittle of religious law might be _spiritually_ fulfilled.
It was after her return to England from Germany that she published her
little pamphlet on Kaiserswerth, from which quotations have already been
given.
Her next visit was to the Convent of St. Vincent de Paul in Paris,
where the nursing was a part of the long-established routine, and while
there she was able to visit the hospitals in Paris, and learned much
from the Sisters in their organized work among the houses of the poor.
In the midst of all this she was herself taken ill, and was nursed
by the Sisters. Her direct and personal experience of their tender
skill no doubt left its mark upon her own fitness. On her return home
to complete her recovery, her new capacity and knowledge made a good
deal of delighted talk in the cottages, and Mrs. Tooley tells us how
it was rumoured that “Miss Florence could set a broken leg better than
a doctor,” and made the old rheumatic folk feel young again with her
remedies, to say nothing of her “eye lotions,” which “was enough to ruin
the spectacle folk.” She was always ahead of her time in her belief in
simple rules of health and diet and hatred of all that continual use
of drugs which was then so much in fashion, and she no doubt saw many
interesting experiments at Matlock Bank in helping Nature to do her own
work.
[Illustration: Florence Nightingale in 1854.
(_From a drawing by H. M. B. C._)]
As soon as her convalescence was over she visited London hospitals, and
in the autumn of 1852 those of Edinburgh and Dublin, having spent a part
of the interval in her home at Embley, where she had again the pleasure
of being near her friends the Herberts, with whose neighbourly work among
the poor she was in fullest sympathy.
Her first post was at the Harley Street Home for Sick Governesses. She
had been interested in many kinds of efforts on behalf of those who
suffer; Lord Shaftesbury’s Ragged School labours, for instance, had
appealed to her, and to that and other like enterprises she had given
the money earned by her little book on Kaiserswerth. But she always had
in view the one clear and definite aim—to fit herself in every possible
way for competent nursing. It was on August 12, 1853, that she became
Superintendent of the Harley Street institution, which is now known
as the Florence Nightingale Hospital. It was founded in 1850 by Lady
Canning, as a Home for Invalid Gentlewomen, and when an appeal was made
to Miss Nightingale for money and good counsel, she gave in addition
_herself_ and became for a time the Lady Superintendent.
The hospital was intended mainly for sick governesses, for whom the need
of such a home of rest and care and surgical help had sometimes arisen,
but it had been mismanaged and was in danger of becoming a failure. There
Miss Nightingale, we read, was to be found “in the midst of various
duties of a hospital—for the Home was largely a sanatorium—organizing the
nurses, attending to the correspondence, prescriptions, and accounts; in
short, performing all the duties of a hard-working matron, as well as
largely financing the institution.”
“The task of dealing with sick and querulous women,” says
Mrs. Tooley, “embittered and rendered sensitive and exacting
by the unfortunate circumstances of their lives, was not an
easy one, but Miss Nightingale had a calm and cheerful spirit
which could bear with the infirmities of the weak. And so she
laboured on in the dull house in Harley Street, summer and
winter, bringing order and comfort out of a wretched chaos, and
proving a real friend and helper to the sick and sorrow-laden
women.
“At length the strain proved too much for her delicate body,
and she was compelled most reluctantly to resign her task.”
She had worked very hard, and was seldom seen outside the walls of the
house in Harley Street. Though she was not there very long, the effect
of her presence was great and lasting, and the Home, which has now moved
to Lisson Grove, has increased steadily in usefulness, though it has
of necessity changed its lines a little, because the High Schools and
the higher education of women have opened new careers and lessened the
number of governesses, especially helpless governesses. It gives aid far
and wide to the daughters and other kindred of hard-worked professional
men, men who are serving the world with their brains, and nobly seeking
to give work and service of as good a kind as lies within their power,
rather than to snatch at its exact value in coin, even if that were
possible—and in such toil as theirs, whether they be teachers, artists,
parsons, or themselves doctors, it is _not_ possible; for such work
cannot be weighed in money.
Queen Alexandra is President, and last year 301 patients were treated,
besides the 16 who were already within its walls when the new year began.
CHAPTER VIII.
_The beginning of the war—A sketch of Sidney Herbert._
It was on April 11, 1854, that war was declared by Russia, and four days
later the invasion of the Ottoman Empire began. England and France were
the sworn allies of Turkey, and though the war had begun with a quarrel
about “a key and a trinket,” the key and the trinket were, after all,
symbols, just as truly as the flags for which men lay down their lives.
England had entrusted the cause of peace to those faithful lovers of
peace, Lord Aberdeen, Mr. Gladstone, Mr. Cobden, and Mr. Bright; but no
single man in our “constitutional” Government is in reality a free agent,
and the peace-loving members of the Cabinet had been skilfully handled
by the potent Lord Palmerston, and did not perceive soon enough that the
understanding with Turkey and with France, into which they had drifted,
must endanger the peace of Europe because the other Powers were ignored.
If the English people had been secretly longing for war—and it is said
that they had—then the terrible cup they had desired was to be drunk to
the lees: the war on which they were entering was a war of agony and
shame, a war in which men died by hundreds of neglect and mismanagement,
before a woman’s hand could reach the helm and reform the hospital
ordinances in the ship of State.
Meanwhile, before we plunge into the horrors of the Crimean War we may
rest our minds with a few pages about Miss Nightingale’s friend, Mr.
Sidney Herbert, who became an active and self-sacrificing power in the
War Office.
When Florence Nightingale was born, Sidney Herbert—afterwards Lord
Herbert of Lea—was already a boy of ten.
Those who know the outlook over the Thames, from the windows of Pembroke
Lodge at Richmond, will realize that he too, like Florence Nightingale,
was born in a very beautiful spot. His father, the eleventh Earl of
Pembroke, had married the daughter of Count Woronzow, the Russian
Ambassador, and, in Sidney’s knowledgeable help afterwards at the War
Office during the Crimean War, it is not without interest to remember
this.
His birth had not been expected so soon, and there were no baby clothes
handy at Pembroke Lodge, where his mother was staying. It would seem
that shops were not so well able to supply every need with a ready-made
garment as they are in these days; so the first clothes that the baby boy
wore were lent by the workhouse until his own were ready.
In later days, when he cared for the needs of all who crossed his path,
until his people feared—or pretended to fear—that he would give away all
he had, his mother used to say that workhouse clothes were the first he
had worn after his birth, and were also clearly those in which he would
die.
He had good reason to rejoice in his lineage, for he was descended from
the sister of Sir Philip Sidney, after whom he was named. He too, like
his great namesake, was all his life full of that high courtesy which
comes of loving consideration for others rather than for self, and is
never more charming than in those who, being in every sense “well-born,”
have seen it in their fathers, and in their fathers before them,
notwithstanding that in those others who, less fortunate, whether they be
rich or poor, having come of an ill brood, are yet themselves well-bred,
such courtesy is of the courts of heaven.
The boy’s father had much individuality. Being the owner of some thirty
villages, and lord-lieutenant of the county, he was naturally a great
magnate in Wiltshire. He was very fond of dogs, and his favourites among
them sat at his own table, each with its own chair and plate.
Sidney was almost like an only son at home, for his elder brother,
who was, of course, the heir to Lord Herbert’s patrimony, had married
unhappily and lived abroad.
The little boy seems to have been really rather like the little angels
in Italian pictures, a child with golden curls and big brown eyes, with
the look of love and sunshine gleaming out of them that he kept all his
life, and there is a letter of his mother’s, describing a children’s
fancy dress ball, at which she dressed him up as a little cupid, with
wings and a wreath of roses, and was very proud of the result. He was
either too little to mind, or if he hated it, as so many boys would,
he bore with it to please his mother, who, we are told, made as much
of an idol of him as did the rest of his family. And indeed it is most
wonderful, from all accounts, that he was not completely spoiled. Here is
his mother’s letter about it:—
“I never did see anything half so like an angel. I must say
so, although it was my own performance. He had on a garland of
roses and green leaves mixed; a pair of wild duck’s wings, put
on wire to make them set well; a bow and arrow, and a quiver
with arrows in it, tied on with a broad blue ribbon that went
across his sweet neck.”
In another of her letters we are told of a visit paid, about this time,
to Queen Charlotte, and how the child “Boysey” climbed into the Queen’s
lap, drew up and pulled down window-blinds, romped at hide-and-seek with
the Duke of Cambridge, and showed himself to be not in the slightest
degree abashed by the presence of royalty.
Lord Fitzwilliam, a friend and distant relation, used often to stay at
Pembroke Lodge and at Wilton, and seems to have been pleased by the boy’s
courteous ways and winning looks; for, having no children of his own,
when he left most of his property to Lord Pembroke, the “remainder,”
which meant big estates in Ireland and Shropshire, was to go to his
second son, Sidney.
The boy loved his father with a very special intimacy and tenderness, as
we see by a letter written soon after he left Harrow and a little while
before he went up to Oxford, where at Oriel he at once made friends with
men of fine character and sterling worth. His father had died in 1827,
and he writes from Chilmark, where the rector, Mr. Lear, was his tutor,
and the Rectory was near his own old home at Wilton:—
“You cannot think how comfortable it is to be in a nice little
country church after that great noisy chapel. Everything is
so quiet and the people all so attentive that you might hear
a pin fall while Mr. Lear is preaching. I like, too, being so
near Wilton, so many things here ever bringing to mind all _he_
said and did, all places where I have ridden with _him_, and
the home where we used to be so happy. In short, there is not
a spot about Wilton now which I do not love as if it were a
person. I hope you will be coming there soon and get it over,
for seeing that place again will be a dreadful trial to you.”
Among his friends at Oxford were Cardinal Manning, Lord Lincoln, who
as Duke of Newcastle was afterwards closely associated with him at the
War Office; Lord Elgin, Lord Dalhousie, and Lord Canning, all three
Viceroys of India. It was there, too, that his friendship with Mr.
Gladstone began. Lord Stanmore says that Mr. Gladstone told him a year
or two before his death how one day at a University Convocation dealing
with a petition against the Roman Catholic Relief Bill, to which he
had himself gone as an undergraduate outsider, he had noticed among the
crowd of undergraduates in the vestibule of the Convocation House “a tall
and graceful figure, surmounted by a face of such singular sweetness
and refinement that his attention was at once riveted by it, and with
such force that the picture he then saw rose again as vividly before him
while talking as when first seen sixty-eight years before.” Mr. Gladstone
inquired the name of this attractive freshman. “Herbert of Oriel,” was
the answer. They became friends; but in those days friendships between
men of different colleges and different ages were not always easily kept
up. The more intimate relations between himself and Herbert date only
from a later time.
Herbert’s noble and beautiful life was to be closely intertwined with
that of his little friend and neighbour, in one of those friendships—holy
in their unselfish ardour of comradeship and service of others—which put
to shame many of the foolish sayings of the world, and prove that, while
an ideal marriage is the divinest happiness God gives to earthly life, an
ideal friendship also has the power to lift both joy and pain into the
region of heaven itself.
This was a friendship which, as we shall see, arose in the first
instance partly out of the fact that the two children grew up on
neighbouring estates, and were both what Mrs. Tollemache has called
“Sunday people”—people with leisure to give to others, as well as wealth;
and at the end of Sidney Herbert’s life it was said that the following
description of Sir Philip Sidney, after whom he was named, was in every
particular a description of him:—
“He was gentle, loving, compassionate, forgiving as a woman,
and yet had the dignity and valour of a man. His liberality was
so great that with him not to give was not to enjoy what he had.
“In his familiarity with men he never descended, but raised
everybody to his own level. So modest, so humble was he, and so
inaccessible to flattery, that he esteemed not praise except as
an encouragement to further exertion in well-doing. His tongue
knew no deceit, and his mind no policy but frankness, courage,
and sincerity, and ... England has had greater statesmen, but
never so choice a union of the qualities which make a Sidney.
His fame is founded on those personal qualities of which his
contemporaries were the best judges, although they may not
leave a trace in books or in history.”
And of both might it most emphatically have been said, as was said by Mr.
Gladstone of one of them: “Rare indeed—God only knows how rare—are men
with his qualities; but even a man with his qualities might not have been
so happy as to possess his opportunities. He had them, and he used them.”
The story of his betraying a State secret to that other friend, who was
the original of “Diana of the Crossways,” is a myth which has been more
than once disproved, and of which his biographer says that any one who
knew him, or knew the real “Diana,” would have treated it with derision.
But he was always ready to bear lightly undeserved blame, just as he took
it as of no account when credit that should have been his was rendered
elsewhere. Take, for instance, the warrant which relieved soldiers of
good conduct from the liability of punishment by flogging. He had worked
hard at this warrant, and it originated with him, although the Duke of
Cambridge supported him in it. But when one of his friends expressed
annoyance that the praise had come to the better-known man, he replied
impatiently: “What _does_ it matter who gets the credit so long as the
thing itself is done?”
Nor did he ever seem to care about mere material reward, and he simply
could not understand the outcry of one useful servant of the State who,
when likely to be left out of office in prospective Cabinet arrangements,
exclaimed, “And pray what is to become of _me_?”
With him, as with Miss Nightingale, giving was an untold and constant
joy, and he was able to be lavish because of his great personal economy
and self-denial. In all his beautiful home at Wilton, Lord Stanmore tells
us, his own were the only rooms that could have been called bare or
shabby, and when he was urged to buy a good hunter for himself, he had
spent too much on others to allow himself such a luxury. He delighted in
educating the sons of widows left by men of his own order without means.
“He maintained,” we read, “at one and the same time boys at Harrow,
Marlborough, and Woolwich, another in training for an Australian career,
and a fifth who was being educated for missionary work. And he expended
much in sending poor clergymen and their families to the seaside for a
month’s holiday.” And to gentlepeople who were poor we read that the help
of money “was given so delicately as to remove the burden of obligation.
A thousand little attentions in time of sickness or sorrow helped and
cheered them. In all these works his wife was his active coadjutor,
but” we read that “it was not till after his death that she was at all
aware of their extent, and even then not fully, so unostentatiously and
secretly were they performed. His sunny presence,” says his biographer,
“warmed and cheered all around him, and the charm of his conversation
made him the light and centre of any company of which he formed a
part.[6] There are, however, many men who are brilliant and joyous in
society, over whom a strange change comes when they cross their own
threshold. Sidney Herbert was never more brilliant, never more charming,
never more witty than when alone with his mother, his wife, his sisters,
or his children.
“Nowhere was he seen to greater advantage than in his own home. He
delighted in country life, and took a keen and almost boyish interest in
its sports and pursuits, into the enjoyment of which he threw himself
with a zest and fulness not common among busy men ... a good shot, a bold
rider, and an expert fisherman, he was welcomed by the country gentlemen
as one of themselves, and to this he owed much of his great popularity in
his own country. But it was also due to the unfailing consideration shown
by him to those of every class around him, and the sure trust in his
responsive sympathy which was felt by all, high and low alike, dwelling
within many miles of Wilton. By all dependent on him, or in any way under
his orders, he was adored, and well deserved to be so. The older servants
were virtually members of his family, and he took much pains in seeing
to their interests, and helping their children to start well in the
world.”
“Never,” says Lady Herbert, “did he come down to Wilton, if only for a
few days, without going to see Sally Parham, an old housemaid, who had
been sixty years in the family, and Larkum, an old carpenter of whom he
was very fond, and who on his death-bed gave him the most beautiful and
emphatic blessing I ever heard.”
Of his splendid work in the War Office, and for our soldiers long after
he had laid aside War Office cares, we shall read in its due place.
Meanwhile we think of him for the present as Florence Nightingale’s
friend, and her neighbour when in the south, for his beautiful Wilton
home was quite near to her own home at Embley.
Before the Crimean War began he was already giving his mind to army
reform, and while that war was in progress the horrors of insanitary
carelessness, as he saw them through Florence Nightingale’s letters, made
of him England’s greatest sanitary reformer in army matters, with the
single exception of Florence Nightingale herself.
The two had from the first many tastes in common, and among those of
minor importance was their great affection for animals. He was as devoted
to his horse Andover as she had been to the little owl Athene, of which
her sister, Lady Verney, in an old MS. quoted by Sir Stuart Grant Duff,
gives the following pretty history:—
“Bought for 6 lepta from some children into whose hands it had
dropped out of its nest in the Parthenon, it was brought by
Miss Nightingale to Trieste, with a slip of a plane from the
Ilissus and a cicala. At Vienna the owl ate the cicala and was
mesmerized, much to the improvement of his temper. At Prague
a waiter was heard to say that ‘this is the bird which all
English ladies carry with them, because it tells them when they
are to die.’ It came to England by Berlin, lived at Embley,
Lea Hurst, and in London, travelled in Germany, and stayed at
Carlsbad while its mistress was at Kaiserswerth. It died the
very day she was to have started for Scutari (her departure was
delayed two days), and the only tear that she had shed during
that tremendous week was when ⸺ put the little body into her
hand. ‘Poor little beastie,’ she said, ‘it was odd how much I
loved you.’”
And we read that before his death, Lord Herbert with a like tenderness
bade a special farewell to his horse Andover, kissing him on the neck,
feeding him with sugar, and telling him he should never ride again.
That was when he was already extremely ill, though not too ill to take
care that a young priest who was dying also, but too poor to buy all the
doctor had ordered, should be cared for out of his own purse.
With him, as with Florence Nightingale, giving and helping seem to have
been unceasing.
The friendship between them was very dear to both of them, and was warmly
shared by Lord Herbert’s wife. When they all knew that death was waiting
with a summons, and that Lord Herbert’s last journey abroad could have
but one ending, even though, as things turned out, he was to have just
a momentary glimpse of home again, Florence Nightingale was the last
friend to whom he bade farewell. But that was not till 1861, and in the
intervening years they worked incessantly together, for the good of the
army and the improvement of sanitary conditions.
CHAPTER IX.
_The Crimean muddle—Explanations and excuses._
In our last chapter we ended with a word about those sanitary reforms
which were yet to come. How appalling was the ignorance and confusion in
1854, when the war in the Crimea began, has now become matter of common
knowledge everywhere.
I note later, as a result of my talk with General Evatt, some of the
reasons and excuses for the dire neglect and muddle that reigned. John
Bull was, as usual, so arrogantly sure of himself that he had—also as
usual—taken no sort of care to keep himself fit in time of peace, and
there was no central organizing authority for the equipment of the
army—every one was responsible, and therefore no one. The provisions
bought by contract were many of them rotten and mouldy, so cleverly had
the purchasers been deceived and defrauded. The clothing provided for
the men before Sebastopol, where, in at least one instance, man was
literally frozen to man, were such as would have been better suited to
India or South Africa. Many of the boots sent out were fitter for women
and children playing on green lawns than for the men who must tramp over
rough and icy roads. The very horses were left to starve for want of
proper hay. Proper medical provision there was none. There were doctors,
some of them nobly unselfish, but few of them trained for that particular
work. An army surgeon gets little practice in time of peace, and one
lady, a Red Cross nurse, told me that even in our South African campaign
the doctor with whom she did her first bit of bandaging out there told
her he had not bandaged an arm for fifteen years! But indeed many of the
doctors in the Crimea were not only badly prepared, they were also so
tied up with red-tape details that, though they gave their lives freely,
they quickly fell in with the helpless chaos of a hospital without a head.
England shuddered to the heart when at last she woke up under the lash
of the following letter from William Howard Russell, the _Times_ war
correspondent:—
“The commonest accessories of a hospital are wanting, there is
not the least attention paid to decency or cleanliness, the
stench is appalling ... and, for all I can observe, the men die
without the least effort to save them. There they lie just as
they were let gently down on the ground by the poor fellows,
the comrades, who brought them on their backs from the camp
with the greatest tenderness, but who are not allowed to remain
with them.”
“Are there,” he wrote at a later date, “no devoted women among
us, able and willing to go forth and minister to the sick and
suffering soldiers of the East in the hospitals at Scutari?
Are none of the daughters of England, at this extreme hour of
need, ready for such a work of mercy?... France has sent forth
her Sisters of Mercy unsparingly, and they are even now by the
bedsides of the wounded and the dying, giving what woman’s hand
alone can give of comfort and relief.... Must we fall so far
below the French in self-sacrifice and devotedness, in a work
which Christ so signally blesses as done unto Himself? ‘I was
sick and ye visited me.’”
What the art of nursing had fallen to in England may be guessed from the
fact lately mentioned to me by a great friend of Miss Nightingale’s, that
when Florence Nightingale told her family she would like to devote her
life to nursing, they said with a smile, “Are you sure you would not like
to be a kitchen-maid?”
Yet the Nightingales were, on other questions, such as that of the
education of girls, far in advance of their time.
Possibly nothing short of those letters to the _Times_, touching, as they
did, the very quick of the national pride, could have broken down the
“Chinese wall” of that particular prejudice.
Something may be said at this point as to what had been at the
root of the dreadful condition of things in the hospitals before
Miss Nightingale’s arrival. I have had some instructive talk with
Surgeon-General Evatt, who knows the medical administration of our army
through and through, and whose friendship with Miss Nightingale arose in
a very interesting way, but will be mentioned later on in its due place.
General Evatt has pointed out to me in conversation that what is still
a weakness of our great London hospitals, though lessened there by the
fierce light of public opinion that is ever beating upon them, was the
very source of the evil at Scutari.
Such hospitals as the London, doing such magnificent work that it
deserves a thousand times the support it receives, are, explained General
Evatt, without any central authority. The doctors pay their daily visits
and their code is a high one, but they are as varied in ability and in
character as any other group of doctors, and are responsible to no one
but God and their own conscience. The nursing staff have _their_ duties
and _their_ code, but are under separate management. The committee
secures the funds and manages the finance, but it is again quite distinct
in its powers, and does not control either doctors or nurses.
The Barrack Hospital at Scutari was, said the General, in this respect
just like a London hospital of sixty years ago, set down in the midst of
the Crimea. There was, he said—to adapt a well-known quotation—“knowledge
without authority, and authority without knowledge,” but no power to
unite them in responsible effort. Therefore we must feel deep pity,
not indignation, with regard to any one member of the staff; for each
alone was helpless against the chaos, until Miss Nightingale, who stood
outside the official muddle, yet with the friendship of a great War
Minister behind her, and in her hand all the powers of wealth, hereditary
influence, and personal charm, quietly cut some of the knots of red tape
which were, as she saw clearly, strangling the very lives of our wounded
soldiers. When I spoke of the miracle by which a woman who had been
all her life fitting herself for this work, had suddenly received her
world-wide opportunity, he replied: “Yes, I have often said it was as if
a very perfect machine had through long years been fitted together and
polished to the highest efficiency, and when, at last, it was ready for
service, a hand was put forth to accept and use it.”
Just as he sought to explain the awful condition of the army hospitals
at the beginning of the war; so also he, as a military doctor, pointed
out to me that there were even many excuses for the condition of the
transport service, and the idiotic blunders of a government that sent
soldiers to the freezing winters of the Crimea in clothes that would have
been better suited to the hot climate of India.
The army after the Peninsular War had been split up into battalions, and
had, like the hospitals, lost all _centre_ of authority. England had
been seething with the social troubles of our transition from the feudal
order to the new competitions and miseries of a commercial and mechanical
age. Machinery was causing uproar among the hand-workers. Chartist
riots, bread riots, were upsetting the customary peace. Troops were sent
hither and thither, scattered over the country, and allowed a certain
degree of licence and slackness. The army had no administrative head.
There was no one to consider the question of stores or transit, and,
even when the war broke out, it was treated with John Bull’s too casual
self-satisfaction as a moment of excitement and self-glorification, from
which our troops were to return as victors in October, after displaying
themselves for a few weeks and satisfactorily alarming the enemy. The
moral of it all is ever present and needs no pressing home. Not until
every man has had the training of a man in defence of his own home, and
is himself responsible for the defence of his own hearth, shall we as a
nation learn the humility and caution of the true courage, and realize
how much, at the best, is outside human control, and how great is our
responsibility in every detail for all that lies within it.
CHAPTER X.
“_Five were wise, and five foolish._”
When the great moment came, there was one wise virgin whose lamp had long
been trimmed and daily refilled with ever finer quality of flame. She was
not alone. There were others, and she was always among the first to do
them honour. But she stood easily first, and first, too, in the modesty
of all true greatness. All her life had been a training for the work
which was now given to her hand.
Among the many women who longed to nurse and tend our soldiers, many were
fast bound by duties to those dependent on them, many were tied hand
and foot by the pettifogging prejudices of the school in which they had
been brought up. Many, whose ardour would have burned up all prejudice
and all secondary claim, were yet ignorant, weak, incapable. Florence
Nightingale, on the contrary, was highly trained, not only in intellect,
but in the details of what she rightly regarded as an art, “a craft,”
the careful art of nursing—highly disciplined in body and in soul, every
muscle and nerve obedient to her will, an international linguist, a woman
in whom organizing power had been developed to its utmost capacity by a
severely masculine education, and whose experience had been deepened by
practical service both at home and abroad.
Her decision was a foregone conclusion, and a very striking seal was set
upon it. For the letter, in which she offered to go out to the Crimea
as the servant of her country, was crossed by a letter from Mr. Sidney
Herbert, that country’s representative at the War Office, asking her to
go. Promptitude on both sides had its own reward; for each would have
missed the honour of spontaneous initiative had there been a day’s delay.
Here is a part of Mr. Herbert’s letter:—
“_October 15, 1854._
“DEAR MISS NIGHTINGALE,—You will have seen in the papers
that there is a great deficiency of nurses at the hospital of
Scutari. The other alleged deficiencies, namely, of medical
men, lint, sheets, etc., must, if they ever existed, have
been remedied ere this, as the number of medical officers
with the army amounted to one to every ninety-five men in the
whole force, being nearly double what we have ever had before;
and thirty more surgeons went out there three weeks ago, and
must at this time, therefore, be at Constantinople. A further
supply went on Monday, and a fresh batch sail next week. As to
medical stores, they have been sent out in profusion, by the
ton weight—15,000 pair of sheets, medicine, wine, arrowroot in
the same proportion; and the only way of accounting for the
deficiency at Scutari, if it exists, is that the mass of the
stores went to Varna, and had not been sent back when the army
left for the Crimea, but four days would have remedied that.
“In the meantime, stores are arriving, but the deficiency of
female nurses is undoubted; none but male nurses have ever been
admitted to military hospitals. It would be impossible to
carry about a large staff of female nurses with an army in the
field. But at Scutari, having now a fixed hospital, no military
reason exists against the introduction; and I am confident they
might be introduced with great benefit, for hospital orderlies
must be very rough hands, and most of them, on such an occasion
as this, very inexperienced ones.
“I receive numbers of offers from ladies to go out, but they
are ladies who have no conception of what a hospital is, nor
of the nature of its duties; and they would, when the time
came, either recoil from the work or be entirely useless, and
consequently, what is worse, entirely in the way; nor would
these ladies probably even understand the necessity, especially
in a military hospital, of strict obedience to rule, etc....
“There is but one person in England that I know of who would
be capable of organizing and superintending such a scheme,
and I have been several times on the point of asking you
hypothetically if, supposing the attempt were made, you would
undertake to direct it. The selection of the rank and file
of nurses would be difficult—no one knows that better than
yourself. The difficulty of finding women equal to the task,
after all, full of horror, and requiring, besides knowledge and
goodwill, great knowledge and great courage, will be great; the
task of ruling them and introducing system among them great;
and not the least will be the difficulty of making the whole
work smoothly with the medical and military authorities out
there.
“This is what makes it so important that the experiment
should be carried out by one with administrative capacity and
experience. A number of sentimental, enthusiastic ladies turned
loose in the hospital at Scutari would probably after a few
days be _mises à la porte_ by those whose business they would
interrupt, and whose authority they would dispute.
“My question simply is—would you listen to the request to go
out and supervise the whole thing? You would, of course, have
plenary authority over all the nurses, and I think I could
secure you the fullest assistance and co-operation from the
medical staff, and you would also have an unlimited power of
drawing on the Government for whatever you think requisite
for the success of your mission. On this part of the subject
the details are too many for a letter, and I reserve it for
our meeting; for, whatever decision you take, I know you will
give me every assistance and advice. I do not say one word to
press you. You are the only person who can judge for yourself
which of conflicting or incompatible duties is the first or the
highest; but I think I must not conceal from you that upon your
decision will depend the ultimate success or failure of the
plan.... Will you let me have a line at the War Office, to let
me know?
“There is one point which I have hardly a right to touch
upon, but I trust you will pardon me. If you were inclined
to undertake the great work, would Mr. and Mrs. Nightingale
consent? This work would be so national, and the request made
to you, proceeding from the Government which represents the
nation, comes at such a moment that I do not despair of their
consent.
“Deriving your authority from the Government, your position
would ensure the respect and consideration of every one,
especially in a service where official rank carries so much
respect. This would secure you any attention or comfort on your
way out there, together with a complete submission to your
orders. I know these things are a matter of indifference to
you, except so far as they may further the great object you may
have in view; but they are of importance in themselves, and of
every importance to those who have a right to take an interest
in your personal position and comfort.
“I know you will come to a right and wise decision. God grant
it may be one in accordance with my hopes.—Believe me, dear
Miss Nightingale, ever yours,
“SIDNEY HERBERT.”
Miss Nightingale’s decision was announced in the _Times_, and on October
23 the following paragraph appeared in that paper:—
“It is known that Miss Nightingale has been appointed by
Government to the office of Superintendent of Nurses at
Scutari. She has been pressed to accept of sums of money for
the general objects of the hospitals for the sick and wounded.
Miss Nightingale neither invites nor can refuse these generous
offers. Her bankers’ account is opened at Messrs. Glyn’s, but
it must be understood that any funds forwarded to her can only
be used so as not to interfere with the official duties of the
Superintendent.”
This was written by Miss Nightingale herself, and the response in money
was at once very large, but money was by no means the first or most
difficult question.
No time must be lost in choosing the nurses who were to accompany the
Lady-in-Chief. It was not until later that she became known by that name,
but it already well described her office, for every vital arrangement and
decision seems to have centred in her. She knew well that her task could
be undertaken in no spirit of lightness, and she never wasted power in
mere fuss or flurry.
She once wrote to Sir Bartle Frere of “that careless and ignorant
person called the Devil,” and she did not want any of his careless and
ignorant disciples to go out with her among her chosen band. Nor did she
want any incompetent sentimentalists of the kind brought before us in
that delightful story of our own South African War, of the soldier who
gave thanks for the offer to wash his face, but confessed that fourteen
other ladies had already offered the same service. Indeed, the rather
garish merriment of that little tale seems almost out of place when we
recall the rotting filth and unspeakable stench of blood and misery in
which the men wounded in the Crimea were lying wrapped from head to
foot. No antiseptic surgery, no decent sanitation, no means of ordinary
cleanliness, were as yet found for our poor Tommies, and Kinglake assures
us that all the efforts of masculine organization, seeking to serve the
crowded hospitals with something called a laundry, had only succeeded in
washing _seven_ shirts for the entire army!
Miss Nightingale knew a little of the vastness of her undertaking,
but she is described by Lady Canning at this critical time as “gentle
and wise and quiet”—“in no bustle or hurry.” Yet within a single week
from the date of Mr. Herbert’s letter asking her to go out, all her
arrangements were made and her nurses chosen—nay more, the expedition had
actually started.
The War Office issued its official intimation that “Miss Nightingale, a
lady with greater practical experience of hospital administration and
treatment than any other lady in this country,” had undertaken the noble
and arduous work of organizing and taking out nurses for the soldiers;
and it was also notified that she had been appointed by Government to the
office of Superintendent of Nurses at Scutari.
The _Examiner_ published a little biographical sketch in reply to the
question which was being asked everywhere. Society, of course, knew Miss
Nightingale very well, but Society includes only a small knot of people
out of the crowd of London’s millions, to say nothing of the provinces.
Many out of those millions were asking, “Who is Miss Nightingale?” and,
in looking back, it is amazing to see how many disapproved of the step
she was taking.
In those days, as in these, and much more tyrannically than in these,
Mrs. Grundy had her silly daughters, ready to talk slander and folly
about any good woman who disregarded her. To Miss Nightingale she simply
did not exist. Miss Martineau was right when she wrote of her that “to
her it was a small thing to be judged by man’s judgment.”
And the spirit in which she chose the women who were to go out under her
to the Crimea may be judged by later words of her own, called forth by a
discussion of fees for nurses—words in which the italics are mine, though
the sentence is quoted here to show the scorn she poured on fashion’s
canting view of class distinction.
“I have seen,” she said, “somewhere in print that nursing is a
profession to be followed by the ‘lower middle-class.’ Shall we
say that painting or sculpture is a profession to be followed
by the ‘lower middle-class’? _Why limit the class at all?_ Or
shall we say that God is only to be served in His sick by the
‘lower middle-class’?
“_It appears to be the most futile of all distinctions to
classify as between ‘paid’ and unpaid art, so between ‘paid’
and unpaid nursing, to make into a test a circumstance as
adventitious as whether the hair is black or brown—viz.,
whether people have private means or not, whether they are
obliged or not to work at their art or their nursing for a
livelihood._ Probably no person ever did that well which he did
only for money. Certainly no person ever did that well which
he did not work at as hard as if he did it solely for money.
If by amateur in art or in nursing are meant those who take it
up for play, it is not art at all, it is not nursing at all.
_You never yet made an artist by paying him well; but an artist
ought to be well paid._”
The woman who in later life wrote this, and all her life acted on it,
could not only well afford to let _Punch_ have his joke about the
nightingales who would shortly turn into ringdoves—although, indeed,
_Punch’s_ verses and illustration were delightful in their innocent
fun—but could even without flinching let vulgar slander insinuate its
usual common-minded nonsense. She herself has written in _Nursing Notes_:—
“The everyday management of a large ward, let alone of a
hospital, the knowing what are the laws of life and death
for men, and what the laws of health for wards (and wards are
healthy or unhealthy mainly according to the knowledge or
ignorance of the nurse)—are not these matters of sufficient
importance and difficulty to require learning by experience
and careful inquiry, just as much as any other art? They do
not come by inspiration to the lady disappointed in love, nor
to the poor workhouse drudge hard up for a livelihood. And
terrible is the injury which has followed to the sick from such
wild notions.”
Happily, too, she was not blinded by the narrow sectarian view of
religion which was, in her day and generation, so often a part of the
parrot belief of those who learned their English version of the faith by
rote, rather than with the soul’s experience, for she goes on to say:—
“In this respect (and why is it so?) in Roman Catholic
countries, both writers and workers are, in theory at least,
far before ours. They would never think of such a beginning
for a good-working Superior or Sister of Charity. And many a
Superior has refused to admit a postulant who appeared to have
no better ‘vocation’ or reasons for offering herself than these.
“It is true we make no ‘vows.’ But is a ‘vow’ necessary to
convince us that the true spirit for learning any art, most
especially an art of charity, aright, is not a disgust to
everything or something else? Do we really place the love of
our kind (and of nursing as one branch of it) so low as this?
What would the Mère Angélique of Port Royal, what would our own
Mrs. Fry, have said to this?”
How silly, in the light of these words, was the gossip of the idle
person, proud of her shopping and her visiting list and her elaborate
choice of dinner, who greeted the news of this nursing embassy to the
Crimea with such cheap remarks as that the women would be all invalided
home in a month; that it was most improper for “young ladies”—for it
was not only shop assistants who were called “young ladies” in early
Victorian days—to nurse in a military hospital; it was only nonsense to
try and “nurse soldiers when they did not even yet know what it was to
nurse a baby!”
Such folly would only shake its hardened old noddle on reading, in the
_Times_ reprint of the article in the _Examiner_, that Miss Nightingale
was “a young lady of singular endowments both natural and acquired.
In a knowledge of the ancient languages and of the higher branches of
mathematics, in general art, science, and literature, her attainments are
extraordinary. There is scarcely a modern language which she does not
understand, and she speaks French, German, and Italian as fluently as
her native English. She has visited and studied all the various nations
of Europe, and has ascended the Nile to its remotest cataract. Young
(about the age of our Queen), graceful, feminine, rich, popular, she
holds a singularly gentle and persuasive influence over all with whom she
comes in contact. Her friends and acquaintances are of all classes and
persuasions, but her happiest place is at home, in the centre of a very
large band of accomplished relatives.”
Girton and Newnham, Somerville and Lady Margaret did not then exist.
If any one had dreamed of them, the dream had not yet been recorded.
Perhaps its first recognized expression, in Tennyson’s “Princess” in
1847, mingling as it does with the story of a war and of the nursing of
wounded men, may have imperceptibly smoothed away a few coarse prejudices
from the path Florence Nightingale was to tread, but far more effectually
was the way cleared by her own inspiring personality. Mrs. Tooley
quotes from an intimate letter the following words: “Miss Nightingale
is one of those whom God forms for great ends. You cannot hear her say
a few sentences—no, not even look at her—without feeling that she is
an extraordinary being. Simple, intellectual, sweet, full of love and
benevolence, she is a fascinating and perfect woman. She is tall and
pale. Her face is exceedingly lovely, but better than all is the soul’s
glory that shines through every feature so exultingly. Nothing can be
sweeter than her smile. It is like a sunny day in summer.”
She who advised other women to make ready for the business of their lives
as men make ready had been for long years preparing herself, and there
was therefore none of the nervous waste and excitement of those who in a
moment of impulse take a path which to their ignorance is like leaping in
the dark.
But she knew well how much must depend on those she took with her, and it
was clear that many who desired to go were quite unfitted for the work.
With her usual clearsightedness she knew where to turn for help. Felicia
Skene was among those whom she consulted and whose advice she found
of good service. It has already been noted in these pages that Miss
Skene had, without knowing it, been preparing one of the threads to be
interwoven in that living tapestry in which Miss Nightingale’s labours
were to endure in such glowing colours. Like Miss Nightingale she had
real intimacy with those outside her own order, and by her practical
human sympathy understood life, not only in one rank, but in all ranks.
By night as well as by day her door was open to the outcast, and in
several life-stories she had played a part which saved some poor girl
from suicide. Full of humour and romance, and a welcome guest in
every society, she will be remembered longest for her work in rescuing
others both in body and in soul, and you will remember that, on the
two occasions when the cholera visited Oxford, she nursed the sick and
the dying by day and by night, and did much to direct and organize the
helpful work of others. Miss Wordsworth speaks of her “innate purity of
heart and mind,” and says of her, “one always felt of her that she had
been brought up in the best of company, as indeed she had.” It was just
such women that Miss Nightingale needed—women who, in constant touch with
what was coarse and hard, could never become coarse or hard themselves;
women versed in practical service and trained by actual experience as
well as by hard-won knowledge.
Moreover, it chanced that after Miss Skene’s labour of love in the
cholera visitation, her niece, “Miss Janie Skene, then a girl of fifteen,
who was staying in Constantinople with her parents, had gone with her
mother to visit the wounded soldiers at Scutari. Shocked by their
terrible sufferings and the lack of all that might have eased their
pain, she wrote strongly to her grandfather, who sent her letter to the
_Times_, where it did much to stir up public opinion.”
“It struck Felicia,” says Miss Rickards, “that having with
great pains trained her corps of nurses for the cholera, they
might now be utilized at Scutari, her great desire being to go
out herself at the head of them. Had these events occurred at
the present day, when ideas have changed as to what ladies,
still young, may and may not do in the way of bold enterprise,
perhaps she might have obtained her parents’ permission to go.
As it was the notion was too new and startling to be taken into
consideration; and she had to content herself with doing all
she could at home to send out others.
“Her zeal was quickened by a letter she received from Lord
Stratford de Redcliffe, who had been much struck by her energy
and ability, urging her to do all she could in England to send
to the rescue.
“At once she set out as a pioneer in the undertaking,
delighted to encourage her nurses to take their part in the
heroic task.
“Meantime Miss Nightingale was hard at work enlisting recruits,
thankful to secure Felicia’s services as agent at Oxford. She
sent her friends Mr. and Mrs. Bracebridge down there, that they
might inspect the volunteers and select the women they thought
would be suitable.
“The interviews took place in Mr. Skene’s dining-room, along
the walls of which the candidates were ranged.
“Kind-hearted as Mrs. Bracebridge was, her proceedings were
somewhat in the ‘Off with their heads!’ style of the famous
duchess in ‘Alice in Wonderland.’ If the sudden questions fired
at each in succession were not answered in a way that she
thought quite satisfactory, ‘She won’t do; send her out,’ was
the decided command.
“And Felicia had to administer balm to the wounded feelings of
the rejected.”[7]
CHAPTER XI.
_The Expedition._
Of the thirty-eight nurses who went out with Miss Nightingale,
twenty-four had been trained in sisterhoods, Roman and Anglican, and of
the remaining fourteen, some had been chosen in the first instance by
Lady Maria Forrester, others by Miss Skene and Mrs. Bracebridge, but it
must be supposed that the final decision lay always with Miss Nightingale.
The correspondence that had poured in upon her and upon Mr. Herbert was
overwhelming, and there was a personal interview with all who seemed in
the least degree likely to be admitted to her staff; so that she worked
very hard, with little pause for rest, to get through her ever-increasing
task in time. Each member of the staff undertook to obey her absolutely.
Among the many who were rejected, though most were unsuitable for
quite other reasons, there were some who objected to this rule. Many
who were full of sympathy and generosity had to be turned away, because
they had not had enough training. Advertisements had appeared in the
_Record_ and the _Guardian_, but the crowd of fair ladies who flocked
to the War Office in response were not always received with such open
arms as they expected. Mr. Herbert was well on his guard against the
charms of impulsive, but ignorant, goodwill, and he issued a sort of
little manifesto in which he said that “many ladies whose generous
enthusiasm prompts them to offer services as nurses are little aware of
the hardships they would have to encounter, and the horrors they would
have to witness. Were all accepted who offer,” he added, with a touch of
humour, “I fear we should have not only many indifferent nurses, but many
hysterical patients.”
He and his wife were untiring in their efficiency and their help.
The English Sisterhoods had made a difficulty about surrendering control
over the Sisters they sent out, but Miss Nightingale overcame that, and
the Roman bishop entirely freed the ten Sisters of his communion from any
rule which could clash with Miss Nightingale’s orders.
It was on the evening of October 21, 1854, that the “Angel Band,” as
Kinglake rightly names them, quietly set out under cover of darkness,
escorted by a parson and a courier and by Miss Nightingale’s friends, Mr.
and Mrs. Bracebridge of Atherstone Hall.
In this way all flourish of trumpets was avoided. Miss Nightingale always
hated public fuss—or, indeed, fuss of any kind. She was anxious also to
lighten the parting for those who loved her best, and who had given a
somewhat doubting consent to her resolve.
The Quakerish plainness of her black dress did but make the more striking
the beauty of her lovely countenance, the firm, calm sweetness of the
smiling lips and steadfast eyes, the grace of the tall, slender figure;
and as the train whirled her out of sight with her carefully-chosen
regiment, she left with her friends a vision of good cheer and high
courage.
But however quiet the setting forth, the arrival at Boulogne could not
be kept a secret, and the enthusiasm of our French allies for those who
were going to nurse the wounded made the little procession a heart-moving
triumph. A merry band of white-capped fishwives met the boat and,
seizing all the luggage, insisted on doing everything for nothing.
Boxes on their backs and bags in their hands, they ran along in their
bright petticoats, pouring out their hearts about their own boys at the
front, and asking only the blessing of a handshake as the sole payment
they would take. Then, as Miss Nightingale’s train whistled its noisy
way out of the station, waving their adieus while the tears streamed
down the weather-beaten cheeks of more than one old wife, they stood
and watched with longing hearts. At Paris there was a passing visit to
the Mother-house of Miss Nightingale’s old friends, the Sisters of St.
Vincent de Paul, and a little call on Lady Canning, also an old friend,
who writes of her as “happy and stout-hearted.”
The poor “Angels” had a terrible voyage to Malta, for the wind, as
with St. Paul, was “contrary” and blew a hurricane dead against them,
so that their ship, the _Vectis_, had something of a struggle to escape
with its many lives. They touched at Malta on October 31, 1854, and soon
afterwards set sail again for Constantinople.
What an old-world story it seems now to talk of “setting sail”!
On the 4th of November, the day before the battle of Inkermann, they had
reached their goal, and had their work before them at Scutari.
A friend of mine who knows Scutari well has described it in summer as a
place of roses, the very graves wreathed all over with the blossoming
briars of them; and among those graves she found a nameless one, on
which, without revealing identity, the epitaph stated, in the briefest
possible way, that this was the grave of a hospital matron, adding in
comment the words spoken of Mary when she broke the alabaster box—and
in this instance full of pathos—the six words, “She hath done what she
could.” And I find from one of Miss Nightingale’s letters that it was she
herself who inscribed those words.
Unspeakable indeed must have been the difficulties with which any
previous hospital matron had to contend, rigid and unbreakable for
ordinary fingers the red tape by which she must have been bound. On this
subject Kinglake has written words which are strong indeed in their
haunting sincerity.
He writes of an “England officially typified that swathes her limbs round
with red tape,” and of those who, though dogged in routine duty, were so
afraid of any new methods that they were found “surrendering, as it were,
at discretion, to want and misery” for those in their care.
“But,” he adds, “happily, after a while, and in gentle, almost
humble, disguise which put foes of change off their guard,
there acceded to the State a new power.
“Almost at one time—it was when they learnt how our troops had
fought on the banks of the Alma—the hearts of many women in
England, in Scotland, in Ireland, were stirred with a heavenly
thought impelling them to offer and say that, if only the
State were consenting, they would go out to tend our poor
soldiers laid low on their hospital pallets by sickness or
wounds; and the honour of welcoming into our public service
this new and gracious aid belonged to Mr. Sidney Herbert.”
He goes on to explain and define Mr. Herbert’s exact position at the War
Office; how he was not only official chief there, but, “having perhaps
also learnt from life’s happy experience that, along with what he might
owe to fortune and birth, his capacity for business of State, his frank,
pleasant speech, his bright, winning manners, and even his glad, sunshine
looks, had a tendency to disarm opposition, he quietly, yet boldly,
stepped out beyond his set bounds, and not only became in this hospital
business the volunteer delegate of the Duke of Newcastle, but even
ventured to act without always asking the overworked Department of War
to go through the form of supporting him by orders from the Secretary of
State; so that thus, and to the great advantage of the public service, he
usurped, as it were, an authority which all who knew what he was doing
rejoiced to see him wield. If he could not in strictness command by an
official despatch, he at least could impart what he wished in a ‘private
letter;’ and a letter, though ostensibly ‘private,’ which came from the
War Office, under the hand of its chief, was scarce likely to encounter
resistance from any official personages to whom the writer might send it.
“Most happily this gifted minister had formed a strong belief in the
advantages our military hospitals would gain by accepting womanly aid;
and, proceeding to act on this faith, he not only despatched to the East
some chosen bands of ladies, and of salaried attendants accustomed to
hospital duties, but also requested that they might have quarters and
rations assigned to them; and, moreover, whilst requesting the principal
medical officer at Scutari to point out to these new auxiliaries how best
they could make themselves useful, Mr. Sidney Herbert enjoined him to
receive with attention and deference the counsels of the Lady-in-Chief,
who was, of course, no other than Miss Nightingale herself.
“That direction was one of great moment, and well calculated to govern
the fate of a newly ventured experiment.
“Thus it was that, under the sanction of a government acceding to the
counsels of one of its most alert and sagacious members, there went out
angel women from England, resolved to confront that whole world of horror
and misery that can be gathered into a military hospital from camp or
battlefield; and their plea, when they asked to be trusted with this
painful, this heart-rending mission, was simply the natural aptitude
of their sex for ministering to those who lie prostrate from sickness
and wounds. Using that tender word which likened the helplessness of
the down-stricken soldier to the helplessness of infancy, they only
said they would ‘nurse’ him; and accordingly, if regarded with literal
strictness, their duty would simply be that of attendants in hospital
wards—attendants obeying with strictness the orders of the medical
officers.
“It was seen that the humble soldiers were likely to be the men most in
want of care, and the ladies were instructed to abstain from attending
upon any of the officers.”[8]
CHAPTER XII.
_The tribute of Kinglake and Macdonald and the Chelsea
Pensioners._
But before continuing the story of Miss Nightingale’s expedition, we must
turn aside for a moment in Kinglake’s company to realize something of the
devotion of another brave and unselfish Englishwoman who, without her
“commanding genius,” yet trod the same path of sacrifice and compassion.
The words “commanding genius” were spoken by Dean Stanley of Miss
Nightingale, and it is of Dean Stanley’s sister Mary that a word must
now be spoken. She had been the right hand of her father, the Bishop of
Norwich, and, in serving the poor, had disclosed special gifts, made
the more winning by her gentle, loving nature. Having had experience of
travel, which was much less a thing of course than it is in these days,
she was willing to escort a company of nurses chosen for work in the
Levant, and at first this was all she expected to do. But there proved
to be a difficulty about receiving them at Scutari, and she could not
bring herself to leave them without guidance; so she quietly gave up all
thought of returning to England while the war continued.
“Could she,” asks Kinglake, “see them in that strait disband,
when she knew but too well that their services were bitterly
needed for the shiploads and shiploads of stricken soldiery
brought down day by day from the seat of war? Under stress
of the question thus put by her own exacting conscience, or
perhaps by the simpler commandment of her generous heart, she
formed the heroic resolve which was destined to govern her life
throughout the long, dismal period of which she then knew not
the end. Instead of returning to England, and leaving on the
shores of the Bosphorus her band of sisters and nurses, she
steadfastly remained at their head, and along with them entered
at once upon what may be soberly called an appalling task—the
task of ‘nursing’ in hospitals not only overcrowded with
sufferers, but painfully, grievously wanting in most of the
conditions essential to all good hospital management.
“The sisters and salaried nurses,” says Kinglake, “who placed
themselves under this guidance were in all forty-six; and Miss
Stanley, with great spirit and energy, brought the aid of
her whole reinforcement—at first to the naval hospital newly
founded at Therapia under the auspices of our Embassy, and
afterwards to another establishment—to that fated hospital at
Kullali, in which, as we saw, at one time a fearful mortality
raged.
“Not regarding her mission as one that needs should aim loftily
at the reformation of the hospital management, Miss Stanley
submitted herself for guidance to the medical officers, saying,
‘What do you wish us to do?’ The officers wisely determined
that they would not allow the gentle women to exhaust their
power of doing good by undertaking those kinds of work that
might be as well or better performed by men, and their answer
was to this effect: ‘The work that in surgical cases has been
commonly done by our dressers will be performed by them, as
before, under our orders. What we ask of you is that you will
see the men take the medicines and the nourishment ordered for
them, and we know we can trust that you will give them all that
watchful care which alleviates suffering, and tends to restore
health and strength.’
“With ceaseless devotion and energy the instructions were
obeyed. What number of lives were saved—saved even in
that pest-stricken hospital of Kullali—by a long, gentle
watchfulness, when science almost despaired, no statistics,
of course, can show; and still less can they gauge or record
the alleviation of misery effected by care such as this; but
apparent to all was the softened demeanour of the soldier
when he saw approaching his pallet some tender, gracious lady
intent to assuage his suffering, to give him the blessing of
hope, to bring him the food he liked, and withal—when she
came with the medicine—to rule him like a sick child. Coarse
expressions and oaths deriving from barracks and camps died
out in the wards as though exorcised by the sacred spell of her
presence, and gave way to murmurs of gratitude. When conversing
in this softened mood with the lady appointed to nurse him,
the soldier used often to speak as though the worship he owed
her and the worship he owed to Heaven were blending into one
sentiment; and sometimes, indeed, he disclosed a wild faith in
the ministering angel that strained beyond the grave. ‘Oh!’
said one to the lady he saw bending over his pallet, ‘you
are taking me on the way to heaven; don’t forsake me now!’
When a man was under delirium, its magic force almost always
transported him to the home of his childhood, and made him
indeed a child—a child crying, ‘Mother! mother!’ Amongst the
men generally, notwithstanding their moments of fitful piety,
there still glowed a savage desire for the fall of Sebastopol.
More than once—wafted up from Constantinople—the sound of great
guns was believed to announce a victory, and sometimes there
came into the wards fresh tidings of combat brought down from
our army in front of the long-besieged stronghold. When this
happened, almost all of the sufferers who had not yet lost
their consciousness used to show that, however disabled, they
were still soldiers—true soldiers. At such times, on many a
pallet, the dying man used to raise himself by unwonted effort,
and seem to yearn after the strife, as though he would answer
once more the appeal of the bugles and drums.”
[Illustration: Florence Nightingale at the Therapia Hospital.
“I was sick, and ye visited me.”]
Kinglake’s touching description of what womanly tenderness could do for
our soldiers, and of the worship it called forth, is followed by these
words:—
“But great would be the mistake of any chronicler fancying
that the advantage our country derived from womanly aid was
only an accession of nurses; for, if gifted with the power
to comfort and soothe, woman also—a still higher gift—can
impel, can disturb, can destroy pernicious content; and when
she came to the rescue in an hour of gloom and adversity,
she brought to her self-imposed task that forethought, that
agile brain power, that organizing and governing faculty of
which our country had need. The males at that time in England
were already giving proofs of the lameness in the use of
brain power, which afterwards became more distinct. Owing,
possibly, to their habits of industry, applied in fixed, stated
directions, they had lost that command of brain force which
kindles ‘initiative,’ and with it, of course, the faculty of
opportunely resorting to any very new ways of action. They
proved slow to see and to meet the fresh exigencies occasioned
by war, when approaching, or even by war when present; and,
apparently, in the hospital problem, they must have gone on
failing and failing indefinitely, if they had not undergone the
propulsion of the quicker—the woman’s—brain to ‘set them going’
in time.”
He then goes on to tell of the arrival at “the immense Barrack Hospital”
at Scutari of Miss Nightingale and her chosen band. “If,” he says, “the
generous women thus sacrificing themselves were all alike in devotion
to their sacred cause, there was one of them—the Lady-in-Chief—who not
only came armed with the special experience needed, but also was clearly
transcendent in that subtle quality which gives to one human being a
power of command over others. Of slender, delicate form, engaging,
highly-bred, and in council a rapt, careful listener, so long as others
were speaking; and strongly, though gently, persuasive whenever speaking
herself, the Lady-in-Chief, the Lady Florence, Miss Nightingale, gave her
heart to this enterprise in a spirit of absolute devotion; but her sway
was not quite of the kind that many in England imagined.”
No, indeed! Sentimentalists who talk as though she had been cast in the
conventional mould of mere yielding amiability, do not realize what she
had to do, nor with what fearless, unflinching force she went straight
to her mark, not heeding what was thought of herself, overlooking the
necessary wounds she must give to fools, caring only that the difficult
duty should be done, the wholesale agony be lessened, the filth and
disorder be swept away.
Her sweetness was the sweetness of strength, not weakness, and was
reserved not for the careless, the stupid, the self-satisfied, but for
the men whose festering wounds and corrupting gangrene were suffered in
their country’s pay, and had been increased by the heedless muddle of a
careless peace-time and a criminally mismanaged transport service.
The picture of their condition before her arrival is revolting in its
horror. There is no finer thing in the history of this war, perhaps, than
the heroism of the wounded and dying soldiers. We are told how, in the
midst of their appalling privation, if they fancied a shadow on their
General’s face—as well, indeed, there might be, when he saw them without
the common necessaries and decencies of life, let alone a sick-room—they
would seize the first possible opening for assuring him they had all they
needed, and if they were questioned by him, though they were dying of
cold and hunger—
“No man ever used to say: ‘My Lord, you see how I am lying wet
and cold, with only this one blanket to serve me for bed and
covering. The doctors are wonderfully kind, but they have not
the medicines, nor the wine, nor any of the comforting things
they would like to be given me. If only I had another blanket,
I think perhaps I might live.’ Such words would have been true
to the letter.”
But as for Lord Raglan, the chief whom they thus adored, “with the
absolute hideous truth thus day by day spread out before him, he did not
for a moment deceive himself by observing that no man complained.”
Yet even cold and hunger were as nothing to the loathsome condition in
which Miss Nightingale found the hospital at Scutari. There are certain
kinds of filth which make life far more horrible than the brief moment
of a brave death, and of filth of every sort that crowded hospital was
full—filth in the air, for the stench was horrible, filth and gore as the
very garment of the poor, patient, dying men.
There was no washing, no clean linen. Even for bandages the shirts had to
be stripped from the dead and torn up to stanch the wounds of the living.
And there were other foul conditions which only the long labour of
sanitary engineering could cure.
The arrival day by day of more and more of the wounded has been described
as an avalanche. We all know Tennyson’s “Charge of the Light Brigade”:
that charge occurred at Balaclava the day before Miss Nightingale left
England. And the terrible battle of Inkermann was fought the day after
she arrived at Scutari.
Here is a word-for-word description from Nolan’s history of the campaign,
given also in Mrs. Tooley’s admirable “Life”:—
“There were no vessels for water or utensils of any kind; no
soap, towels, or cloths, no hospital clothes; the men lying in
their uniforms, stiff with gore and covered with filth to a
degree and of a kind no one could write about; their persons
covered with vermin, which crawled about the floors and walls
of the dreadful den of dirt, pestilence, and death to which
they were consigned.
“Medical assistance would naturally be expected by the invalid
as soon as he found himself in a place of shelter, but many lay
waiting for their turn until death anticipated the doctor. The
medical men toiled with unwearied assiduity, but their numbers
were inadequate to the work.”
The great hospital at Scutari is a quadrangle, each wing nearly a quarter
of a mile long, and built in tiers of corridors and galleries, one above
the other. The wounded men had been brought in and laid on the floor,
side by side, as closely as they could lie, so that Kinglake was writing
quite literally when he spoke of “miles of the wounded.”
Rotting beneath an Eastern sky and filling the air with poison, Miss
Nightingale counted the carcasses of six dead dogs lying under the
hospital windows. And in all the vast building there was no cooking
apparatus, though it did boast of what was supposed to be a kitchen. As
for our modern bathrooms, the mere notion would have given rise to bitter
laughter; for even the homely jugs and basins were wanting in that
palace of a building, and water of any kind was a rare treasure.
How were sick men to be “nursed,” when they could not even be washed,
and their very food had to be carried long distances and was usually the
worst possible!
Miss Nightingale—the Lady-in-Chief—had the capacity, the will, the
driving power, to change all that.
A week or two ago I had some talk with several of the old pensioners who
remember her. The first to be introduced to me has lost now his power of
speech through a paralytic stroke, but it was almost surprising, after
all these long years that have passed between the Crimean day and our
own day, to see how well-nigh overwhelming was the dumb emotion which
moved the strong man at the naming of her name. The second, who was full
of lively, chuckling talk, having been in active service for a month
before her arrival in the Crimea, and himself seen the wondrous changes
she wrought, was not only one of her adorers—all soldiers seem to be
that—but also overflowing with admiration for her capability, her pluck.
To him she was not only the ideal nurse, but also emphatically a woman of
unsurpassed courage and efficiency.
“You know, miss,” he said, “there was a many young doctors out there that
should never have been there—they didn’t know their duty and they didn’t
do as they should for us—and she chased ’em, ay, she did that! She got
rid of ’em, and there was better ones come in their place, and it was
all quite different. Oh yes,” and he laughed delightedly, as a schoolboy
might. “Oh yes, she hunted ’em out.” I, who have a great reverence for
the medical profession, felt rather shy and frightened and inclined
to blush, but the gusto with which the veteran recalled a righteous
vengeance on the heads of the unworthy was really very funny. And his
gargoyle mirth set in high relief the tenderness with which he told of
Miss Nightingale’s motherly ways with his poor wounded comrades, and how
she begged them not to mind having their wounds washed, any more than if
she were really their mother or sister, and thus overcame any false shame
that might have prevented their recovery. “Ah, she was a good woman,” he
kept repeating, “there’s no two ways about it, a _good_ woman!”
From Pensioner John Garrett of the 3rd Battalion Grenadier Guards, I had
one very interesting bit of history at first hand; for he volunteered the
fact that on his first arrival in the Crimea—which was evidently about
the same time as Miss Nightingale’s own, his first engagement having
been the battle of Inkermann—Miss Nightingale being still unknown to
the soldiers—a mere name to them—she had much unpopularity to overcome.
Clearly jealous rumour had been at work against this mere woman who was
coming, as the other pensioner had phrased it, “to chase the doctors.”
This, of course, made the completeness of her rapid victory over the
hearts of the entire army the more noteworthy.
“And afterwards?” I asked.
“Oh, _afterwards we knew what she was_, and she was very popular indeed!”
Though he treasured and carried about with him everywhere a Prayer Book
containing Florence Nightingale’s autograph—which I told him ought to be
a precious heirloom to his sons and their children, and therefore refused
to accept, when in the generosity of his kind old heart he thrice tried
to press it upon me—he had only seen her once; for he was camping out at
the front, and it was on one of her passing visits that he had his vision
of her. He is a very young-looking old man of eighty-two, Suffolk-born,
and had been in the army from boyhood up to the time of taking his
pension. He had fought in the battle of Inkermann and done valiant
trench-duty before Sebastopol, and confirmed quite of his own accord
the terrible accounts that have come to us of the privations suffered.
“Water,” he said, “why, we could scarce get water to drink—much less to
wash—why, I hadn’t a change of linen all the winter through.”
“And you hadn’t much food, I hear, for your daily rations?” I said.
“Oh, we didn’t have food every _day_!” said he, with a touch of gently
scornful laughter. “Every _three_ days or so, we may have had some
biscuits served out. But there was a lot of the food as wasn’t fit to
eat.”
He was, however, a man of few words, and when I asked him what Miss
Nightingale was like, he answered rather unexpectedly and with great
promptitude, “Well, she had a very nice figger.” All the same, though he
did not dilate on the beauty of her countenance, and exercised a certain
reserve of speech when I tried to draw him out about the Lady-in-Chief,
it was clear that hers was a sacred name to him, and that the bit of her
handwriting which he possessed in the little book, so carefully unwrapped
for me from the tin box holding his dearest possessions, which he
uncorded under my eyes with his own capable but rather tired old hands,
between two bouts of his wearying cough, had for long been the great joy
and pride of his present quiet existence.
I had a talk with others of these veterans in their stately and
well-earned home of rest in the Royal Hospital at Chelsea, and it was
clear that to them all she was enshrined in memory’s highest place. This
may be a fitting moment for recording the tribute of Mr. Macdonald, the
administrator of the _Times_ Fund, who wrote of her before his return to
England:—
“Wherever there is disease in its most dangerous form, and
the hand of the spoiler distressingly nigh, there is that
incomparable woman sure to be seen; her benignant presence
is an influence for good comfort, even among the struggles
of expiring nature. She is a ‘ministering angel,’ without
any exaggeration, in these hospitals, and, as her slender
form glides quietly along each corridor, every poor fellow’s
face softens with gratitude at the sight of her. When all
the medical officers have retired for the night, and silence
and darkness have settled down upon those miles of prostrate
sick, she may be observed alone, with a little lamp in her
hand, making her solitary rounds. The popular instinct was
not mistaken, which, when she had set out from England on her
mission of mercy, hailed her as a heroine; I trust she may not
earn her title to a higher though sadder appellation. No one
who has observed her fragile figure and delicate health can
avoid misgivings lest these should fail. With the heart of a
true woman, and the manners of a lady, accomplished and refined
beyond most of her sex, she combines a surprising calmness of
judgment and promptitude and decision of character.”
The soldier who watched for her coming, night by night, on her quiet
rounds, after dark, when other nurses were by her orders resting, and
who only knew her as “the Lady with the Lamp,” has been quoted all over
the world; but it has been well said that she was also “the lady with
the brain.” Hercules had not so big a task before him when he cleansed
the Augean stables, and the swiftness with which order and comfort were
created in this “hell” of suffering—for so it has been named by those who
saw and knew—might well be called one of the wonders of the world.
[Illustration: “A Mission of Mercy.” Florence Nightingale at Scutari.
(_After the painting by J. Barratt._)]
The secret lay partly in the fact that Florence Nightingale’s whole
life had been an offering and a preparation. She knew all it had been
possible for her to learn of hospital management and training. She never
wasted words, nor frittered away her power. Her authority grew daily. Mr.
Herbert’s support, even at so great a distance, was, of course, beyond
price. Lord Raglan soon found the value of her letters. She inspired
her orderlies with utmost devotion, and it is needless to speak of what
her patients themselves felt to her. Kinglake is not, like the present
writer, a woman, and therefore he can write with a good grace and from
his own knowledge what might come with an ill grace from a woman’s pen.
He shall again therefore be quoted, word for word, through a few pages.
“The growth of her dominion was rapid, was natural, and
not unlike the development of what men call ‘responsible
government.’ One of others accepting a task ostensibly
subordinate and humble, she yet could not, if she would,
divest herself of the authority that belonged to her as a
gentlewoman—as a gentlewoman abounding in all the natural
gifts, and all the peculiar knowledge required for hospital
management. Charged to be in the wards, to smooth the
sufferer’s pillow, to give him his food and his medicine as
ordered by the medical officers, she could not but speak
with cogency of the state of the air which she herself had
to breathe; she could not be bidden to acquiesce if the beds
she approached were impure; she could scarcely be held to
silence if the diet she had been told to administer were not
forthcoming; and, whatever her orders, she could hardly be
expected to give a sufferer food which she perceived to be bad
or unfit. If the males[9] did not quite understand the peculiar
contrivances fitted for the preparation of hospital diet,
might she not, perhaps, disclose her own knowledge, and show
them what to do? Or, if they could not be taught, or imagined
that they had not the power to do what was needed, might not
she herself compass her object by using the resources which
she had at command? Might not she herself found and organize
the requisite kitchens, when she knew that the difference
between fit and unfit food was one of life and death to the
soldier? And again, if she chose, might she not expend her own
resources in striving against the foul poisons that surrounded
our prostrate soldiery? Rather, far, than that even one man
should suffer from those cruel wants which she generously chose
to supply, it was well that the State should be humbled, and
submit to the taunt which accused it of taking alms from her
hand.
“If we learnt that the cause of the evils afflicting our
Levantine hospitals was a want of impelling and of governing
power, we now see how the want was supplied. In the absence of
all constituted authority proving equal to the emergency, there
was need—dire need—of a firm, well-intentioned usurper; but
amongst the males acting at Scutari there was no one with that
resolute will, overstriding law, habit, and custom, which the
cruel occasion required; for even Dr. M’Gregor, whose zeal and
abilities were admirable, omitted to lay hold, dictatorially,
of that commanding authority which—because his chief could
not wield it—had fallen into abeyance. The will of the males
was always to go on performing their accustomed duties
industriously, steadily, faithfully, each labouring to the
utmost, and, if need be, even to death (as too often, indeed,
was the case), in that groove-going ‘state of life to which it
had pleased God to call him.’ The will of the woman, whilst
stronger, flew also more straight to the end;[10] for what she
almost fiercely sought was—not to make good mere equations
between official codes of duty and official acts of obedience,
but—overcoming all obstacles, to succour, to save our prostrate
soldiery, and turn into a well-ordered hospital the hell—the
appalling hell—of the vast barrack wards and corridors. Nature
seemed, as it were, to ordain that in such a conjuncture the
all-essential power which our cramped, over-disciplined males
had chosen to leave unexerted should pass to one who would
seize it, should pass to one who could wield it—should pass to
the Lady-in-Chief.
“To have power was an essential condition of success in her
sacred cause; and of power accordingly she knew and felt the
worth, rightly judging that, in all sorts of matters within
what she deemed its true range, her word must be law. Like
other dictators, she had cast upon her one duty which no one
can hope to perform without exciting cavil. For the sake of
the cause, she had to maintain her dictatorship, and (on pain
of seeing her efforts defeated by anarchical action) to check
the growth of authority—of authority in even small matters—if
not derived from herself. She was apparently careful in this
direction; and, though outwardly calm when provoked, could give
strong effect to her anger. On the other hand, when seeing
merit in the labours of others, she was ready with generous
praise. It was hardly in the nature of things that her sway
should excite no jealousies, or that always, hand in hand with
the energy which made her great enterprise possible, there
should be the cold, accurate justice at which the slower sex
aims; but she reigned—painful, heart-rending empire—in a spirit
of thorough devotion to the objects of her care, and, upon the
whole, with excellent wisdom.
“To all the other sources of power which we have seen her
commanding, she added one of a kind less dependent upon
her personal qualities. Knowing thoroughly the wants of a
hospital, and foreseeing, apparently, that the State might
fail to meet them, she had taken care to provide herself with
vast quantities of hospital stores, and by drawing upon these
to make good the shortcoming of any hampered or lazy official,
she not only furnished our soldiery with the things they were
needing, but administered to the defaulting administrator a
telling, though silent, rebuke; and it would seem that under
this discipline the groove-going men winced in agony, for they
uttered touching complaints, declaring that the Lady-in-Chief
did not choose to give them time (it was always time that the
males wanted), and that the moment a want declared itself she
made haste to supply it herself.”
Another able writer—a woman—has said that for Miss Nightingale the
testing moment of her life met her with the coming of the wagon-loads
of wounded men from the battlefield of Inkermann, who were poured into
the hospital at Scutari within twenty-four hours of her arrival. Had the
sight of all that agony and of the senseless confusion that received
it, led the Lady-in-Chief and her nurses to waste their power in rushing
hither and thither in disorganized fear of defeat, their very sympathy
and emotion dimming their foresight and clouding their brain, the whole
story might have been different. But Miss Nightingale was of those who,
by a steadfast obedience hour by hour to the voice within, have attained
through the long years to a fine mastery of every nerve and muscle of
that frail house wherein they dwell. The more critical the occasion, the
more her will rose to meet it. She knew she must think of the welfare,
not of one, but of thousands; and for tens of thousands she wrought the
change from this welter of misery and death to that clean orderliness
which for the moment seemed as far away as the unseen heaven. There
were many other faithful and devoted nurses in the Crimea, though few,
perhaps, so highly skilled; but her name stands alone as that of the
high-hearted and daring spirit who made bold to change the evil system
of the past when no man else had done anything but either consent to it
or bemoan it. She, at least, had never been bound by red tape, and her
whole soul rose up in arms at sight of the awful suffering which had been
allowed under the shelter of dogged routine.
Before ten days had passed, she had her kitchen ready and was feeding 800
men every day with well-cooked food, and this in spite of the unforeseen
and overwhelming numbers in which the new patients had been poured into
the hospitals after Balaclava and Inkermann. She had brought out with
her, in the _Vectis_, stores of invalid food, and all sorts of little
delicacies surprised the eyes and lips of the hitherto half-starved men.
Their gentle nurses brought them beef tea, chicken broth, jelly. They
were weak and in great pain, and may be forgiven if their gratitude was,
as we are told, often choked with sobs.
Mrs. Tooley tells us of one Crimean veteran, that when he received a
basin of arrowroot on his first arrival at the hospital early in the
morning, he said to himself, “‘Tommy, me boy, that’s all you’ll get into
your inside this blessed day, and think yourself lucky you’ve got that.’
But two hours later, if another of them blessed angels didn’t come
entreating of me to have just a little chicken broth! Well, I took that,
thinking maybe it was early dinner, and before I had well done wondering
what would happen next, round the nurse came again with a bit o’ jelly;
and all day long at intervals they kept on bringing me what they called
‘a little nourishment.’ In the evening, Miss Nightingale she came and had
a look at me, and says she, ‘I hope you’re feeling better?’ I could have
said, ‘Ma’am, I feels as fit as a fightin’ cock,’ but I managed to git
out somethin’ a bit more polite.”[11]
The barracks had thirteen “coppers,” and in the old days meat and
vegetables had just been tossed into these and boiled together anyhow.
It is easy to imagine the greasy mess to which the fevered invalids must
have been treated by the time the stuff had been carried round to the
hospital.
But now, sometimes in a single day, thirteen gallons of chicken broth,
and forty gallons of arrowroot found their way from the new kitchen to
the hospital wards.
CHAPTER XIII.
_The horrors of Scutari—The victory of the Lady-in-Chief—The
Queen’s letter—Her gift of butter and treacle._
Miss Nightingale’s discipline was strict; she did not mind the name
of autocrat when men were dying by twenties for lack of what only an
autocrat could do; and when there was continual loss of life for want
of fitting nourishment, though there had been supplies sent out, as had
been said “by the ton-weight,” she herself on at least one occasion,
broke open the stores and fed her famishing patients. It is true that
the ordinary matron would have been dismissed for doing so; she was not
an ordinary matron—she was the Lady-in-Chief. To her that hath shall be
given. She had grudged nothing to the service to which from childhood
she had given herself—not strength, nor time, nor any other good gift
of her womanhood, and having done her part nobly, fortune aided her.
Her friends were among the “powers that be,” and even her wealth was, in
this particular battle, a very important means of victory. Her beauty
would have done little for her if she had been incompetent, but being to
the last degree efficient, her loveliness gave the final touch to her
power—her loveliness and that personal magnetism which gave her sway
over the hearts and minds of men, and also, let it be added, of women.
Not only did those in authority give to her of their best—their best
knowledge, their closest attention, their most untiring service—but she
knew how to discern the true from the false, and to put to the best use
the valuable information often confided to her. She had many helpers.
Besides her thirty-eight nurses and the chaplain, Mr. Sidney Osborne,
there were her friends, Mr. and Mrs. Bracebridge, and that splendid
“fag,” as he called himself, the young “Mr. Stafford,”[12] who had left
the gaieties of London to fetch and carry for the Lady-in-Chief, and—to
quote Mrs. Tooley, “did anything and everything which a handy and
gallant gentleman could do to make himself useful to the lady whom he
felt honoured to serve.” Among those who were most thoughtful in their
little gifts for the wounded officers was the wife of our ambassador,
Lady Stratford de Redcliffe, and her “beauteous guest,” as Kinglake calls
her, Lady George Paget. But Miss Nightingale’s chief anxiety was not for
the officers—they, like herself, had many influences in their favour—her
thought was for the nameless rank and file, who had neither money nor
rank, and were too often, as she knew, the forgotten pawns on the big
chessboard. It was said “she thought only of the men;” she understood
well that for their commanders her thought was less needed.
“In the hearts of thousands and thousands of our people,” says Kinglake,
“there was a yearning to be able to share the toil, the distress, the
danger of battling for our sick and wounded troops against the sea
of miseries that encompassed them on their hospital pallets; and men
still remember how graciously, how simply, how naturally, if so one may
speak, the ambassadress Lady Stratford de Redcliffe and her beauteous
guest gave their energies and their time to the work; still remember
the generous exertions of Mr. Sidney Osborne and Mr. Joscelyne Percy;
still remember, too, how Mr. Stafford—I would rather call him ‘Stafford
O’Brien’—the cherished yet unspoilt favourite of English society,
devoted himself heart and soul to the task of helping and comforting our
prostrate soldiery in the most frightful depths of their misery.
“Many found themselves embarrassed when trying to choose the best
direction they could for their generous impulses; and not, I think,
the least praiseworthy of all the self-sacrificing enterprises which
imagination devised was that of the enthusiastic young fellow who,
abandoning his life of ease, pleasure, and luxury, went out, as he
probably phrased it, to ‘fag’ for the Lady-in-Chief. Whether fetching
and carrying for her, or writing for her letters or orders, or orally
conveying her wishes to public servants or others, he, for months and
months, faithfully toiled, obeying in all things her word.
“There was grace—grace almost mediæval—in his simple yet romantic idea;
and, if humbly, still not the less usefully he aided the sacred cause,
for it was one largely, mainly dependent on the power of the lady he
served; so that, when by obeying her orders he augmented her means of
action, and saved her precious time, there were unnumbered sufferers
deriving sure benefit from his opportune, well-applied help. By no other
kind of toil, however ambitiously aimed, could he well have achieved so
much good.”
But there was many a disappointment, much that did not seem “good luck”
by any means, and that called for great courage and endurance. The
stores, which Mr. Herbert had sent out in such abundance, had gone to
Varna by mistake, and the loss of the _Prince_, a ship laden with ample
supplies, a fortnight after Miss Nightingale’s arrival, was a very
serious matter.
Warm clothing for the frost-bitten men brought in from Sebastopol was so
badly needed that one nurse, writing home, told her people: “Whenever
a man opens his mouth with ‘Please, ma’am, I want to speak to you,’ my
heart sinks within me, for I feel sure it will end in flannel shirts.”
Every one had for too long been saying “all right,” when, as a matter of
fact, it was all wrong. Here once again it is best to quote Kinglake.
“By shunning the irksome light,” he says, “by choosing a low standard of
excellence, and by vaguely thinking ‘War’ an excuse for defects which
war did not cause, men, it seems, had contrived to be satisfied with
the condition of our hospitals; but the Lady-in-Chief was one who would
harbour no such content, seek no such refuge from pain. Not for her was
the bliss—fragile bliss—of dwelling in any false paradise. She confronted
the hideous truth. Her first care was—Eve-like—to dare to know, and—still
Eve-like—to force dreaded knowledge on the faltering lord of creation.
Then declaring against acquiescence in horror and misery which firmness
and toil might remove, she waged her ceaseless war against custom and
sloth, gaining every day on the enemy, and achieving, as we saw, in
December, that which to eyes less intent than her own upon actual saving
of life, and actual restoration of health, seemed already the highest
excellence.”
But, of course, what most made the men adore her was her loving
individual care for each of those for whom she felt herself responsible.
There was one occasion on which she begged to be allowed to try whether
she could nurse back to possible life five wounded men who were being
given up as “hopeless cases,” and did actually succeed in doing so.
In all that terrible confusion of suffering that surrounded her soon
after her first arrival, the first duty of the doctors was to sort out
from the wounded as they arrived those cases which they could help and
save from those which it seemed no human surgery could help.
While this was being done she stood by: she never spared herself the
sight of suffering, and her eyes—the trained eyes that had all the
intuition of a born nurse—saw a glimmer of hope for five badly wounded
men who were being set aside among those for whom nothing could be done.
“Will you give me those five men?” she asked. She knew how much might
be done by gentle and gradual feeding, and by all the intently watchful
care of a good nurse, to give them just enough strength to risk the
surgery that might save them. With her own hand, spoonful by spoonful,
as they were able to bear it, she gave the nourishment, and by her own
night-long watching and tending in the care of all those details which
to a poor helpless patient may make the difference between life and
death—the purifying of the air, the avoidance of draughts, the mending of
the fire—she nursed her five patients back into a condition in which the
risks of an operation were, to say the least of it, greatly lessened. The
operation was in each case successfully performed; by all human standards
it may be said that she saved the lives of all the five.
She never spared herself, though she sometimes spared others. She has
been known to stand for twenty hours out of the twenty-four, and at
night, when she had sent her day-nurses to rest, it was she herself
who watched in all the wards and silently cared for the needs of one
and another. Is it any wonder that “there was worship almost in the
gratitude of the prostrate sufferer, who saw her glide into his ward,
and at last approach his bedside? The magic of her power over men used
often to be felt in the room—the dreaded, the blood-stained room—where
‘operations’ took place. There, perhaps, the maimed soldier, if not yet
resigned to his fate, might at first be craving death rather than meet
the knife of the surgeon; but, when such a one looked and saw that the
honoured Lady-in-Chief was patiently standing beside him, and—with lips
closely set and hands folded—decreeing herself to go through the pain of
witnessing pain, he used to fall into the mood for obeying her silent
command, and—finding strange support in her presence—bring himself to
submit and endure.”[13]
M. Soyer, who placed his culinary art at her service, has written a book
about his experiences in which he tells us that, after a merry evening in
the doctors’ quarters, when on his way back to his own, he saw by a faint
light a little group—shadowy in the half-darkness—in a corner of one
of the corridors. A Sister stood beside Miss Nightingale with a lighted
candle that she might see clearly enough to scribble down the last wishes
of the dying soldier who was supported on the bed beside her. With its
deep colouring, described as like a grave study by Rembrandt, the little
picture drew the passer-by, and for a few minutes he watched unseen while
the Lady-in-Chief took into those “tender womanly hands” the watch and
trinkets of the soldier, who with his last gasping breath was trying to
make clear to her his farewell message to his wife and children. And this
seems to have been but one among many kindred scenes.
We have all heard of the man who watched till her shadow fell across the
wall by his bed that he might at least kiss that shadow as it passed; but
few of us, perhaps, know the whole story. The man was a Highland soldier
who had been doomed to lose his arm by amputation. Miss Nightingale
believed that she might possibly be able to save the arm by careful
nursing, and she begged that she might at least be allowed to try.
Nursing was to her an art as well as a labour of love. The ceaseless care
in matters of detail, which she considered the very alphabet of that art,
stand out clearly in her own _Notes on Nursing_. And in this instance her
skill and watchfulness and untiring effort saved the man’s arm. No wonder
that he wanted to kiss her shadow!
To the wives of the soldiers she was indeed a saving angel. When she
arrived at Scutari, they were living, we are told, literally in holes and
corners of the hospital. Their clothes were worn out. They had neither
bonnets, nor shoes, nor any claim on rations. Poor faithful creatures,
many of them described in the biographies as respectable and decent, they
had followed their husbands through all the horrors of the campaign, and
now, divided from them and thrust aside for want of space, they were
indeed in sorry case.
Well might Miss Nightingale write later, and well may we all lay it to
heart—“When the improvements in our system are discussed, let not the
wife and child of the soldier be forgotten.”
After being moved about from one den to another, the poor women—some
wives and some, alas, widows—had been quartered in a few damp rooms in
the hospital basement, where those who wanted solitude or privacy could
do nothing to secure it beyond hanging a few rags on a line as a sort of
screen between home and home. And in these desolate quarters many babies
had been born.
It was but the last drop of misery in their cup when, early in 1855,
a month or two after Miss Nightingale’s arrival, a drain broke in the
basement, and fever followed.
Miss Nightingale had already sought them out, and from her own stores
given them food and clothing; but now she did not rest until through her
influence a house had been requisitioned and cleaned and furnished for
them out of her own funds. Next, after fitting out the widows to return
to their homes, employment was found for the wives who remained. Work was
found for some of them in Constantinople, but for most of them occupation
was at hand in the laundry she had set going, and there those who were
willing to do their part could earn from 10s. to 14s. a week. In this
way, through our heroine’s wise energy, helped by the wife and daughter
of Dr. Blackwood, one of the army chaplains, we are told that about 500
women were cared for.
There had already arrived through the hands of Mr. Sidney Herbert, who
forwarded it to Miss Nightingale, a message from Queen Victoria—in effect
a letter—which greatly cheered the army and also strengthened Miss
Nightingale’s position.
“WINDSOR CASTLE, _December 6, ’54_.
“Would you tell Mrs. Herbert,” wrote the Queen to Mr.
Sidney Herbert, “that I beg she would let me see frequently
the accounts she receives from Miss Nightingale or Mrs.
Bracebridge, as I hear no details of the wounded, though I
see so many from officers, etc., about the battlefield, and
naturally the former must interest me more than any one.
“Let Mrs. Herbert also know that I wish Miss Nightingale and
the ladies would tell these poor, noble wounded and sick men
that no one takes a warmer interest or feels more for their
sufferings or admires their courage and heroism more than their
Queen. Day and night she thinks of her beloved troops. So does
the Prince.
“Beg Mrs. Herbert to communicate these my words to those
ladies, as I know that our sympathy is much valued by these
noble fellows.
“VICTORIA.”
Miss Nightingale agreed with the Queen in her use of the word “noble”
here, for she herself has written of the men:—
“Never came from any of them one word nor one look which a
gentleman would not have used; and while paying this humble
tribute to humble courtesy, the tears come into my eyes as I
think how, amidst scenes of ... loathsome disease and death,
there rose above it all the innate dignity, gentleness, and
chivalry of the men (for never, surely, was chivalry so
strikingly exemplified), shining in the midst of what must be
considered as the lowest sinks of human misery, and preventing
instinctively the use of one expression which could distress a
gentlewoman.”
Having transcribed the Queen’s letter, this may be a good place for
adding from the letters of Sister Aloysius a little instance of Her
Majesty’s homely kindness to her troops whenever she heard of any need
which she could supply:—
“When Miss Stanley reached England, Her Majesty the Queen
(anxious, of course, to hear all about her soldiers) sent for
her; and when the interview was nearly over Her Majesty asked
her what she thought the poor soldiers would like—she was
anxious to send them a present. Miss Stanley said: ‘Oh, I do
know what they would like—plenty of flannel shirts, mufflers,
butter, and treacle.’ Her Majesty said they must have all these
things; and they did come out in abundance: Kullali got its
share of the gifts. But the very name of butter or treacle was
enough for the doctors: they said they would not allow it into
the wards, because it would be going about in bits of paper
and daubing everything. So Rev. Mother at once interposed, and
said if the doctors allowed it, she would have it distributed
in a way that could give no trouble. They apologized, and said
they should have known that, and at once left everything to
her. Each Sister got her portion of butter and treacle (which
were given only to the convalescent patients), and when the
bell rang every evening for tea she stood at the table in the
centre of the ward, and each soldier walked over and got his
bread buttered, and some treacle if he wished spread on like
jam. We told them it was a gift from the Queen; and if Her
Majesty could only have seen how gratified they were it would
have given her pleasure. One evening Lady Stratford, and some
distinguished guests who were staying at the Embassy, came,
and were much pleased to see how happy and comfortable the men
were, and how much they enjoyed Her Majesty’s gifts.”
CHAPTER XIV.
_Letters from Scutari—Kinglake on Miss Nightingale and her
dynasty—The refusal of a new contingent._
Miss Nightingale’s saving sense of humour gleams forth in her letters
in the most delightful way, even in the darkest days. In the following,
something of the hugeness of her task is dimly seen through the comic
background of the unbecoming cap that “If I’d known, ma’am, I wouldn’t
have come, ma’am.” Here is the letter just as it is given in Lord
Herbert’s life. It begins abruptly, evidently quoting from a conversation
just held with one of the staff nurses:—
“‘I came out, ma’am, prepared to submit to everything, to be
put upon in every way. But there are some things, ma’am, one
can’t submit to. There is the caps, ma’am, that suits one face
and some that suits another; and if I’d known, ma’am, about the
caps, great as was my desire to come out to nurse at Scutari,
I wouldn’t have come, ma’am.’—_Speech of Mrs. L., Barrack
Hospital, Scutari, Asiatic Side, November 14, 1854._
“Time must be at a discount with the man who can adjust the
balance of such an important question as the above, and I for
one have none, as you will easily suppose when I tell you that
on Thursday last we had 1,175 sick and wounded in this hospital
(among whom 120 cholera patients), and 650 severely wounded in
the other building, called the General Hospital, of which we
also have charge, when a message came to me to prepare for 510
wounded on our side of the hospital, who were arriving from the
dreadful affair of November 5, from Balaclava, in which battle
were 1,763 wounded and 442 killed, besides 96 officers wounded
and 38 killed. I always expected to end my days as a hospital
matron, but I never expected to be barrack mistress. We had but
half an hour’s notice before they began landing the wounded.
Between one and nine o’clock we had the mattresses stuffed,
sewn up, laid down (alas! only upon matting on the floor), the
men washed and put to bed, and all their wounds dressed.
“We are very lucky in our medical heads. Two of them are
brutes and four are angels—for this is a work which makes
either angels or devils of men, and of women too. As for
the assistants, they are all cubs, and will, while a man
is breathing his last breath under the knife, lament the
‘annoyance of being called up from their dinners by such a
fresh influx of wounded.’ But unlicked cubs grow up into good
old bears, though I don’t know how; for certain it is, the old
bears are good. We have now four miles of beds and not eighteen
inches apart.
“We have our quarters in one tower of the barracks, and all
this fresh influx has been laid down between us and the main
guard, in two corridors, with a line of beds down each side,
just room for one person to pass between, and four wards. Yet
in the midst of this appalling horror (we are steeped up to our
necks in blood) there is good—and I can truly say, like St.
Peter, ‘It is good for us to be here’—though I doubt whether,
if St. Peter had been there, he would have said so.”
Meanwhile England, stirred to its depths by the accounts given by Mr.
William Howard Russell, of the sufferings of our soldiers, had begged the
_Times_, in whose pages his letters appeared, to receive funds and send
them out by the hand of Mr. Macdonald, a man of vigour, firmness, and
good sense, and “loyally devoted to his duty.” Before leaving England,
he saw the Inspector-General of the army, Dr. Andrew Smith, and also the
Duke of Newcastle, but was assured that Government had already provided
so amply for the sick and wounded that his fund was not likely to be
needed. When he reached the Bosphorus all the official people there
talked to him in the same strain. But there leaked out through an officer
on duty one little fact that showed how much such assurances were worth.
It seemed that the 39th Regiment was actually on its way to the
severities of a Crimean winter with only the light summer clothing that
would be worn in hot countries. Happily, the surgeon of the regiment
appealed to Mr. Macdonald, and, more happily still, Mr. Macdonald dared
to go beyond his exact instructions and give help out of his fund which
might prevent illness, instead of waiting for the moment when death was
already at the door. He went into the markets of Constantinople and
bought then and there a suit of flannels or other woollens for every man
in that regiment.
Mr. Macdonald saw that he must be ready to offer help, or red tape and
loyalty together would seal the lips of men in the service, lest they
should seem to be casting a slur on the army administration.
There is humour of the grimmest kind in what resulted. The chief of the
Scutari hospitals told him “nothing was wanted,” and on pushing his
inquiry with a yet more distinguished personage, he was actually advised
to spend the money on building a church at Pera!
“Yet at that very time,” says Kinglake, “wants so dire as
to include want of hospital furniture and of shirts for the
patients, and of the commonest means for obtaining cleanliness,
were afflicting our stricken soldiery in the hospitals.”
The Pera proposal—rightly described as “astounding”—led to an interview
with the Lady-in-Chief. Tears and laughter must have met in her heart
as she heard this absurdity, and away she took him—money as well—to the
very centre of her commissariat, to see for himself the daily demands and
the gaping need—furniture, pillows, sheets, shirts—endless appliances
and drugs—that need seemed truly endless, and many hours daily he spent
with her in the Nurses’ Tower, taking down lists of orders for the
storekeepers in Constantinople. Here was the right help at last—not
pretty mufflers for men in need of shirts, nor fine cambric for stout
bed-linen.
However, from the Lady-in-Chief Mr. Macdonald soon learned the truth,
and the course he then took was one of the simplest kind, but it worked
a mighty change. He bought the things needed, and the authorities,
succumbing at last to this excruciating form of demonstration, had to
witness the supply of wants which before they had refused to confess.
So now, besides using the stores which she had at her own command, the
Lady-in-Chief could impart wants felt in our hospitals to Mr. Macdonald
with the certainty that he would hasten to meet them by applying what was
called the “_Times_ Fund” in purchasing the articles needed.
“It was thus,” adds Kinglake, “that under the sway of motives
superbly exalted, a great lady came to the rescue of our
prostrate soldiery, made good the default of the State, won the
gratitude, the rapt admiration of an enthusiastic people, and
earned for the name she bears a pure, a lasting renown.
“She even did more. By the very power of her fame, but also,
I believe, by the wisdom and the authority of her counsels,
she founded, if so one may speak, a gracious dynasty that
still reigns supreme in the wards where sufferers lie, and
even brings solace, brings guidance, brings hope, into those
dens of misery that, until the blessing has reached them, seem
only to harbour despair. When into the midst of such scenes
the young high-bred lady now glides, she wears that same
sacred armour—the gentle attire of the servitress—which seemed
‘heavenly’ in the eyes of our soldiers at the time of the war,
and finds strength to meet her dire task, because she knows by
tradition what the first of the dynasty proved able to confront
and to vanquish in the wards of the great Barrack Hospital.”
In everything a woman’s hand and brain had been needed. It was, for
instance, of little use to receive in the evening, after barrack fires
were out, food which had been asked for from the supplies for some meal
several hours earlier; yet that, it appears, was the sort of thing that
happened. And too much of the food officially provided, even when it did
reach the patients at last, had been unfit for use.
As for the question of laundry, a washing contract that had only
succeeded in washing seven shirts for two or three thousand men could
not have been permitted to exist under any feminine management. Nor could
any trained or knowledgeable nurse have allowed for a single day the
washing of infectious bed-linen in one common tub with the rest. Yet this
had been the condition of affairs before the Lady-in-Chief came on the
scenes. In speaking of her work among the soldiers’ wives it has already
been noted how she quickly hired and fitted up a house close to the
hospital as a laundry, where under sanitary regulations 500 shirts and
150 other articles were washed every week.
Then there arose the practical question of what could be done for the
poor fellows who had no clothes at all except the grimy and blood-stained
garments in which they arrived, and we are told that in the first three
months, out of her own private funds, she provided the men with ten
thousand shirts.
The drugs had all been in such confusion that once when Mrs. Bracebridge
had asked three times for chloride of lime and been assured that there
was none, Miss Nightingale insisted on a thorough search, and not less
than ninety pounds of it were discovered.
The semi-starvation of many hospital patients before Miss Nightingale’s
arrival, noted on an earlier page, was chiefly the result of
mismanagement—mismanagement on the part of those who meant well—often,
indeed, meant the very best within their power, but among whom there
was, until her coming, no central directing power, with brain and heart
alike capable and energizing and alive to all the vital needs of deathly
illness—alert with large foreseeing outlook, yet shrewd and swift in
detail.
It is at first puzzling to compare Kinglake’s picture of the confusion
and suffering, even while he is defending Lord Raglan, with some of
the letters in Lord Stanmore’s “Life of Lord Herbert,” especially one
from General Estcourt, in which he says “never was an army better fed.”
But even in this letter—dated, be it noted, a fortnight after Miss
Nightingale’s arrival—the next sentence, which refers, of course, to the
army in general and not to the hospitals under her management, shows the
same muddling that had pursued the hospitals until she came to their
aid with Mr. Herbert and the War Office at her back; for after saying
that the ration is ample and most liberal, it adds—and the italics are
mine—“_but the men cannot cook for want of camp-kettles and for want of
fuel_.”
Yet even with regard to the hospitals, it is startling to find Mr.
Bracebridge, in his first letter to Mr. Herbert, speaking of the Barrack
Hospital as clean and airy. But people have such odd ideas of what is
“clean and airy,” and it would seem that he thought it “clean and airy”
for the patients to have no proper arrangements for washing, for the
drains to be in such a noisome state as to need engineering, and for six
dead dogs to be rotting under the windows! I suppose he liked the look
of the walls and the height of the ceilings, and wanted, moreover, to
comfort Mr. Herbert’s sad heart at a time when all England was up in arms
at the mistakes made in transport and other arrangements.
The letters of the chaplain to Mr. Herbert are full of interest, and
in reading the following we have to put ourselves back into the mind
of a time that looked anxiously to see whether Miss Nightingale was
really equal to her task—an idea which to us of to-day seems foolish and
timorous, but which was, after all, quite natural, seeing that she was
new and untried in this particular venture of army nursing, and that half
the onlookers had no idea of the long and varied training she had had.
“MY DEAR HERBERT,—I have now had near a week’s opportunity of
closely observing the details of the hospitals at Scutari.
First, as to Miss Nightingale and her company, nothing can be
said too strong in their praise; she works them wonderfully,
and they are so useful that I have no hesitation in saying some
twenty more of the same sort would be a very great blessing
to the establishment. Her nerve is equal to her good sense;
she, with one of her nurses and myself, gave efficient aid at
an amputation of the thigh yesterday. She was just as cool
as if she had had to do it herself. We are close allies, and
through Macdonald and the funds at my own command, I get her
everything for which she asks, and this is saying a great deal.
“My honest view of the matter is this: I found but too great
evidence of the staff and means being unequal to the emergency;
the requirements have almost doubled through the last two
unhappy actions at Balaclava. Still, day by day I see manifest
improvement; no government, no nation could have provided, on
a sudden, staff and appliances for accident wards miles in
length, and for such sickness as that horrid Varna dysentery.
To manage more than three thousand casualties of the worst
nature is indeed a task to be met in an entirely satisfactory
way by nothing short of a miraculous energy with the means
it would require. The men are landed necessarily in a most
pitiable state, and have to be carried up steep ground for
considerable distance, either by those beasts of Turks, who are
as stupid as callous, or by our invalids, who are not equal to
the task. Still, it is done, and as this is war, not peace, and
Scutari is really a battlefield, I am more disposed to lament
than to blame.
“There seems now, so far as I can see, no lack of lint and
plaister; there is a lack of linen,—we have sent home for it.
The surgeons are working their utmost, and serious cases seem
treated with great humanity and skill. There was and is an
awful want of shirts for the men, and socks, and such matters;
we have already let Miss Nightingale have all she applies for,
and this morning I, with Macdonald’s sanction, or, rather, in
concert with him, have sent to the Crimea a large stock of
shirts of warm serge, socks, flannel, tea, etc., etc. I spend
the best part of every day there acting, at one time as priest
to the dying, at another helping the surgeons or the men to
dress their wounds; again, I go to the landing-place and try
to work them into method for an hour or two, etc., etc. One
and all are now most kind and civil to me, meet my wishes in
every way they can. Alas! I fear, with every possible effort
of the existing establishment, the crisis is still too great;
there are wanting hundreds of beds—that is, many hundreds have
only matting between the beds and the stone floor. I slept
here Sunday night, and walked the wards late and early in
the morning; I fear the cold weather in these passages will
produce on men so crippled and so maimed much supplementary
evil in the way of coughs and chest diseases. The wounded do
better than the sick. I scarce pray with one of the latter one
day but I hear he is dead on the morrow.... I am glad to say
the authorities have left off swearing they had everything
and wanted nothing; they are now grateful for the help which,
with the fund at command, we liberally meet. The wounds are,
many of them, of the most fearful character, and yet I have
not heard a murmur, even from those who, from the pressing
urgency of the case, are often left with most obvious grounds
of complaint. Stafford O’Brien is here; he, at my suggestion,
aids my son and self in letter writing for the poor creatures.
My room is a post office; I pay the post of every letter from
every hospital patient, and we write masses every day. They
show one what the British soldier really is; I only wish to God
the people of England, who regard the red coat as a mere guise
of a roystering rake in the private and a dandified exclusive
in the officer, could see the patience, true modesty, and
courageous endurance of all ranks.
“Understand me clearly. I could pick many a hole; I could
show where head has been wanting, truth perverted, duty
neglected, etc.; but I feel that the pressure was such and of
so frightful, so severe (in one way) a character, there is such
an effort at what we desire, that I for one cry out of the past
‘_non mi ricordo_;’ of the present, ‘If the cart is in the
rut, there is every shoulder at the wheel.’ The things wanted
we cannot wait for you to supply, in England; if the slaughter
is to go on as it has done the last fortnight, the need must
be met at once. Macdonald is doing his work most sensibly,
steadily, and I believe not only with no offence to any, but is
earning the goodwill of all.”
Truth is a two-edged sword, and for purposes of rebuke or reform Miss
Nightingale used it at times with keenness and daring. In that sense this
glowing, loving-hearted woman knew how on occasions to be stern. Her
salt never lost its savour. She was swift, efficient, capable to the
last degree, and she was also high-spirited and sometimes sharp-tongued.
Perhaps we love her all the more for being so human. A person outwardly
all perfection, if not altogether divine, is apt to give the idea
that there are faults hidden up somewhere. It was not so with Miss
Nightingale. Her determination to carry at all costs the purpose she had
in hand laid her often open to criticism, for, just as she was ready on
occasion to override her own feelings, so also she was ready sometimes to
override the feelings of others. Mr. Herbert judged from her letters that
an addition to her staff of nurses would be welcome, but we saw that when
the new band of forty-six arrived, under the escort of Miss Nightingale’s
old friend Miss Stanley, they were not admitted to the hospital at
Scutari, and to tell the truth, Miss Nightingale was very angry at their
being thrust upon her, just when she was finding her own staff rather a
“handful.” In point of fact, she not only wrote a very warm letter to her
old friend Mr. Herbert, but she also formally gave in her resignation.
This was not accepted. Mr. Herbert’s generous sweetness of nature, his
love for the writer, and his belief that she was the one person needed
in the hospitals, and was doing wonders there, led him to write a very
noble and humble reply, saying that _he_ had made a mistake—which,
indeed, was true enough—in taking his well-meant step without consulting
her. She yielded her point in so far as to remain at her post, now that
Miss Stanley and her staff had moved on to Therapia and Smyrna, and were
doing real good there, Miss Stanley having given up all her own plans, to
remain and look after the nurses who had come under her escort.
But, apart from the fact that it would have been a great hindrance to
discipline to have forty-six women on her hands who had _not_ promised
obedience to her, as had her own nurses, a little sidelight is thrown
upon it all by these words in one of Miss Stanley’s own letters, speaking
of the nurses under her guardianship:—
“The first night there was great dissatisfaction among them,
and a strong inclination to strike work. ‘We are not come out
to be cooks, housemaids, and washerwomen,’ and they dwelt
considerably on Mr. Herbert’s words about equality. _They are
like troublesome children._”
Though our sympathy goes out to Miss Stanley, it is not impossible that
Miss Nightingale’s decision may have saved Scutari from unavoidable
confusions of authority which would have been very unseemly, and from
more than a possibility of defeat in the experiment she was making, in
the eyes of all Europe, as to how far women could be wisely admitted
into military hospitals. Such confusion might have arisen, not from any
fault in Miss Nightingale or Miss Stanley, but from the special work of
reorganization which had to be done at Scutari, and the special code of
obedience by which Miss Nightingale’s staff had been prepared for it. She
did not want for such work any “troublesome children.”
CHAPTER XV.
_The busy nursing hive—M. Soyer and his memories—Miss
Nightingale’s complete triumph over prejudice—The memories of
Sister Aloysius._
Meanwhile Miss Stanley’s letters give us a very interesting informal
glimpse of the work that was going on and of Miss Nightingale herself.
Here is one in which she describes her visit to her in the hospital at
Scutari:—
“We passed down two or three of these immense corridors, asking
our way as we went. At last we came to the guard-room, another
corridor, then through a door into a large, busy kitchen, where
stood Mrs. Margaret Williams, who seemed much pleased to see
me: then a heavy curtain was raised; I went through a door, and
there sat dear Flo writing on a small unpainted deal table. I
never saw her looking better. She had on her black merino,
trimmed with black velvet, clean linen collar and cuffs, apron,
white cap with a black handkerchief tied over it; and there was
Mrs. Bracebridge, looking so nice, too. I was quite satisfied
with my welcome. It was settled at once that I was to sleep
here, especially as, being post day, Flo could not attend to me
till the afternoon.
“The sofa is covered with newspapers just come in by the post.
I have been sitting for an hour here, having some coffee, and
writing, Mrs. Clarke coming in to see what I have wanted, in
spite of what I could say.
“The work this morning was the sending off General Adams’s
remains, and the arrangements consequent upon it.
“A stream of people every minute.
“‘Please, ma’am, have you any black-edged paper?’
“‘Please, what can I give which would keep on his stomach; is
there any arrowroot to-day for him?’
“‘No; the tubs of arrowroot must be for the worst cases; we
cannot spare him any, nor is there any jelly to-day; try him
with some eggs, etc.’
“‘Please, Mr. Gordon wishes to see Miss Nightingale about the
orders she gave him.’
“Mr. Sabine comes in for something else.
“Mr. Bracebridge in and out about General Adams, and orders of
various kinds.”
Such was the busy life of which Miss Nightingale was the queen, though,
unlike the queen-bee of the ordinary honey-hive, this queen of nurses was
the hardest-worked and most severely strained worker in the whole toiling
community.
It was early in the spring of 1855 that in the feeding department, which
she rightly considered of great importance to her invalids, she received
unexpected help.
This came from M. Soyer, who may be remembered by more than one old
Londoner as at one time _chef_ of the New Reform Club, where his
biography, which contains some interesting illustrations, still adorns
the library. M. Soyer begged to be allowed the command of the hospital
kitchen at Scutari. He was an expert and an enthusiast, and very amusing.
Also what he offered was of no slight importance and unselfishness. In
February, 1855, he wrote as follows to the _Times_:—
“Sir,—After carefully perusing the letter of your
correspondent, dated Scutari, in your impression of Wednesday
last, I perceive that, although the kitchen under the
superintendence of Miss Nightingale affords so much relief,
the system of management at the large one at the Barrack
Hospital is far from being perfect. I propose offering my
services gratuitously, and proceeding direct to Scutari at my
own personal expense, to regulate that important department,
if the Government will honour me with their confidence, and
grant me the full power of acting according to my knowledge and
experience in such matters.—I have the honour to remain, sir,
your obedient servant,
“A. SOYER.”
His proposal was accepted, and on his arrival at Scutari he was welcomed
by Miss Nightingale in what he names, after his rather florid manner, “a
sanctuary of benevolence.” There he presented his letters and parcels
from the Duchess of Sutherland and Mr. Stafford and others, the Duchess
especially commending him to the Lady-in-Chief as likely to be of service
in the cooking department. He was found to be a most valuable ally, and
his letters and writings, since published, are full of interest. He
wrote home at once, saying: “I must especially express my gratitude to
Miss Nightingale, who from her extraordinary intelligence and the good
organization of her kitchen procured me every material for making a
commencement, and thus saved me at least one week’s sheer loss of time,
as my model kitchen did not arrive till Saturday last.”
This is interesting, because it shows yet once more Miss Nightingale’s
thoroughness and foresight and attention to detail—the more valuable in
one whose outlook at the same time touched so wide a skyline, and was so
large in its noble care for a far-off future and a world of many nations,
never bounded by her own small island or her own church pew.
Soyer’s description of her is worth giving in full, and later we shall,
through his eyes, have a vision of her as she rode to Balaclava.
“Her visage as regards expression is very remarkable, and one
can almost anticipate by her countenance what she is about to
say: alternately, with matters of the most grave importance,
a gentle smile passes radiantly over her countenance, thus
proving her evenness of temper; at other times, when wit or
a pleasantry prevails, the heroine is lost in the happy,
good-natured smile which pervades her face, and you recognize
only the charming woman. Her dress is generally of a greyish
or black tint; she wears a simple white cap, and often a rough
apron. In a word, her whole appearance is religiously simple
and unsophisticated. In conversation no member of the fair sex
can be more amiable and gentle than Miss Nightingale. Removed
from her arduous and cavalier-like duties, which require the
nerve of a Hercules—and she possesses it when required—she is
Rachel on the stage in both tragedy and comedy.”
Soyer’s help and loyalty proved invaluable all through the campaign. His
volume of memories adds a vivid bit of colour here and there to these
pages. His own life had been romantic, and he saw everything from the
romantic point of view.
We read and know that although Sidney Herbert’s letter to Dr. Menzies,
the principal medical officer at Scutari, asked that all regard should be
paid to every wish of the Lady-in-Chief, and that was in itself a great
means of power, the greatest power of all lay in her own personality and
its compelling magnetism, which drew others to obedience. The attractive
force of a strong, clear, comprehensive mind, and still more of a soul on
fire with high purpose and deep compassion, which never wasted themselves
in words, became tenfold the more powerful for the restraint and
self-discipline which held all boisterous expression of them in check—her
word, her very glance,
“Winning its way with extreme gentleness
Through all the outworks of suspicious pride.”
Her strength was to be tried to the uttermost; for scarcely had her work
in the hospital begun when cholera came stalking over the threshold. Day
and night among the dying and the dead she and her nurses toiled with
fearless devotion, each one carrying her life in her hand, but seldom,
indeed, even thinking of that in the heroic struggle to save as many
other lives as possible.
Miss Nightingale long afterwards, when talking of services of a far
easier kind, once said to a professional friend that no one was fit to be
a nurse who did not really enjoy precisely those duties of a sick-room
which the ordinary uneducated woman counts revolting; and if she was, at
this time, now and then impatient with stupidity and incompetence and
carelessness, that is not wonderful in one whose effort was always at
high level, and for whom every detail was of vivid interest, because she
realized that often on exactitude in details hung the balance between
life and death.
On their first arrival she and her nurses may, no doubt, have had to bear
cold-shouldering and jealousy; but in the long agony of the cholera
visitation they were welcomed as veritable angels of light. It would
be easy to be sensational in describing the scenes amid which they
moved, for before long the hospital was filled, day and night, with two
long processions: on one side came in those who carried the sick men
in on their stretchers, and on the other side those who carried out
the dead. The orderlies could not have been trusted to do the nursing
that was required; the “stuping”—a professional method of wholesale hot
fomentations and rubbings to release the iron rigidity of the cholera
patient’s body—was best done by skilled and gentle hands, and even in
_such_ hands, so bad were the surrounding conditions—the crowding, the
bad drainage, the impure water—that, despite the utmost devotion, only a
small proportion of lives could be saved.
It was especially at this time that the feeling towards the Lady-in-Chief
deepened into a trust that was almost worship. Watchful, resourceful,
unconquered, with a mind that, missing no detail, yet took account of
the widest issues and the farthest ends, she was yet full of divine
tenderness for each sufferer whom with her own hands she tended; and,
although she did not nurse the officers—she left that to others—in her
devotion to Tommy Atkins she had been known to be on her feet, as already
has been said, for twenty hours on end; and, whether she was kneeling or
standing, stooping or lifting, always an ideal nurse.
The graves round the hospitals were not dug deep enough, and the air
became even fouler than before. To the inroads of cholera the suffering
of Sebastopol patients added a new form of death. Sister Aloysius writes
of these men who came in by scores and hundreds from the trenches, and
whom this Sister, greatly valued by the Lady-in-Chief, helped to nurse
both at Scutari and at Balaclava:—
“I must say something of my poor frost-bitten patients. The men
who came from the ‘front,’ as they called it, had only thin
linen suits, no other clothing to keep out the Crimean frost
of 1854-5. When they were carried in on the stretchers which
conveyed so many to their last resting-place, their clothes
had to be cut off. In most cases the flesh and clothes were
frozen together; and, as for the feet, the boots had to be cut
off bit by bit, the flesh coming off with them; many pieces of
the flesh I have seen remain in the boot.
“We have just received some hundreds of poor creatures, worn
out with sufferings beyond any you could imagine, in the
Crimea, where the cold is so intense that a soldier described
to me the Russians and the Allies in a sudden skirmish, and
neither party able to draw a trigger! So fancy what the poor
soldiers must endure in the ‘trenches.’
“It was a comfort to think that these brave men had some care,
all that we could procure for them. For at this time the food
was very bad—goat’s flesh, and sometimes what they called
mutton, but black, blue, and green. Yet who could complain of
anything after the sufferings I have faintly described—borne,
too, with such patience: not a murmur!... One day, after a
batch had arrived from the Crimea, and I had gone my rounds
through them, one of my orderlies told me that a man wanted to
speak one word to me.
“When I had a moment I went to him. ‘Tell me at once what you
want; I have worse cases to see after’—he did not happen to be
very bad. ‘All I want to know, ma’am, is, are you one of our
own Sisters of Mercy from Ireland?’ ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘your very
own.’ ‘God be praised for that!’
“Another poor fellow said to me one day, ‘Do they give you
anything good out here?’ ‘Oh yes,’ I said; ‘why do you ask me?’
‘Because, ma’am, you gave me a piece of chicken for my dinner,
and I kept some of it for you.’ He pulled it out from under his
head and offered it to me. I declined the favour with thanks. I
never could say enough of those kind-hearted soldiers and their
consideration for us in the midst of their sufferings.”
CHAPTER XVI.
_Inexactitudes—Labels—Cholera—“The Lady with the Lamp”—Her
humour—Letters of Sister Aloysius._
About the middle of December Miss Nightingale had to rebuke very severely
one of her own nurses, who had written a letter to the _Times_ which made
a great sensation by its lurid picture of the evils in the hospital—a
misrepresentation so great that the nurse herself confessed in the end
that it was “a tissue of exaggerations”—perhaps “inexactitudes” would be
our modern word.
Meanwhile, the small-minded parochial gossips at home were wasting
their time in discussing Miss Nightingale’s religious opinions. One who
worked so happily with all who served the same Master was first accused
under the old cry of “Popery,” and then under the equally silly label
of “Unitarianism.” Her friend Mrs. Herbert, in rebuking parish gossip,
felt it necessary to unpin these two labels and loyally pin on a new one,
by explaining that in reality she was rather “Low Church.” The really
sensible person, with whom, doubtless, Lady Herbert would have fully
agreed, was the Irish parson, and his like, when he replied to some
foolish questions about her that Miss Nightingale belonged to a very rare
sect indeed—the sect of the Good Samaritans.
Miss Stanley tells a most amusing story of how one of the military
chaplains complained to Miss Jebbut that very improper books had been
circulated in the wards; she pressed in vain to know what they were. “As
I was coming away he begged for five minutes’ conversation, said he was
answerable for the men and what they read, and he must protest against
sentiments he neither approved nor understood, and that he would fetch me
the book. It was Keble’s ‘Christian Year,’ which Miss Jebbut had lent to
a sick midshipman!”
It was a brave heart indeed that the Good Samaritan needed now, with
cholera added to the other horrors of hospital suffering, and the
frost-bitten cases from Sebastopol were almost equally heart-rending.
It was early in January 1855 that Miss Stanley escorted fifty more
nurses. Most of them worked under Miss Anderson at the General Hospital
at Scutari, but eight were sent into the midst of the fighting at
Balaclava, and of the life there “at the front” the letters of Sister
Aloysius give a terrible picture. We have, for instance, the story of a
man ill and frost-bitten, who found he could not turn on his side because
his feet were frozen to those of the soldier opposite. And it came to
pass that for two months the death-rate in the hospitals was sixty per
cent.
Night after night, the restless, lonely sufferers watched for the coming
of the slender, white-capped figure with the little light that she shaded
so carefully lest it should waken any sleeper, as she passed through the
long corridors watching over the welfare of her patients, and to them she
was “the Lady with the Lamp.”
We still see with the American poet:—
“The wounded from the battle-plain,
In dreary hospitals of pain,
The cheerless corridors,
The cold and stony floors.
“Lo! in that house of misery
A lady with a lamp I see
Pass through the glimmering gloom,
And flit from room to room.
“And slow, as in a dream of bliss,
The speechless sufferer turns to kiss
Her shadow, as it falls
Upon the darkening walls.”
“Ah,” said to me old John Ball, the veteran of the Crimea, who had been
wounded at Alma and been at Scutari a month before her arrival, so that
in his later days there he saw the changes that she wrought, “ah, she was
a _good_ soul—she was a _good_ woman!” And through his words, and those
of the other old men who remembered her, it was possible to discern a
little of the glow, the humour, the homely maternal tenderness with which
the _Wohlgebohrene Dame_ had comforted young and old in their hours of
patriotic wounding and pain.
For herself, in the long days of sacrificial service, was there any
human solace, any dear companionship, any dawning light of love?
For us at least, the mere outsiders, to whom she is just a very practical
saint and a very great woman, “there lives no record of reply.” But we
know that, though hers was the solitary path, which yet was no solitude
because of the outpoured love and sympathy to others, when in her
presence once some one was chattering about the advantages of “single
blessedness,” she, with her quick sense of humour, replied that a fish
out of water might be blessed, but a good deal of effort was needed to
become accustomed to the air!
None of the letters describing the Scutari life are more interesting than
those of Sister Aloysius, the Irish Sister of Mercy, from whose graphic
descriptions quotations have already been made.
“She and her companions had had only a few hours in which to
prepare for a long and dangerous journey, with the details of
which they were quite unacquainted, only knowing that they were
to start for Turkey at half-past seven in the morning, and
that they went for the love of God.
“‘And who is to take care of you from this to Turkey?’ asked
one of their amazed well-wishers. To which the Sisters only
replied that ‘they hoped their guardian angels would kindly do
so.’”
Needless to say, the little party _did_ reach its destination safely,
and “at last,” writes Sister Aloysius, “a despatch came[14] to say that
five Sisters were to proceed to Scutari, to the General Hospital; while
arrangements were made for the other ten Sisters to proceed to a house on
the Bosphorus, to await further orders. At once the five Sisters started
for Scutari: Reverend Mother, Sister M. Agnes, Sister M. Elizabeth,
Sister M. Winifred, and myself. When we reached Scutari we were shown
to our quarters consisting of one little room, not in a very agreeable
locality. However, we were quite satisfied none better could be found,
and for this little nook we were thankful.
“Of course, we expected to be sent to the wards at once. Sister M. Agnes
and the writer were sent to a store to sort clothes that had been eaten
by the rats; Rev. Mother and Sister M. Elizabeth either to the kitchen or
to another store. In a dark, damp, gloomy shed we set to work and did the
best we could; but, indeed, the destruction accomplished by the rats was
something wonderful. On the woollen goods they had feasted sumptuously.
They were running about us in all directions; we begged of the sergeant
to leave the door open that we might make our escape if they attacked us.
Our home rats would run if you ‘hushed’ them; but you might ‘hush’ away,
and the Scutari rats would not take the least notice.
“During my stay in the stores I saw numberless funerals pass by the
window. Cholera was raging, and how I did wish to be in the wards amongst
the poor dying soldiers! Before I leave the stores I must mention that
Sister M. Agnes and myself thought the English nobility must have emptied
their wardrobes and linen stores to send out bandages for the wounded—the
most beautiful underclothing, the finest cambric sheets, with merely a
scissors run here and there through them to ensure their being used
for no other purpose. And such large bales, too; some from the Queen’s
Palace, with the Royal monogram beautifully worked. Whoever sent out
these immense bales thought nothing too good for the poor soldiers. And
they were right—nothing was too good for them. And now good-bye stores
and good-bye rats; for I was to be in the cholera wards in the morning.
“Where shall I begin, or how can I ever describe my first day in the
hospital at Scutari? Vessels were arriving, and the orderlies carrying
the poor fellows, who, with their wounds and frost-bites, had been
tossing about on the Black Sea for two or three days, and sometimes more.
Where were they to go? Not an available bed. They were laid on the floor
one after another, till the beds were emptied of those dying of cholera
and every other disease. Many died immediately after being brought
in—their moans would pierce the heart—the taking of them in and out of
the vessels must have increased their pain.
“The look of agony in those poor dying faces will never leave my heart.
“Week in, week out, the cholera went on. The same remedies were
continued, though almost always to fail. However, while there was life
there was hope, and we kept on the warm applications to the last. When it
came near the end the patients got into a sort of collapse, out of which
they did not rally.
“We begged the orderlies, waiting to take them to the dead-house, to
wait a little lest they might not be dead; and with great difficulty we
prevailed on them to make the least delay. As a rule the orderlies drank
freely—‘to drown their grief,’ they said. I must say that their position
was a very hard one—their work always increasing—and such work; death
around them on every side; their own lives in continual danger—it was
almost for them a continuation of the field of battle.
“The poor wounded men brought in out of the vessels were in a dreadful
state of dirt, and so weak that whatever cleaning they got had to
be done cautiously. Oh, the state of those fine fellows, so worn
out with fatigue, so full of vermin! Most, or all, of them required
spoon-feeding. We had wine, sago, arrowroot. Indeed, I think there was
everything in the stores, but it was so hard to get them.... An orderly
officer took the rounds of the wards every night to see that all was
right. He was expected by the orderlies, and the moment he raised the
latch one cried out, ‘All right, your honour.’ Many a time I said, ‘All
wrong.’ The poor officer, of course, went his way; and one could scarcely
blame him for not entering those wards, so filled with pestilence, the
air so dreadful that to breathe it might cost him his life. And then,
what could he do even if he did come? I remember one day an officer’s
orderly being brought in—a dreadful case of cholera; and so devoted was
his master that he came in every half-hour to see him, and stood over him
in the bed as if it was only a cold he had; the poor fellow died after a
few hours’ illness. I hope his devoted master escaped. I never heard.
“Each Sister had charge of two wards, and there was just at this time
a fresh outbreak of cholera. The Sisters were up every night; and the
cases, as in Scutari and Kullali, were nearly all fatal. Reverend Mother
did not allow the Sisters to remain up all night, except in cases of
cholera, without a written order from the doctor.
“In passing to the wards at night we used to meet the rats in droves.
They would not even move out of our way. They were there before us, and
were determined to keep possession. As for our hut, they evidently wanted
to make it theirs, scraping under the boards, jumping up on the shelf
where our little tin utensils were kept, rattling everything. One night
dear Sister M. Paula found one licking her forehead—she had a real horror
of them. Sleep was out of the question. Our third day in Balaclava was a
very sad one for us. One of our dear band, Sister Winifred, got very ill
during the night with cholera. She was a most angelic Sister, and we were
all deeply grieved.
“She, the first to go of all our little band, had been full of life and
energy the day before. We were all very sad, and we wondered who would be
the next.
“Miss Nightingale was at the funeral, and even joined in the prayers.
The soldiers, doctors, officers, and officials followed. When all was
over we returned to our hut, very sad; but we had no further time to
think. Patients were pouring in, and we should be out again to the
cholera wards. Besides cholera there were cases of fever—in fact, of
every disease. Others had been nearly killed by the blasting of rocks,
and they came in fearfully disfigured.
“Father Woolett brought us one day a present of a Russian cat; he bought
it, he told us, from an old Russian woman for the small sum of seven
shillings. It made a particularly handsome captive in the land of its
fathers, for we were obliged to keep it tied to a chair to prevent its
escape. But the very sight of this powerful champion soon relieved us of
some of our unwelcome and voracious visitors.
“Early in 1856 rumours of peace reached us from all sides. But our
Heavenly Father demanded another sacrifice from our devoted little band.
Dear Sister Mary Elizabeth was called to a martyrs’ crown.
“She was specially beloved for her extraordinary sweetness of
disposition. The doctor, when called, pronounced her illness to be fever;
she had caught typhus in her ward. Every loving care was bestowed on her
by our dearest Mother, who scarcely ever left her bedside. Death seemed
to have no sting.... She had no wish to live or die, feeling she was in
the arms of her Heavenly Father. ‘He will do for me what is best,’ she
whispered, ‘and His will is all I desire.’”
At Scutari Miss Nightingale’s work of reorganization was bearing swift
fruit. The wives of the soldiers were daily employed in the laundry she
had established, so that they had a decent livelihood, and the soldiers
themselves had clean linen. But, of course, a great many of the soldiers
had left their wives and children at home.
A money office also had been formed by the Lady-in-Chief, which helped
them in sending home their pay. It was she too who arranged for the safe
return of the widows to England, and it was she who provided stamps
and stationery for the men, that they might be able to write to those
dear to them. No one had had a moment, it seemed, to give thought to
anything but the actual warfare with all its horrors, until her womanly
sympathy and splendid capacity came on the scene. With her there was
always little time lost between planning and achieving, and happily she
had power of every kind in her hand. Besides her own means, which she
poured forth like water, the people of England had, as we saw, subscribed
magnificently through the _Times_ Fund, and with one so practical as the
Lady-in-Chief in daily consultation with Mr. Macdonald, there was no
longer any fear of giving to church walls what was intended to save the
lives of ill-clad and dying soldiers.
CHAPTER XVII.
_Miss Nightingale visits Balaclava—Her illness—Lord Raglan’s
visit—The Fall of Sebastopol._
At last, in the May of 1855, the Lady-in-Chief was able to see such
fruits of the six months’ steady work at Scutari that the scene of her
labours could be changed, and she set out for Balaclava to inspect the
other hospitals, for which, as superintendent of the ladies in the
military hospitals in the East, she was responsible. She wished to see
for herself what was being done for the soldiers on the field. Besides
Mr. Bracebridge and her nursing staff, M. Soyer accompanied her with a
view to improving the cooking arrangements for the army in the field, and
he writes with his usual vividness:—
“Thomas, Miss Nightingale’s boy, the twelve-year-old drummer
who had left what he called his ‘instrument sticks’ to make
himself her most devoted slave and messenger, was also allowed
to go.
“At nine,” says M. Soyer, “we were all on shore and mounted.
There were about eight of us ready to escort our heroine to the
seat of war. Miss Nightingale was attired simply in a genteel
amazone, or riding habit, and had quite a martial air. She was
mounted upon a very pretty mare of a golden colour which, by
its gambols and caracoling, seemed proud to carry its noble
charge. The weather was very fine. Our cavalcade produced an
extraordinary effect upon the motley crowd of all nations
assembled at Balaclava, who were astonished at seeing a lady so
well escorted. It was not so, however, with those who knew who
the lady was.”
Later he gives us a most characteristic glimpse of the light-hearted
courage and high spirit of his Lady-in-Chief:—
“Mr. Anderson proposed to have a peep at Sebastopol. It was
four o’clock, and they were firing sharply on both sides.
Miss Nightingale, to whom the offer was made, immediately
accepted it; so we formed a column and, for the first time,
fearlessly faced the enemy, and prepared to go under fire.
P. M. turned round to me, saying quietly, but with great
trepidation, ‘I say, Monsieur Soyer, of course you would not
take Miss Nightingale where there will be any danger?’ ... The
sentry then repeated his caution, saying, ‘Madam, even where
you stand you are in great danger; some of the shot reach
more than half a mile beyond this!’ ... ‘My good young man,’
replied Miss Nightingale in French, ‘more dead and wounded have
passed through my hands than I hope you will ever see in the
battlefield during the whole of your military career; believe
me, I have no fear of death!’”
By a little guile the eager Frenchman led the unsuspecting idol of the
troops into a position where she could be well seen by the soldiers; and
while she was seated on the Morta, in view of them all, it hardly needed
his own dramatic outcry for a salutation to “the Daughter of England” to
call forth the ringing cheers which greeted her from the men of the 39th
Regiment, and the shouts were taken up so loudly by all the rest that the
Russians were actually startled by them at Sebastopol.
The darkness fell quickly, and half-way back to Balaclava Miss
Nightingale and her party found themselves in the midst of a merry
Zouave camp, where the men were singing and drinking coffee, but warned
our friends that brigands were in the neighbourhood. However, there
was nothing for it but to push on, and, as a matter of fact, the only
wound received was from the head of Miss Nightingale’s horse, which hit
violently against the face of her escort at the bridle rein, who kept
silence that he might not alarm her, but was found with a face black and
bleeding at the end of the journey.
After her night’s rest in her state-cabin in the _Robert Lowe_, though
still feeling used up with the adventurous visit to the camp hospitals,
Miss Nightingale visited the General Hospital at Balaclava and the
collection of huts on the heights, which formed the sanatoria, and
also went to see an officer ill with typhus in the doctors’ huts. She
renewed her visit next day, when, after a night at Balaclava, she settled
three nurses into the sanatorium, and then for some days continued her
inspection of hospitals and moved into the ship _London_, the _Robert
Lowe_ having been ordered home.
Worn out by her ceaseless labours at Scutari, she had probably been
specially open to infection in the sick officer’s hut, and while on board
the _London_ it became clear that she had contracted Crimean fever in a
very bad form.
She was ordered up to the huts amid such dreadful lamentations of the
surrounding folk that, thanks to their well-meant delays, it took an
hour to carry her up to the heights, her faithful nurse, Mrs. Roberts,
keeping off the sun-glare by walking beside her with an umbrella, and
her page-boy Thomas weeping his heart out at the tail of the little
procession.
A spot was found after her own heart near a running stream where the wild
flowers were in bloom, and she tells in her _Nursing Notes_ how her first
recovery began when a nosegay of her beloved flowers was brought to her
bedside. But for some days she was desperately ill, and the camp was
unspeakably moved and alarmed.
Britain also shared deeply in the suspense, though happily the worst
crisis was passed in about twelve days, leaving, however, a long time of
great weakness and slow convalescence to be won through afterwards.
During those twelve days some very sharp skirmishing took place, and
there was talk of an attack on Balaclava from the Kamara side, in which
case Miss Nightingale’s hut would, it was said, be the first outpost
to be attacked. Any such notion was, of course, an injustice to the
Russians, who would not knowingly have hurt a hair of her head—indeed, it
may almost be said that she was sacred to all the troops, whether friends
or foes. But at all events it gave her boy Thomas his opportunity, and he
was prepared, we are told, “to die valiantly in defence of his mistress.”
Soyer gives a picturesque account of Lord Raglan’s visit to Miss
Nightingale when her recovery was first beginning. He begins by
describing his own visit, and tells the story through the lips of Mrs.
Roberts, Miss Nightingale’s faithful nurse.
“ ... I was,” he writes, “very anxious to know the actual state
of Miss Nightingale’s health, and went to her hut to inquire.
I found Mrs. Roberts, who was quite astonished and very much
delighted to see me.
“‘Thank God, Monsieur Soyer,’ she exclaimed, ‘you are here
again. We have all been in such a way about you. Why, it was
reported that you had been taken prisoner by the Russians. I
must go and tell Miss Nightingale you are found again.’
“‘Don’t disturb her now. I understand Lord Raglan has been to
see her.’
“‘Yes, he has, and I made a serious mistake. It was about five
o’clock in the afternoon when he came. Miss Nightingale was
dozing, after a very restless night. We had a storm that day
and it was very wet. I was in my room sewing when two men on
horseback, wrapped in large gutta-percha cloaks and dripping
wet, knocked at the door. I went out, and one inquired in which
hut Miss Nightingale resided.
“‘He spoke so loud that I said, “Hist! hist! don’t make such
a horrible noise as that, my man,” at the same time making a
sign with both hands for him to be quiet. He then repeated his
question, but not in so loud a tone. I told him this was the
hut.
“‘“All right,” said he, jumping from his horse, and he was
walking straight in when I pushed him back, asking what he
meant and whom he wanted.
“‘“Miss Nightingale,” said he.
“‘“And pray who are you?”
“‘“Oh, only a soldier,” was the reply; “but I must see her—I
have come a long way—my name is Raglan: she knows me very well.”
“‘Miss Nightingale, overhearing him, called me in, saying, “Oh!
Mrs. Roberts, it is Lord Raglan. Pray tell him I have a very
bad fever, and it will be dangerous for him to come near me.”
“‘“I have no fear of fever, or anything else,” said Lord Raglan.
“‘And before I had time to turn round, in came his lordship. He
took up a stool, sat down at the foot of the bed, and kindly
asked Miss Nightingale how she was, expressing his sorrow at
her illness, and thanking her and praising her for the good she
had done for the troops. He wished her a speedy recovery, and
hoped that she might be able to continue her charitable and
invaluable exertions, so highly appreciated by every one, as
well as by himself.
“‘He then bade Miss Nightingale good-bye, and went away. As he
was going I said I wished to apologize.
“‘“No, no! not at all, my dear lady,” said Lord Raglan; “you
did very right; for I perceive that Miss Nightingale has not
yet received my letter, in which I announced my intention of
paying her a visit to-day—having previously inquired of the
doctor if she could be seen.”’”[15]
The doctors, after her twelve days of dangerous illness, were urgent for
Miss Nightingale’s instant return to England; but this she would not do:
she was sure that, with time and patience, she would be able once more to
take up her work at Scutari. Lord Ward placed his yacht at her disposal,
and by slow degrees she made recovery, though Lord Raglan’s death, June
18, 1855, was a great grief and shock to her.
Wellington said of Lord Raglan that he was a man who would not tell a lie
to save his life, and he was also a man of great charm and benevolence,
adored by his troops. He felt to the quick the terrible repulse of our
troops before Sebastopol that June, having yielded his own counsels to
those of France rather than break the alliance, and he died two days
after the despatch was written in which he told the story of this event.
Writing to the Duke of Newcastle in October, he had entreated for his
army a little repose—that brave army, worn out, not only by the ordinary
fatigues of a military campaign, and by the actual collecting of wood and
water to keep life from extinction, but by cholera, sickness, and the
bitter purgatorial cold of a black hillside in a Russian winter.
“Repose!” echoes Kinglake with sardonic bitterness, and we too echo it,
remembering how, two days afterwards, it was riding through the devil’s
jaws at Balaclava, to hurl itself but a little later against its myriad
assailants at Inkermann!
Repose! uncomplaining and loyal, in the bitter grasp of winter on the
heights of the Chersonese, holding day and night a siege that seemed
endless, the allied armies had proved their heroism through the slow
tragedy. And when at last, on the day of victory, amid the fury of the
elements and the avenging fury of their own surging hearts, they grasped
the result of their patient agony, though
“Stormed at with shot and shell,
Boldly they rode and well,”
that final moment of onset did but crown the fortitude of those long,
slow days of dying by inches in the slow clutch of starvation, that had
been so much harder to bear, while they saw their comrades in the anguish
of cholera and felt their own limbs freezing beneath them.
But it was doubtless a brave assault, and it was sad that their loved
commander was not there to see; for, while the Malakoff fell before
the French, it was the British troops that took the Redan—that Redan
of which it has been written that “three months before it had repulsed
the attacking force with fearful carnage, and brought Lord Raglan to a
despairing death.”
There is tragedy, therefore, in the fact that when, so soon afterwards,
Sebastopol fell, the triumph was not his.
It was on September 8, amid a furious storm which suddenly broke up a
summer-like day, that the cannonade joined with the thunder and the final
assault was made. Though the first shouts of victory came at the end of
an hour, it was nightfall before the fighting ceased and the Russians
retreated. Sebastopol was in flames. And before the next day dawned the
last act in this terrible war-drama was over.
Within a month of leaving Scutari Miss Nightingale was already there
again, and during these days of slowly returning strength, when she
wandered sometimes through the beautiful cemetery where the strange,
black-plumaged birds fly above the cypresses and, against the background
of the blue Bosphorus, the roses garland the tombs, she planned, for the
soldiers who had fallen, the monument which now stands there to their
undying memory, where under the drooping wings of the angels that support
it are inserted the words, “This monument was erected by Queen Victoria
and her people.”
CHAPTER XVIII.
_The Nightingale Fund—Miss Nightingale remains at her post,
organizing healthy occupations for the men off duty—Sisters of
Mercy—The Queen’s jewel—Its meaning._
Far and wide spread the news of the fall of Sebastopol, and London took
the lead in rejoicings. The Tower guns shouted the victory, the arsenals
fired their salutes, cathedrals and village churches rang out their
welcome to peace. There were sons, husbands, brothers, fathers, for whom
there would be no more home-coming on earth; and some who would come back
broken and maimed: but all had served their country, and heroism lasts
beyond time and death.
All through the empire arose an outcry of thanksgiving to the woman who
still remained at her post among the sick and the dying—the woman who had
saved England’s honour in the day of disgrace and neglect, and had saved
also countless lives among her brave sons.
The Queen and all her people were eager to know what there was that they
might lay at her feet. In one form only would Miss Nightingale accept the
testimony offered—namely, the means of yet further work. The Herberts
knew she had longed to organize a hospital on the lines of unpaid
nursing, but there was a difficulty for the moment, because she could not
bring herself to leave the East until her work there was fully completed,
and such a hospital must, they thought, have her presence from the first.
Just now she was with Sister Aloysius at Balaclava, nursing one of her
staff, and while there an accident on the rough roads, which injured not
only herself, but also the Sister who was walking beside her, led to a
thoughtful kindness from Colonel Macmurdo, who had a little carriage
especially made for her. In this little carriage, through the cutting
cold and snow of a Crimean winter, she would drive about among the camp
hospitals with no escort but her driver, as she returned through the dark
night at the end of her long day of self-imposed duties. Sometimes she
has stood for hours on a cold, shelterless rock, giving her directions,
and when one and another of her friends entreated against such risk and
exposure, she would just smile with a quiet certainty that, for all that
in her eyes was her clear duty, strength and protection would certainly
be given.
She was much occupied in helping and uplifting the convalescent, and not
only these, but also all the soldiers in camp in the army of occupation,
which was for a while to be left in the East until the treaty was signed,
and would necessarily be surrounded by special temptations in time of
peace. Her way of fighting drunkenness—and after Sebastopol you may be
sure there was a good deal of “drinking of healths”—was to provide all
possible means of interest and amusement. Huts were built, clubs were
formed. Stationery was provided for letters home. So effectually was
every one in England interested that, while Queen Victoria herself led
the way in sending newspapers and magazines, all through the country her
example was followed.
And while this was going on, the great testimonial fund in London was
mounting and mounting.
The Duke of Cambridge, Lord Houghton, and the Marquis of Ripon were
members of the committee. The great bankers opened their books. The
churches collected funds, _the rank and file of our impoverished army
sent £4,000_, and taking Mrs. Tooley’s figures, which are doubtless
correct, and including all ranks and all troops throughout the world, the
military contributions alone appear to have risen to about £10,000.
Jenny Lind, then Madame Goldschmidt, gave a concert, of which she
herself bore all the expense, amounting to about £500, and then gave
the entire proceeds, about £2,000, to the fund. This was so warmly
appreciated by some of those interested in the success of the fund that,
by private subscription, they gave a marble bust of Queen Victoria to the
Goldschmidts as a thank-offering.
From the overseas dominions came over £4,000; from provincial cities,
towns, and villages in Britain, between £6,000 and £7,000, and from
British residents abroad also a very handsome sum. Indeed, it may be
truly said that in every quarter of the globe men and women united
to pour forth their gratitude to Miss Nightingale, and to enable her
to complete the work so bravely begun, by transforming the old and
evil methods of nursing under British rule to that ideal art in which
fortitude, tenderness, and skill receive their crowning grace. It has
been said—I know not with what exactitude—that no British subject has
ever received such world-wide honour as was at this time laid at her feet.
At one of the great meetings Mr. Sidney Herbert read the following letter
from one of his friends:—
“I have just heard a pretty account from a soldier describing
the comfort it was even to see Florence pass. ‘She would speak
to one and another,’ he said, ‘and nod and smile to many more,
but she could not do it to all, you know, for we lay there by
hundreds; but we could kiss her shadow[16] as it fell, and lay
our heads on the pillow again content.’”
That letter alone, we are told, brought another £10,000.
The gross amount had reached £44,000, but in 1857 Miss Nightingale
desired that the list should be closed and help be given instead to our
French Allies, who were then suffering from the terrible floods that laid
waste their country in that year.
And whatever she commanded, of course, was done. Alike in England and in
the Crimea, her influence was potent for all good.
She herself was still busy nursing some of the Roman Catholic members
of her staff in the huts on the snowclad heights of Balaclava, and how
heartily she valued them may be judged from these closing sentences of a
letter to their Reverend Mother:—
“You know that I shall do everything I can for the Sisters
whom you have left me. I will care for them as if they were my
own children. But it will not be like you.”
Not very far from the sanatorium on the heights above Balaclava, two new
camp hospitals had been put up, and while superintending the nursing
there, our Lady-in-Chief lived in a three-roomed hut with a medical store
attached to it, where she was quite near to sanatorium and hospitals.
She and the three Sisters who were with her had not very weather-proof
quarters. One of them, whose letters are full of interest, tells of their
waking one morning to find themselves covered with snow, and leading a
life of such adventurous simplicity that when the Protestant chaplain
brought some eggs tied up in a handkerchief the gift was regarded as
princely! Happily, they were able to reward the gentleman by washing his
neckties, and ironing them with an ingenious makeshift for the missing
flat-iron, in the shape of a teapot filled with hot water. Every night
everything in the huts froze, even to the ink. But Miss Nightingale tells
how brave and entirely self-forgetful the Sisters were under every
hardship and privation.
[Illustration: Miss Nightingale’s Medals and Decorations.]
By those who have never had the privilege of knowing such women
intimately, her affection for them may be the better understood from the
following graphic letter written by Lord Napier:—
“At an early period of my life I held a diplomatic position
under Lord Stratford de Redcliffe in Constantinople. During
the distress of the Crimean War the Ambassador called me one
morning and said: ‘Go down to the port; you will find a ship
there loaded with Jewish exiles—Russian subjects from the
Crimea. It is your duty to disembark them. The Turks will give
you a house in which they may be placed. I turn them over
entirely to you.’ I went down to the shore and received about
two hundred persons, the most miserable objects that could be
witnessed, most of them old men, women, and children. I placed
them in the cold, ruinous lodging allocated to them by the
Ottoman authorities. I went back to the Ambassador and said:
‘Your Excellency, these people are cold, and I have no fuel
or blankets. They are hungry, and I have no food. They are
dirty, and I have no soap. Their hair is in an indescribable
condition, and I have no combs. What am I to do with these
people?’ ‘Do?’ said the Ambassador. ‘Get a couple of Sisters
of Mercy; they will put all to right in a moment.’ I went, saw
the Mother Superior, and explained the case. I asked for two
Sisters. She ordered two from her presence to follow me. They
were ladies of refinement and intellect. I was a stranger and
a Protestant, and I invoked their assistance for the benefit
of the Jews. Yet these two women made up their bundles and
followed me through the rain, without a look, a whisper, a
sign of hesitation. From that moment my fugitives were saved.
I witnessed the labours of those Sisters for months, and they
never endeavoured to make a single convert.”
The military men were not less enthusiastic. When Colonel Connolly,
brother-in-law to Mr. Bruin, of Carlow, was travelling, after his
return from the war, near the Bruin estate, a fellow-traveller spoke
disrespectfully of nuns. The colonel, a Protestant, not only made a warm
defence of the ladies who had nursed him in Russia and Ottoman regions,
and for their sakes of all other nuns, but handed the assailant his card,
saying: “If you say another word against these saintly gentlewomen I
shall call you out.” The slanderer subsided very quickly.
Sister Aloysius, one of those very Sisters who were with Miss Nightingale
in the huts, has written in her “Memories of the Crimea”:—
“It was said at one time that the War Office was on the point
of issuing a mandate forbidding us to speak even to the
Catholic soldiers on religion, or to say a prayer for them.
However, that mandate never came; we often thought the guardian
angels of the soldiers prevented it.”
It made no difference to the loyalty of their work together that Miss
Nightingale was not a Roman Catholic; they all obeyed the Master who has
taught that it is not the way in which He is addressed that matters, but
whether we help those whom He gave His life to help, and in loving and
serving whom, we love and serve Him.
So in London and in Balaclava the good of her influence was felt. In
London the funds mounted, and at Balaclava the excellent work among the
soldiers still went on.
Her very presence among the men helped to keep them sober and diligent,
and in every way at their best, in those first months of victory when
heads are only too easily turned. And she had the reward she most
desired, for she was able to speak of these brave fellows—the nameless
heroes of the long campaign—as having been “uniformly quiet and
well-bred.” Those words, it is true, were spoken of the men attending the
reading-huts; but they are quite in line with her more general verdict
with regard to Tommy; though, alas, we cannot stretch them to cover
his behaviour at the canteens, where we are told that much drunkenness
prevailed.
She had advanced money for the building of a coffee-house at Inkermann,
and had helped the chaplain to get maps and slates for his school work,
and the bundles of magazines and illustrated papers, sent out from
England in answer to her appeal, as well as books sent out by the Duchess
of Kent, cheered and brightened many a long hour for the men. She was
always on the alert to help them about sending home their pay, and quick
to care for the interests of their wives and children.
Before she left the Crimea, her hut was beset by fifty or sixty poor
women who had been left behind when their husbands sailed for home with
their regiments. They had followed their husbands to the war without
leave and, having proved themselves useful, had been allowed to remain.
And now they were left alone in a strange land and, but for Florence
Nightingale, the end of the story might have been bitter sorrow. But she
managed to get them sent home in a British ship.
Many a mother at home must already have blessed her; for reckless boys
who had enlisted, without the sanction of their families, had again and
again been by her persuaded to write home, and in the first months of
the war she had actually undertaken to stamp for the men any letters
home which were sent to her camp. And at Scutari she had arranged a
provisional money-order office where, four afternoons in each week, she
received from the men the pay which she encouraged them to send home.
When we are told that, in small sums, about £1,000 passed through this
office month by month, we realize dimly something of the labour involved,
and thinking of all her other cares and labours, which were nevertheless
not allowed to stand in the way of such practical thoughtfulness as
this, we do not wonder that “the services” loved her with a love that
was akin to worship. The money, as she herself says, “was literally so
much rescued from the canteens and from drunkenness;” and the Government,
following her lead, had themselves established money-order offices later
at Scutari, Balaclava, Constantinople, and the Headquarters, Crimea.
It is not surprising that, in the “Old Country,” songs were dedicated to
her as “the good angel of Derbyshire,” and that her very portrait became
a popular advertisement.
And we have it on good authority that her name was revered alike by
English, French, Turks, and Russians.
The Treaty of Peace was signed at Paris on March 30, 1856, and on July
12 General Codrington formally gave up Sebastopol and Balaclava to the
Russians. When the last remnant of our army was ordered home and the
hospitals were finally closed, Florence Nightingale was for the first
time willing to leave a post which she had held so bravely and so long.
But before she left she wished to leave a memorial to the brave men who
had fallen, and the brave women, her comrades, who had died upon that
other battlefield where disease, and Death himself, must be wrestled with
on behalf of those who are nursed and tended.
And so it comes to pass that among the visible tokens which the war
has left behind, is a gigantic white marble cross erected by Florence
Nightingale upon the sombre heights of Balaclava, where it still opens
wide its arms for every gleam of golden sunlight, every reflected
shimmer, through the dark night, of silvery moon and star, to hearten
the sailors voyaging northward and mark a prayer for the brave men and
women who toiled and suffered there. It is inscribed with the words in
Italian, “Lord, have mercy upon us.” But while she herself asked only
mercy for herself and others, that human shortcomings might be forgiven,
her compatriots were uniting to do her honour.
On December 20, 1855, the _Morning Post_ printed the following
announcement:—
“The country will experience much satisfaction, though no
surprise, on learning, as we believe we are correct in stating,
that Her Majesty the Queen has, in a manner as honourable to
herself as it must be gratifying to her people, been pleased to
mark her warm appreciation of the unparalleled self-devotion
of the good Miss Nightingale. The Queen has transmitted to
that lady a jewelled ornament of great beauty, which may be
worn as a decoration, and has accompanied it with an autograph
letter—such a letter as Queen Victoria has ere now proved she
can write—a letter not merely of graceful acknowledgment, but
full of that deep feeling which speaks from heart to heart, and
at once ennobles the sovereign and the subject.”
Of the symbolic meaning of this jewel the following exposition appeared
in the issue of January 15, 1856, of the same paper:—
“The design of the jewel is admirable, and the effect
no less brilliant than chaste. It is characteristic and
emblematical—being formed of a St. George’s cross in ruby-red
enamel, on a white field—representing England. This is
encircled by a black band, typifying the office of Charity, on
which is inscribed a golden legend, ‘Blessed are the merciful.’
The Royal donor is expressed by the letters ‘V. R.’ surmounted
by a crown in diamonds, impressed upon the centre of the St.
George’s cross, from which also rays of gold emanating upon
the field of white enamel are supposed to represent the glory
of England. While spreading branches of palm, in bright green
enamel, tipped with gold, form a framework for the shield,
their stems at the bottom being banded with a ribbon of blue
enamel (the colour of the ribbon for the Crimean medal), on
which, in golden letters, is inscribed ‘Crimea.’ At the top
of the shield, between the palm branches, and connecting the
whole, three brilliant stars of diamonds illustrate the idea
of the light of heaven shed upon the labours of Mercy, Peace,
and Charity, in connection with the glory of a nation. On the
back of this Royal jewel is an inscription on a golden tablet,
written by Her Majesty ... recording it to be a gift and
testimonial in memory of services rendered to her brave army by
Miss Nightingale. The jewel is about three inches in depth by
two and a half in width. It is to be worn, not as a brooch or
ornament, but rather as the badge of an order. We believe the
credit of the design is due to the illustrious consort of Her
Majesty.”
_Punch_, of course, had always taken the liveliest interest in Miss
Nightingale’s work, and having begun with friendly jesting, he ended
with a tribute so tender in its grave beauty that it would hardly have
been out of place in a church window; for below a sketch of Florence
Nightingale herself, holding a wounded soldier by the hand, and with the
badge of Scutari across her breast, was a vision of the Good Samaritan.
CHAPTER XIX.
_Her citizenship—Her initiative—Public recognition and
gratitude—Her return incognito—Village excitement—The country’s
welcome—Miss Nightingale’s broken health—The Nightingale
Fund—St. Thomas’s Hospital—Reform of nursing as a profession._
It may be fairly supposed that even those benighted Philistines whose
mockery had at the outset been of a less innocent quality than _Punch’s_
gentle fun, now found it expedient to alter their tone, and if their
objections had been mere honest stupidity, they were probably both
convinced of their past folly and a good deal ashamed.
For Britain was very proud of the daughter who had become so mighty a
power for good in the State. The Sister of Mercy whom Miss Nightingale
used laughingly to call “her Cardinal” had responded on one occasion by
addressing her with equal affection as “Your Holiness,” and the nickname
was not altogether inappropriate, for her advice in civic and hygienic
matters had an authority which might well be compared with that which the
Pope himself wielded on theological questions.
Among the doctors at Scutari was a friend of General Evatt, from whom he
had many facts at first-hand, and it was therefore not without knowledge
that, in his conversation with me on the subject, the latter confirmed
and strengthened all that has already been written of Miss Nightingale’s
mental grasp and supreme capacity. To him, knowing her well, and knowing
well also the facts, she was the highest embodiment of womanhood and of
citizenship. Yet, while he talked, my heart ached for her, thinking of
the womanly joys of home and motherhood which were not for her, and all
the pure and tender romance which woman bears in her inmost soul, even
when, as in this noble instance, it is transmuted by the will of God and
the woman’s own obedient will into service of other homes and other lives.
Perhaps I may here be allowed to quote a sentence from Mrs. Tooley’s
admirable life of our heroine; for it could not have been better
expressed: “No one would wish to exempt from due praise even the humblest
of that ‘Angel Band’ who worked with Florence Nightingale, and still less
would she, but in every great cause there is the initiating genius who
stands in solitary grandeur above the rank and file of followers.”
Nor was official recognition of the country’s debt to Miss Nightingale in
any wise lacking. When the Treaty of Peace was under discussion in the
House of Lords, Lord Ellesmere made it an opportunity for the following
tribute:—
“My Lords, the agony of that time has become a matter of
history. The vegetation of two successive springs has obscured
the vestiges of Balaclava and of Inkermann. Strong voices now
answer to the roll-call, and sturdy forms now cluster round
the colours. The ranks are full, the hospitals are empty. The
Angel of Mercy still lingers to the last on the scene of
her labours; but her mission is all but accomplished. Those
long arcades of Scutari, in which dying men sat up to catch
the sound of her footstep or the flutter of her dress, and
fell back on the pillow content to have seen her shadow as it
passed, are now comparatively deserted. She may probably be
thinking how to escape, as best she may, on her return, the
demonstrations of a nation’s appreciation of the deeds and
motives of Florence Nightingale.”
And in the House of Commons Mr. Sidney Herbert said: “I have received,
not only from medical men, but from many others who have had an
opportunity of making observations, letters couched in the highest
possible terms of praise. I will not repeat the words, but no higher
expressions of praise could be applied to woman, for the wonderful
energy, the wonderful tact, the wonderful tenderness, combined with
the extraordinary self-devotion, which have been displayed by Miss
Nightingale.”
Lord Ellesmere was right when he hinted that Miss Nightingale would
be likely to do her best to escape all public fuss on her return. The
Government had offered her a British man-of-war to take her home; but
it was not her way to accept any such outward pomp, and, almost before
people knew what had happened, it was found that she had travelled
quietly home as Miss Smith in a French vessel, visiting in Paris her old
friends the Sisters of St. Vincent de Paul, and finding that by having
embarked at night, at a moment when Scutari was not looking for her
departure, her little _ruse_ had been very successful. An eager people
had not recognized under the passing incognito of Miss Smith, travelling
with her aunt, Mrs. Smith, the great Florence Nightingale whose return
they had wished to celebrate. The village gossips at Lea Hurst have it
that “the closely veiled lady in black, who slipped into her father’s
house by the back door, was first recognized by the family butler,” and
it seems a pity to spoil such a picturesque tradition by inquiring into
it too closely.
[Illustration: The Nightingale Nursing Carriage.]
There was great joy among the villagers that “Miss Florence had come
home from the wars,” but it was understood that she wished to be quiet,
and that bonfires and such-like rejoicings were out of the question.
Along the roads near Lea Hurst came troops of people from Derby and
Nottingham, and even from Manchester, hoping to catch a glimpse of her;
and there is in one of the biographies a vivid account, given by the old
lady who kept the lodge gates, of how the park round Lea Hurst was beset
by these lingering crowds, how men came without arms or without legs,
hoping to see the Queen of Nurses. “But,” added the old lady, “the squire
wasn’t a-going to let Miss Florence be made a staring-stock of.” And,
indeed, “Miss Florence” must have been in great need of repose, though
never to the end of her life would it seem that she was allowed to have
much of it; for the very fruitfulness of her work made work multiply upon
her hands, and her friend Mrs. Sidney Herbert knew her well when she said
that to Florence Nightingale the dearest guerdon of work already done was
the gift of more work still to do.
Perhaps we shall never any of us fully know what it must have been to one
so abounding in spiritual energy and world-wide compassion to have to
learn slowly and painfully, through the years that followed, what must
henceforth be the physical limitations of her life. When we think of
the long, careful training that had been given to her fine gifts of eye
and hand in the art that she loved—for she rightly regarded nursing as
an art—an art in which every movement must be a skilled and disciplined
movement—we may divine something of what it cost to bear, without one
murmur of complaint, what she might so easily have been tempted to regard
as a lifelong waste of faculty. Instead of allowing herself to dwell on
any such idea, gradually, as the knowledge dawned on her of what she must
forego, she gave herself, with tenfold power in other directions, to work
which _could_ be achieved from an invalid’s couch, and thus helped and
guided others in that art all over the world.
Among the greetings which pleased her most on her first return to England
was an address from the workmen of Newcastle-on-Tyne, to whom she
replied in the following letter:—
_August 23, 1856._
“MY DEAR FRIENDS,—I wish it were in my power to tell you what
was in my heart when I received your letter.
“Your welcome home, your sympathy with what has been passing
while I have been absent, have touched me more than I can tell
in words. My dear friends, the things that are the deepest
in our hearts are perhaps what it is most difficult for us
to express. ‘She hath done what she could.’ These words I
inscribed on the tomb of one of my best helpers when I left
Scutari. It has been my endeavour, in the sight of God, to do
as she has done.
“I will not speak of reward when permitted to do our country’s
work—it is what we live for—but I may say to receive sympathy
from affectionate hearts like yours is the greatest support,
the greatest gratification, that it is possible for me to
receive from man.
“I thank you all, the eighteen hundred, with grateful, tender
affection. And I should have written before to do so, were not
the business, which my return home has not ended, been almost
more than I can manage.—Pray believe me, my dear friends, yours
faithfully and gratefully,
“FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE.”
Among the tokens of regard which the late Duke of Devonshire brought to
his old friend on her return, when he drove over from Chatsworth to Lea
Hurst to see her after her long, eventful absence, was a little silver
owl, a sort of souvenir, I suppose, of her beloved little “Athena,”
whose death she had felt so keenly when leaving for the Crimea. Queen
Victoria and the young princesses were eager to welcome Miss Nightingale
to Balmoral; and in looking back on her little visit there, which seems
to have been a happiness on both sides, it is interesting to see how her
influence told upon the Crown Princess and Princess Alice in their later
organization of hospital work, and to be reminded by Mrs. Tooley, whose
words we here venture to quote, that the “tiny Princess Helena was to
become in after years an accomplished nurse, and an active leader in the
nursing movement of this country; and, alas, to yield her soldier son on
the fatal field of South Africa.”
Meanwhile, before and after this visit, Miss Nightingale was quietly
receiving her own friends and neighbours at Lea Hurst, and entertaining
little parties of villagers from among the rustics she had so long known
and loved. Rich and poor alike were all so eager to do her honour that
it is impossible to speak separately of all the many forms which their
expressions of gratitude took. They included a gift from the workmen of
Sheffield as well as from her own more immediate neighbours, and found
their climax in the fund pressed upon her by a grateful nation, and for
convenience called the Nightingale Fund, which was still awaiting its
final disposal.
Meanwhile, imagine the importance of the ex-drummer-boy Thomas, her
devoted servant and would-be defender at Balaclava, promoted now to
be “Miss Nightingale’s own man” in her home at Lea Hurst—an even more
exciting presence to the villagers than the Russian hound which was
known through the country-side as “Miss Florence’s Crimean dog.”
There were still living, we are told, when Mrs. Tooley wrote her
delightful record, a few old people round about Lea Hurst who remembered
those great days of “Miss Florence’s return,” and the cannon balls and
bullets they had seen as trophies, the dried flowers gathered at Scutari,
and Thomas’s thrilling stories, for if he had not himself been present
in the famous charge at Balaclava, he did at least know all about it at
first-hand.
So little did any one dream that Miss Nightingale’s health had been
permanently shattered that when the Indian Mutiny broke out in 1857, she
offered to go out to her friend Lady Canning, and organize a nursing
staff for the troops. And while, with her customary business-like
clearness, she proceeded to draw up a detailed account of all the
private gifts entrusted to her for the Crimea, and took the opportunity
of putting on record her tribute to Lord Raglan, the final arrangements
with regard to the Nightingale Fund were still for a time held in
suspense, in the hope that she would so far recover strength as to be
able to take into her own hands the government of that institution for
the training of hospital nurses, to which it was to be devoted. When her
friend Mr. Herbert talked gaily in public of chaining her to the oar
for the rest of her life, that she might “raise the system of nursing
to a pitch of efficiency never before known,” he did not foresee that
the invisible chain, which was to bruise her eager spirit, was to be of
a kind so much harder to bear. But when, in 1860, her health showed no
signs of recovery, she definitely handed over to others the management
of the fund, only reserving to herself the right to advise. Her friend
Mr. Herbert was, up to the time of his death, the guiding spirit of the
council, and it gave Miss Nightingale pleasure that St. Thomas’s Hospital
should from the outset be associated with the scheme, because that
hospital had originated in one of the oldest foundations in the country
for the relief of the sick poor, and in choosing it for the training of
lay sisters as nurses, its earliest tradition was being continued. The
work of the fund began at St. Thomas’s in 1860, in the old building near
London Bridge, before it moved into its present palace at Westminster,
of which the Nightingale Training Home is a part. In those first early
days an upper floor was arranged for the nurses in a new part of the
old hospital, with a bedroom for each probationer, two rooms for the
Sister-in-charge, and a sitting-room in which all shared. As the result
of the advertisement for candidates in 1860, fifteen probationers were
admitted in June, the first superintendent being Mrs. Wardroper. The
probationers were, of course, under the authority of the matron, and
subject to the rules of the hospital. They were to give help in the wards
and receive teaching from the Sisters and medical staff, and if at the
end of the year they passed their examination, they were to be registered
as certified nurses.
[Illustration: Miss Nightingale visiting the Herbert Hospital, Woolwich.
(_Bas-relief on the pedestal—Herbert Memorial._)]
Thanks to Miss Nightingale and other pioneers, the fifty years that have
passed since then have made Mrs. Grundy a little less Grundyish, but in
those days she considered the whole business a terrible venture, and was
too much occupied with the idea of possible love affairs between the
doctors and nurses to realize what good work was being done. The first
year was a very anxious one for Miss Nightingale, but all the world
knows now how her experiment has justified itself and how her prayers
have been answered; for it was in prayer that she found her “quietness
and confidence” through those first months of tension when the enemy was
watching and four probationers had to be dismissed, though their ranks
were speedily filled up by others.
At the end of the year, from among those who were placed on the
register, six received appointments at St. Thomas’s and two took work
in infirmaries. There was special need of good nurses in workhouse
infirmaries, and there was also throughout the whole country a crying
need for nurses carefully trained in midwifery: lack of knowledge, for
instance, had greatly increased the danger of puerperal fever, a scourge
against which Miss Nightingale was one of the first to contend; and it
had been wisely decided that while two-thirds of the fund should go to
the work at St. Thomas’s, one-third should be used for special training
of nurses in these branches at King’s College.
“How has the tone and state of hospital nurses been raised?”
Miss Nightingale asks in her little book on “Trained Nursing
for the Sick Poor,” published in 1876.
“By, more than anything else, making the hospital such a home
as good young women—educated young women—can live and nurse
in; and, secondly, by raising hospital nursing into such a
profession as these can earn an honourable livelihood in.”
In her “Notes on Hospitals,” published in 1859, she pointed out what she
considered the four radical defects in hospital construction—namely:—
1. The agglomeration of a large number of sick under the same
roof.
2. Deficiency of space.
3. Deficiency of ventilation.
4. Deficiency of light.
How magnificently builders have since learned to remedy such defects may
be seen in the Nightingale Wing of St. Thomas’s Hospital.
The block system on which St. Thomas’s Hospital is built is what Miss
Nightingale has always recommended, each block being divided from the
next by a space of 125 feet, across which runs a double corridor by means
of which they communicate with one another. Each has three tiers of wards
above the ground floor.
The six blocks in the centre are those used for patients, that at the
south for the lecture-rooms and a school of medicine, the one at the
north, adjoining Westminster Bridge, for the official staff. From Lambeth
Palace to Westminster Bridge, with a frontage of 1,700 feet, the hospital
extends; and there would be room in the operating theatre for 600
students. In the special wing in one of the northern blocks, reserved for
the Nightingale Home and Training School for Nurses, everything has been
ordered in accordance with Miss Nightingale’s wishes.
To-day the whole _status_ of nursing in Britain and British dominions
is recognized as that of an honoured and certified profession, and
year by year, at St. Thomas’s alone, thirty probationers are trained,
of whom fifteen pay £1, 1_s._ a week for the privilege, whereas to the
other fifteen it is given gratuitously. At St. Thomas’s were trained
nurses who were among the earliest to be decorated with the Red Cross,
that international badge of good army nursing throughout the world
which, indirectly as well as directly, owed much to Miss Nightingale.
How warmly, even arduously, Miss Nightingale shared in the trials and
joys and adventures of her nurses, comes out very clearly in some of
her letters to one of them, whom, as a personal friend and one of the
first nine to receive the Red Cross, she playfully named “her Cape of
Good Hope.” Those tender and intimate letters, which I will not name
emotional, because she who wrote them had justified emotion by ever
translating it into useful work, made me feel to an almost startling
degree her warm, eager, dominating personality with its extraordinary
mingling of utmost modesty and pleading authority. To me that personality
seems to win the heart of the coldest and dullest by its ardent
enthusiasm and humility, and those unpublished letters, which I was
privileged to read, brought home to me how Miss Nightingale—then an
invalid of sixty-two—literally _lived_ in the life of those pioneer
nurses whom she had inspired and sent forth.
It is easy to see in them how much she feared for her nurses any innocent
little trip of the tongue, with regard to the rest of the staff, which
might set rolling the dangerous ball of hospital gossip. She puts the
duty of obedience and forbearance on the highest grounds, and she draws
a useful distinction between the sham dignity which we all know in the
hatefulness of “the superior person,” and the true dignity which tries to
uplift those less fortunate, rather than self-indulgently to lean on them
or make to them foolish confidences.
And while she is all aglow with sympathy for every detail of a nurse’s
work, she entreats her friend to “let no want of concord or discretion
appear to mar that blessed work. And let no one,” she adds, “be able
justly to say what was said to me last month, ‘It is only Roman Catholic
vows that can keep Sisters together.’”
What she wrote when asking for recruits for St. Thomas’s at the outset
still remains the basis of the ideal held there. “We require,” she wrote,
“that a woman be sober, honest, truthful, without which there is no
foundation on which to build.
“We train her in habits of punctuality, quietness, trustworthiness,
personal neatness. We teach her how to manage the concerns of a large
ward or establishment. We train her in dressing wounds and other
injuries, and in performing all those minor operations which nurses are
called upon day and night to undertake.
“We teach her how to manage helpless patients in regard to moving,
changing, feeding, temperature, and the prevention of bedsores.
“She has to make and apply bandages, line splints, and the like. She must
know how to make beds with as little disturbance as possible to their
inmates. She is instructed how to wait at operations, and as to the kind
of aid the surgeon requires at her hands. She is taught cooking for the
sick; the principle on which sick wards ought to be cleansed, aired, and
warmed; the management of convalescents; and how to observe sick and
maimed patients, so as to give an intelligent and truthful account to the
physician or surgeon in regard to the progress of cases in the intervals
between visits—a much more difficult thing than is generally supposed.
“We do not seek to make ‘medical women,’ but simply nurses acquainted
with the principle which they are required constantly to apply at the
bedside.
“For the future superintendent is added a course of instruction in
the administration of a hospital, including, of course, the linen
arrangements, and what else is necessary for a matron to be conversant
with.
“There are those who think that all this is intuitive in women, that they
are born so, or, at least, that it comes to them without training. To
such we say, by all means send us as many such geniuses as you can, for
we are sorely in want of them.”
CHAPTER XX.
_William Rathbone—Agnes Jones—Infirmaries—Nursing in the homes
of the poor—Municipal work—Homely power of Miss Nightingale’s
writings—Lord Herbert’s death._
A word must here be said of Mr. William Rathbone’s work in Liverpool.
After the death of his first wife, realizing the comfort and help that
had been given during her last illness by a trained nurse, he determined
to do what he could to bring aid of the same kind into the homes of the
poor, where the need was often so much more terrible. This brought him
into touch with Miss Nightingale, who advised him to start a school of
nursing in connection with the Liverpool Hospital. These two friends—for
they soon became trusted and valued friends, each to each—were both
people of prompt and efficient action, and one step led to another,
until Liverpool had not only an important school of nurses for the sick
poor, but also led the way throughout the country in the reform of the
hitherto scandalous nursing in workhouse infirmaries. Mr. Rathbone set
his mind on securing the services of Miss Agnes Elizabeth Jones to help
him in his work, a woman of character as saintly as his own, and the
difference in their religious outlook only made more beautiful their
mutual relations in this great work.
Miss Agnes Jones, who has already been mentioned more than once in these
pages, left an undying record on England’s roll of honour. It was of her
that in 1868 Miss Nightingale wrote[17]:—
“A woman attractive and rich, and young and witty; yet a veiled
and silent woman, distinguished by no other genius but the
divine genius—working hard to train herself in order to train
others to walk in the footsteps of Him who went about doing
good.... She died, as she had lived, at her post in one of
the largest workhouse infirmaries in this kingdom—the first
in which trained nursing has been introduced.... When her
whole life and image rise before me, so far from thinking the
story of Una and her lion a myth, I say here is Una in real
flesh and blood—Una and her paupers far more untamable than
lions. In less than three years she had reduced one of the
most disorderly hospital populations in the world to something
like Christian discipline, and had converted a vestry to the
conviction of the economy as well as humanity of nursing pauper
sick by trained nurses.”
And it was in introducing a book about the Liverpool Home and School for
Nurses that she wrote:—
“Nursing, especially that most important of all its
branches—nursing of the sick poor at home—is no amateur work.
To do it as it ought to be done requires knowledge, practice,
self-abnegation, and, as is so well said here, direct obedience
to and activity under the highest of all masters and from the
highest of all motives. It is an essential part of the daily
service of the Christian Church. It has never been otherwise.
It has proved itself superior to all religious divisions,
and is destined, by God’s blessing, to supply an opening the
great value of which, in our densely populated towns, has been
unaccountably overlooked until within these few years.”
As early as 1858 Miss Nightingale published “Notes on Matters affecting
the Health, Efficiency, and Hospital Administration of the British Army,”
and the commission on this subject appointed in 1857 set a high value on
her evidence.
Something of the development that followed along both these lines—that of
army reform and of nursing among the submerged—may be gleaned from the
following clear statement of fact which appeared during the South African
War, on May 21, 1900, in a great London daily:—
“In the forty and more years that have elapsed since her
return, Miss Nightingale has seen the whole system of army
nursing and hospitals transformed. Netley, which has been
visited by the Queen again this week, was designed by her, and
for the next largest, namely, the Herbert Hospital, Woolwich,
she assisted and advised Sir Douglas Galton in his plans.
“There is not a naval or military hospital on any of the
foreign stations or depôts on which she has not been consulted,
and matters concerning the health and well-being of both
services have been constantly brought before her. District
nursing owes much to her, and in this connection may be cited
a few lines from a letter which she wrote when Princess
Louise, Duchess of Argyll, was initiating a movement to
establish a home for the Queen’s Jubilee Nurses in Chiswick and
Hammersmith. ‘I look upon district nursing,’ she wrote, ‘as
one of the most hopeful of the agencies for raising the poor,
physically as well as morally, its province being not only
nursing the patient, but nursing the room, showing the family
and neighbours how to second the nurse, and eminently how to
nurse health as well as disease.’”
“Everywhere,” we read in Mr. Stephen Paget’s contribution to
the “Dictionary of National Biography,” “her expert reputation
was paramount,” and “during the American Civil War of 1862-4,
and the Franco-German War of 1870-1, her advice was eagerly
sought by the governments concerned.” The “Dictionary of
National Biography” also assures us that “in regard to civil
hospitals, home nursing, care of poor women in childbirth, and
sanitation, Miss Nightingale’s authority stood equally high.”
In what she wrote there was a homely directness, a complete absence of
anything like pose or affectation, which more than doubled her power, and
was the more charming in a woman of such brilliant acquirements and—to
quote once more Dean Stanley’s words—such “commanding genius”; but, then,
genius is of its nature opposed to all that is sentimental or artificial.
I believe it is in her “Notes on Nursing for the Labouring Classes” that
she writes to those who are “minding baby”: “One-half of all the nurses
in service are girls of from five to twenty years old. You see you are
very important little people. Then there are all the girls who are
nursing mother’s baby at home; and in all these cases it seems pretty
nearly to come to this, that baby’s health for its whole life depends
upon you, girls, more than upon anything else.” Simple rules, such as
a girl of six could understand, are given for the feeding, washing,
dressing, nursing, and even amusement of that important person, “baby.”
And it is in her best known book of all that she says: “The healthiest,
happiest, liveliest, most beautiful baby I ever saw was the only child of
a busy laundress. She washed all day in a room with the door open upon a
larger room, where she put the child. It sat or crawled upon the floor
all day with no other playfellow than a kitten, which it used to hug. Its
mother kept it beautifully clean, and fed it with perfect regularity. The
child was never frightened at anything. The room where it sat was the
house-place; and it always gave notice to its mother when anybody came
in, not by a cry, but by a crow. I lived for many months within hearing
of that child, and never heard it cry day or night. I think there is a
great deal too much of amusing children now, and not enough of letting
them amuse themselves.”
What, again, could be more useful in its simplicity than the following,
addressed to working mothers:—
“DEAR HARD-WORKING FRIENDS,—I am a hard-working woman too. May
I speak to you? And will you excuse me, though not a mother?
“You feel with me that every mother who brings a child into the
world has the duty laid upon her of bringing up the child in
such health as will enable him to do the work of his life.
“But though you toil all day for your children, and are so
devoted to them, this is not at all an easy task.
“We should not attempt to practise dressmaking, or any other
trade, without any training for it; but it is generally
impossible for a woman to get any teaching about the management
of health; yet health is to be learnt....
“The cottage homes of England are, after all, the most
important of the homes of any class; they should be pure in
every sense, pure in body and mind.
“Boys and girls must grow up healthy, with clean minds and
clean bodies and clean skins.
“And for this to be possible, the air, the earth, and the water
that they grow up in and have around them must be clean. Fresh
air, not bad air; clean earth, not foul earth; pure water,
not dirty water; and the first teachings and impressions that
they have at home must all be pure, and gentle, and firm. It
is home that teaches the child, after all, more than any other
schooling. A child learns before it is three whether it shall
obey its mother or not; and before it is seven, wise men tell
us that its character is formed.
“There is, too, another thing—orderliness. We know your daily
toil and love. May not the busiest and hardest life be somewhat
lightened, the day mapped out, so that each duty has the same
hours?...
“Think what enormous extra trouble it entails on mothers when
there is sickness. It is worth while to try to keep the family
in health, to prevent the sorrow, the anxiety, the trouble of
illness in the house, of which so much can be prevented.
“When a child has lost its health, how often the mother says,
‘Oh, if I had only known! but there was no one to tell me. And
after all, it is health and not sickness that is our natural
state—the state that God intends for us. There are more people
to pick us up when we fall than to enable us to stand upon
our feet. God did not intend all mothers to be accompanied by
doctors, but He meant all children to be cared for by mothers.
God bless your work and labour of love.”
[Illustration: Letter from Miss FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE.
Dec 16/96 10 South Street Park Lane W
Dear Duke of Westminster
Good speed to your noble effort in favour of District Nurses for town “&
Country”; and in Commemoration of our Queen who cares for all.
We look upon the District Nurse, if she is what she should be, & if we
give her the training she should have, as the great civilizer of the
poor, training as well as nursing them out of ill health into good health
(Health Missioness), out of drink into self control but all without
preaching, without patronizing—as friends in sympathy.
But let them hold the standard high as Nurses.
Pray be sure I will try to help all I can, tho’ that be small, here I
will with your leave let you know.
Pray believe me your Grace’s faithful servant
Florence Nightingale]
Or in a widely different field, in that fight against one of the most
important causes of consumption, in which she was so far ahead of her
time, what could be more clear and convincing, both in knowledge and in
reasoning, than the following analysis with regard to army barracks:—
“The cavalry barracks, as a whole, are the least overcrowded,
and have the freest external movement of air. Next come
the infantry; and the most crowded and the least ventilated
externally are the Guards’ barracks; _so that the mortality
from consumption, which follows the same order of increase in
the different arms, augments with increase of crowding and
difficulty of ventilation_.”[18]
Her own well-trained mind was in extreme contrast with the type of mind
which she describes in the following story:—
“I remember, when a child, hearing the story of an accident,
related by some one who sent two girls to fetch a ‘bottle of
sal volatile from her room.’ ‘Mary could not stir,’ she said;
‘Fanny ran and fetched a bottle that was not sal volatile, and
that was not in my room.’”
All her teaching, so far as I know it, is clearly at first-hand and
carefully sifted. It is as far as possible from that useless kind of
doctrine which is a mere echo of unthinking hearsay. For instance, how
many sufferers she must have saved from unnecessary irritation by the
following reminder to nurses:—
“Of all parts of the body, the face is perhaps the one which
tells the least to the common observer or the casual visitor.
“I have known patients dying of sheer pain, exhaustion, and
want of sleep, from one of the most lingering and painful
diseases known, preserve, till within a few days of death,
not only the healthy colour of the cheek, but the mottled
appearance of a robust child. And scores of times have I heard
these unfortunate creatures assailed with, ‘I am glad to see
you looking so well.’ ‘I see no reason why you should not live
till ninety years of age.’ ‘Why don’t you take a little more
exercise and amusement?’—with all the other commonplaces with
which we are so familiar.”
And then, again, how like her it is to remind those who are nursing that
“a patient is not merely a piece of furniture, to be kept clean and
arranged against the wall, and saved from injury or breakage.”
She was one of the rare people who realized that truth of word is partly
a question of education, and that many people are quite unconscious of
their lack of that difficult virtue. “I know I fibbs dreadful,” said a
poor little servant girl to her once. “But believe me, miss, I never
finds out I have fibbed until they tell me so!” And her comment suggests
that in this matter that poor little servant girl by no means stood alone.
She worked very hard. Her books and pamphlets[19] were important, and her
correspondence, ever dealing with the reforms she had at heart all over
the world, was of itself an immense output.
Those who have had to write much from bed or sofa know only too well the
abnormal fatigue it involves, and her labours of this kind seem to have
been unlimited.
How strongly she sympathized with all municipal efforts, we see in many
such letters as the one to General Evatt, given him for electioneering
purposes, but not hitherto included in any biography, which we are
allowed to reproduce here:—
“Strenuously desiring, as we all of us must, that
_Administration_ as well as Politics should be well represented
in Parliament, and that vital matters of social, sanitary,
and general interest should find their voice, we could desire
no better representative and advocate of these essential
matters—matters of life and death—than a man who, like
yourself, unites with almost exhaustless energy and public
spirit, sympathy with the wronged and enthusiasm with the
right, a persevering acuteness in unravelling the causes of the
evil and the good, large and varied experience and practical
power, limited only by the nature of the object for which it is
exerted.
“It is important beyond measure that such a man’s thoughtful
and well-considered opinions and energetic voice should be
heard in the House of Commons.
“You have my warmest sympathy in your candidature for Woolwich,
my best wishes that you should succeed, even less for your
own sake than for that of Administration and of England.—Pray
believe me, ever your faithful servant,
“FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE.”
And also the following letter written to the Buckinghamshire County
Council in 1892, begging them to appoint a sanitary committee:—
“We must create a public opinion which will drive the
Government, instead of the Government having to drive us—an
enlightened public opinion, wise in principles, wise in
details. We hail the County Council as being or becoming one
of the strongest engines in our favour, at once fathering and
obeying the great impulse for national health against national
and local disease. For we have learned that we have national
health in our own hands—local sanitation, national health.
But we have to contend against centuries of superstition and
generations of indifference. Let the County Council take the
lead.”
And how justly, how clearly, she was able to weigh the work of those who
had borne the brunt of sanitary inquiry in the Crimea, with but little
except kicks for their pains, may be judged by the following sentences
from a letter to Lady Tulloch in 1878:—
“MY DEAR LADY TULLOCH,—I give you joy, I give you both joy, for
this crowning recognition of one of the noblest labours ever
done on earth. You yourself cannot cling to it more than I do;
hardly so much, in one sense, for I saw how Sir John MacNeill’s
and Sir A. Tulloch’s reporting was the salvation of the army in
the Crimea. Without them everything that happened would have
been considered ‘all right.’
“Mr. Martin’s note is perfect, for it does not look like an
afterthought, nor as prompted by others, but as the flow of a
generous and able man’s own reflection, and careful search into
authentic documents. Thank you again and again for sending it
to me. It is the greatest consolation I could have had. Will
you remember me gratefully to Mr. Paget, also to Dr. Balfour?
_I look back upon these twenty years as if they were yesterday,
but also as if they were a thousand years._ Success be with us
and the noble dead—and it has been success.—Yours ever,
“FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE.”
We see from this letter how warmly the old memories dwelt with her, even
while her hands were full of good work for the future.
The death of Lord Herbert in 1868 had been a blow that struck very deeply
at her health and spirits.
In all her work of army reform she had looked up to him as her “Chief,”
hardly realizing, perhaps, how much of the initiating had been her own.
Their friendship, too, had been almost lifelong, and in every way ideal.
The whole nation mourned his loss, but only the little intimate group
which centred in his wife and children and those dearest friends, of whom
Miss Nightingale was one, knew fully all that the country had lost in him.
It may be worth while for a double reason to quote here from Mr.
Gladstone’s tribute at a meeting held to decide on a memorial.
“To him,” said Gladstone, “we owe the commission for inquiry
into barracks and hospitals; to him we are indebted for the
reorganization of the medical department of the army. To him
we owe the commission of inquiry into, and remodelling the
medical education of, the army. And, lastly, we owe him the
commission for presenting to the public the vital statistics of
the army in such a form, from time to time, that the great and
living facts of the subject are brought to view.”
Lord Herbert had toiled with ever-deepening zeal to reform the unhealthy
conditions to which, even in times of peace, our soldiers had been
exposed—so unhealthy that, while the mortality lists showed a death
of eight in every thousand for civilians, for soldiers the number of
deaths was seventeen per thousand. And of every two deaths in the army
it was asserted that one was preventable. Lord Herbert was the heart
and soul of the Royal Commission to inquire into these preventable
causes, and through his working ardour the work branched forth into four
supplementary commissions concerning hospitals and barracks. When he
died, Miss Nightingale not only felt the pang of parting from one of her
oldest and most valued friends, but she also felt that in this cause,
so specially dear to her heart, she had lost a helper who could never be
replaced, though she dauntlessly stood to her task and helped to carry on
his work.
CHAPTER XXI.
_Multifarious work and many honours—Jubilee Nurses—Nursing
Association—Death of father and mother—Lady Verney and her
husband—No respecter of persons—From within four walls—South
Africa and America._
Her activities were so multitudinous that it is difficult even to name
them all in such a brief sketch as this. Besides those at which we have
already glanced, prison reform, help to Bosnian fugitives, Manchester
Police Court Mission for Lads, Indian Famine Fund—merely glancing
down two pages of her biography, I find all these mentioned. She was
herself, of course, decorated with the Red Cross, but M. Henri Dunant’s
magnificent Red Cross scheme for helping the wounded on the battlefield
may be said to have been really the outcome of her own work and example.
For it was the extension of her own activities, by means of the Red
Cross Societies, which throughout the European continent act in concert
with their respective armies and governments.
She was the first woman to be decorated with the Order of Merit, which
was bestowed on her in 1907, and in the following year she received,
as the Baroness Burdett Coutts had done, the “Freedom of the City of
London,” having already been awarded, among many like honours, the French
Gold Medal of Secours aux blessés Militaires, and the German Order of
the Cross of Merit. On May 10, 1910, she received the badge of honour of
the Norwegian Red Cross Society. But there was another distinction, even
more unique, which was already hers. For when £70,000 came into Queen
Victoria’s hands as a gift from the women of her empire at the time of
her Jubilee, so much had the Queen been impressed by the work of the
Nursing Association and all that had been done for the sick poor, that
the interest of this Women’s Jubilee Fund, £2,000 a year, was devoted to
an Institution for Training and Maintaining Nurses for the Sick Poor; and
the National Association for Providing Trained Nurses, which owed so
much to Miss Nightingale, was affiliated with it, though it still keeps
its old headquarters at 23 Bloomsbury Square, where for so many years
would arrive at Christmas from her old home a consignment of beautiful
holly and other evergreens for Christmas festivities. H.R.H. the Princess
Christian is President of the Nursing Association, and Miss Nightingale’s
old friend and fellow-worker, Mr. Henry Bonham Carter, is the Secretary.
The influence of Miss Florence Lees, described by Kinglake as “the gifted
and radiant pupil of Florence Nightingale,” who afterwards became Mrs.
Dacre Craven, and was the first Superintendent-General, has been a very
vitalizing influence there, and the home owes much also to her husband,
the Rev. Dacre Craven, of St. Andrew’s, Holborn. Miss Nightingale’s warm
friendship for Miss Florence Lees brought her into peculiarly intimate
relations with the home, and both the Association and the Queen’s Jubilee
Institute are the fruit of Miss Nightingale’s teaching, and a noble
double memorial of the national—nay, imperial—recognition of its value.
The Royal Pension Fund for Nurses also, in which Queen Alexandra
was so specially interested, helped to crown the fulfilment of Miss
Nightingale’s early dream and long, steadfast life-work.
But equally important, though less striking, has been the growing harvest
of her quiet, courteous efforts to help village mothers to understand
the laws of health, her pioneer-work in regard to all the dangers of
careless milk-farms, her insistence on the importance of pure air as
well as pure water, though she had always been careful to treat the poor
man’s rooftree as his castle and never to cross his doorstep except by
permission or invitation.
After the death of her father at Embley in 1874—a very peaceful death,
commemorated in the inscription on his tomb, “In Thy light we shall see
light,” which suggests in him a nature at once devout and sincere—she was
much with her mother, in the old homes at Embley and Lea Hurst, though
Lea Hurst was the one she loved best, and the beech-wood walk in Lea
Woods, with its radiant shower of golden leaves in the autumn, for which
she would sometimes delay her leaving, is still specially associated with
her memory: and her thoughtfulness for the poor still expressed itself in
many different ways—in careful gifts, for instance, through one whom she
trusted for knowledge and tact; in her arrangement that pure milk should
be sent daily from the home dairy at Lea Hurst to those in need of it.
With faithful love she tended her mother to the time of her death in
1880, and there seems to be a joyous thanksgiving for that mother’s
beauty of character in the words the two sisters inscribed to her memory:
“God is love—Bless the Lord, O my soul, and forget not all His benefits.”
After her mother’s death, when the property had passed into the hands of
Mr. William Shore Nightingale, she still visited her kinsman there and
kept up her interest in the people of the district.
Among the outward events of her life, after her return from the Crimea,
one of the earliest had been the marriage of her sister Parthenope, who
in 1858 became the second wife of Sir Harry Verney,[20] and her home
at Claydon in Buckinghamshire was thenceforth a second home to Miss
Nightingale. It need hardly be said that in Sir Harry Verney’s various
generous schemes for the good of the neighbourhood, schemes in which his
wife cordially co-operated, Miss Nightingale took a warm and sympathetic
pleasure. His keen interest in army reform was, of course, a special
ground of comradeship. Miss Nightingale divided her time chiefly between
her own home in South Street, Park Lane, and visits to the rooms that
were reserved for her at Claydon. One of her great interests while at
Claydon, soon after her sister’s marriage, had been the building of the
new Buckinghamshire Infirmary in 1861, of which her sister laid the
foundation; and her bust still adorns the entrance hall.
Mrs. Tooley reminds us that not only was Lady Verney well known in
literary and political circles, but also her books on social questions
had the distinction of being quoted in the House of Commons. She gives
many interesting details with regard to the philanthropic and political
work of Sir Harry Verney and his family, but it is hardly necessary to
duplicate them here, since her book is still available. Lady Verney’s
death in 1890, after a long and painful illness, following on that of her
father and mother, bereaved Miss Nightingale of a lifelong companionship,
and might have left her very lonely but for her absorbing work and her
troops of friends.
How fruitful that work was we may dimly see when we remember that—to
instance one branch of it only—in ten years the death-rate in the army
in India, which her efforts so determinately strove to lessen, fell from
sixty-nine per thousand to eighteen per thousand.[21] She strove—and not
in vain—to improve the sanitary conditions of immense areas of undrained
country, but she also endeavoured to bring home to the rank and file of
the army individual teaching.
She gives in one of her pamphlets a delightful story of men who came to
a district in India supposed to be fatal to any new-comer, but, strong
in their new hygienic knowledge, determined _not_ to have cholera. They
lived carefully, they grew their own garden produce, they did not give
way to fear, and _all_, without exception, escaped.
To return for a moment to Britain, since a separate chapter is reserved
for India. She was before her day in contending that foul air was one
of the great causes of consumption and other diseases. And her teaching
was ever given with courtesy and consideration. How strongly she felt
on this and kindred subjects, and how practical her help was, we see
clearly in her letters and pamphlets. She delighted in making festivities
for companies of nurses and of her other hard-working friends. And in
St. Paul’s fine sense of the phrase, she was no “respecter of persons”:
she reverenced personality, not accidental rank. She had no patience
with those visiting ladies who think they may intrude at all hours
of the day into the homes of the poor, and her quick sense of humour
delighted in many of the odd speeches which would have shocked the prim
and conventional. She thought the highest compliment ever paid to her
staff of nurses who visited in the homes of the poor was the speech of
the grubby ragamuffin, who seemed to think they could wash off even the
blackness of the Arch-fiend and, when being scrubbed, cried out, “You may
bathe the divil.”
But with all her fun and relish of life, how sane, how practical, she was!
Do you remember how she laughed at the silly idea that nothing was needed
to make a good nurse except what the “Early Victorian” used to call “a
disappointment in love”?
Here are other of her shrewd sayings from her _Nursing Notes_:—
“Another extraordinary fallacy is the dread of night air.
What air can we breathe at night but night air? The choice
is between pure night air from without and foul air from
within. Most people prefer the latter.... Without cleanliness
within and without your house, ventilation is comparatively
useless.... And now, you think these things trifles, or at
least exaggerated. But what you ‘think’ or what I ‘think’
matters little. Let us see what God thinks of them. God
always justifies His ways. While we are thinking, He has been
teaching. I have known cases of hospital pyæmia quite as severe
in handsome private houses as in any of the worst hospitals,
and from the same cause—viz., foul air. Yet nobody learnt the
lesson. Nobody learnt _anything_ at all from it. They went on
_thinking_—thinking that the sufferer had scratched his thumb,
or that it was singular that ‘all the servants’ had ‘whitlows,’
or that something was ‘much about this year.’”
If there had been any hope at first that Miss Nightingale might grow
strong enough to stand visibly among those who were being trained as
nurses by the fund raised in her honour, that hope was now past, and when
the great new wing of St. Thomas’s was built—the finest building for its
purpose in Europe—the outward reins of government had to be delivered
over into the hands of another, though hers was throughout the directing
hand. And the results of her work are written in big type upon the page
of history.
In India and America she is acclaimed as an adored benefactress, but
what has she not done for our own country alone? To sum up even a few of
the points on which I have touched: she initiated sick nursing among the
poor, through her special appeal was built the Central Home for Nurses,
she was the pioneer in the hygienic work of county councils, and, besides
the great nursing school at St. Thomas’s, to her was largely due the
reform of nursing in workhouses and infirmaries. And in 1890, with the
£70,000 of the Women’s Jubilee Fund, the establishment of the Queen’s
Nurses received its charter.
In affairs of military nursing it is no exaggeration to say that she
was consulted throughout the world. America came to her in the Civil
War; South Africa owed much to her; India infinitely more; and so vital
have been the reforms introduced by Lord Herbert and herself that even
as early as 1880, when General Gordon was waging war in China during
the Taiping Rebellion, the death-rate as compared with the Crimea was
reduced from sixty per cent. to little more than three in every hundred
yearly.[22]
We have seen that, though she was so much more seriously broken in health
than any one at first realized, that did not prevent her incessant work,
though it did in the end make her life more or less a hidden life, spent
within four walls, and chiefly on her bed.
Yet from those four walls what electric messages of help and common sense
were continuously flashing across the length and breadth of the world!
She was regarded as an expert in her own subjects, and long before her
Jubilee Fund enabled her to send forth the Queen’s Nurses, she was, as we
have already seen, busy writing and working to improve not only nursing
in general, but especially the nursing of the sick poor; and unceasingly
she still laboured for the army.
Repeated mention has been made of General Evatt, to whose memory of Miss
Nightingale I am much indebted.
General Evatt served in the last Afghan campaign, and what he there
experienced determined him to seek an interview, as soon as he returned
to England, with her whom he regarded as the great reformer of military
hygiene—Florence Nightingale. In this way and on this subject there arose
between them a delightful and enduring friendship. Many and many a time
in that quiet room in South Street where she lay upon her bed—its dainty
coverlet all strewn with the letters and papers that might have befitted
the desk or office of a busy statesman, and surrounded by books and by
the flowers that she loved so well—he had talked with her for four hours
on end, admiring with a sort of wonder her great staying power and her
big, untiring brain.
He did not, like another acquaintance of mine, say that he came away
feeling like a sucked orange, with all hoarded knowledge on matters great
and small gently, resistlessly drawn from him by his charming companion;
but so voracious was the eager, sympathetic interest of Miss Nightingale
in the men and women of that active world whose streets, at the time he
learned to know her, she no longer walked, that no conversation on human
affairs ever seemed, he said, to tire her.
And her mind was ever working towards new measures for the health and
uplifting of her fellow-creatures.
We have seen how eager she was to use for good every municipal
opportunity, but she did not stop at the municipality, for she knew that
there are many womanly duties also at the imperial hearth; and without
entering on any controversy, it is necessary to state clearly that she
very early declared herself in favour of household suffrage for women,
and that “the North of England Society for Women’s Suffrage is the proud
possessor of her signature to an address to Mr. Disraeli, thanking him
for his favourable vote in the House of Commons, and begging him to
do his utmost to remove the injustice under which women householders
suffered by being deprived of the parliamentary vote.”[23]
[Illustration: Florence Nightingale’s London House, 10 South Street, Park
Lane (house with balcony), where she died, August 14, 1910.]
Whatever could aid womanly service—as a voice in choosing our great
domestic executive nowadays undoubtedly can—had her sympathy and
interest; but what she emphasized most, I take it, at all times, was that
when any door opened for service, woman should be not only willing, but
also nobly _efficient_. She herself opened many such doors, and her lamp
was always trimmed and filled and ready to give light and comfort in the
darkest room.
It has been well said that in describing a friend in the following words,
she unconsciously drew a picture of herself:—
“She had the gracefulness, the wit, the unfailing
cheerfulness—qualities so remarkable, but so much overlooked,
in our Saviour’s life. She had the absence of all
‘mortification’ for mortification’s sake, which characterized
His work, and any real work in the present day as in His day.
And how did she do all this?... She was always filled with the
thought that she must be about her Father’s business.”
CHAPTER XXII.
_India—Correspondence with Sir Bartle Frere—Interest in village
girls—The Lamp._
We come now to Miss Nightingale’s most monumental achievement of all,
the reform of sanitary conditions in India—a reform ever widening and
developing, branching forth and striking its roots deeper. Her interest
in that vast population, that world-old treasury of subtle religious
thought and ever-present mystical faith, may perhaps have been in part an
inheritance from the Anglo-Indian Governor who was counted in her near
ancestry. But there can be little doubt that her ardent and practical
desire to improve the conditions of camp life in India began in her
intimate care for the soldiers, and her close knowledge of many things
unknown to the ordinary English subject. The world-wide freemasonry of
the rank and file in our army enabled her to hear while at Scutari much
of the life of the army in the vast and distant dominions of Burma and
Bengal, and she had that gift for seeing through things to their farthest
roots which enabled her to perceive clearly that no mere mending of camp
conditions could stay the continual ravages of disease among our men.
The evil was deeper and wider, and only as conditions were improved in
sanitary matters could the mortality of the army be lessened. She saw,
and saw clearly, that the reason children died like flies in India, so
that those who loved them best chose the agony of years of parting rather
than take the risks, lay not so much in the climate as in the human
poisons and putrefactions so carelessly treated and so quickly raised to
murder-power by the extreme heat.
Much of this comes out clearly in her letter to Sir Bartle Frere, with
whom her first ground of friendship had arisen out of their common
interest in sanitary matters.
What manner of man Sir Bartle was may be divined from a letter to him
written by Colonel W. F. Marriott, one of the secretaries of the Bombay
Government, at the time of his leaving Bombay:—
“The scene of your departure stirred me much. That bright
evening, the crowd on the pier and shore as the boat put
off, the music from the _Octavia_, as the band played ‘Auld
Lang Syne’ as we passed, were all typical and impressive by
association of ideas. But it was not a shallow sympathy with
which I took in all the circumstances. I could divine some of
your thoughts. If I felt like Sir Bedivere, left behind ‘among
new men, strange faces, other minds,’ you must have felt in
some degree like King Arthur in the barge, ‘I have lived my
life, and that which I have done may He Himself make pure.’
I do not doubt that you felt that all this ‘mouth honour’ is
only worth so far as it is the seal of one’s own approving
conscience, and though you could accept it freely as deserved
from their lips, yet at that hour you judged your own work
hardly. You measured the palpable results with your conceptions
and hopes, and were inclined to say, ‘I am no better than my
fathers.’ But I, judging now calmly and critically, feel—I may
say, see—that though the things that seem to have failed be
amongst those for which you have taken most pains, yet they
are small things compared with the work which has not failed.
You have made an impression of earnest human sympathy with the
people of this country, which will deepen and expand, so that
it will be felt as a perpetual witness against any narrower
and less noble conception of our relation to them, permanently
raising the moral standard of highest policy towards them;
and your name will become a traditional embodiment of a good
governor.”[24]
Frere had seen that the filthy condition of many of the roads, after
the passing of animals and the failure to cleanse from manure, was of
itself a source of poison, though the relation between garbage and
disease-bearing flies was then less commonly understood, and he was never
tired of urging the making of decent roads; but this, he knew, was only
a very small part of the improvements needed.
His correspondence with Miss Nightingale began in 1867, and in that
and the five following years they exchanged about one hundred letters,
chiefly on sanitary questions.
It was part of her genius always to see and seize her opportunity, and
she rightly thought that, as she says in one of her letters, “We might
never have such a favourable conjunction of the larger planets again:
“You, who are willing and most able to organize the machinery here; Sir
John Lawrence, who is able and willing, provided only he knew what to do;
and a Secretary of State who is willing and in earnest. And I believe
nothing would bring them to their senses in India more than an annual
report of what they have done, with your comments upon it, laid before
Parliament.”
In order to set in motion the machinery of a sanitary department for all
India, a despatch had to be written, pointing out clearly and concisely
what was to be done.
Frere consulted Miss Nightingale at every point about this despatch,
but spoke of the necessity for some sort of peg to hang it on—“not,” he
said, “that the Secretary of State is at all lukewarm, nor, I think, that
he has any doubt as to what should be said, or how—that, I think, your
memoranda have fixed; the only difficulty is as to the when....
“No governor-general, I believe, since the time of Clive has had such
powers and such opportunities, but he fancies the want of progress is
owing to some opposing power which does not exist anywhere but in his own
imagination.
“He cannot see that perpetual inspection by the admiral of the drill and
kit of every sailor is not the way to make the fleet efficient, and he
gets disheartened and depressed because he finds that months and years of
this squirrel-like activity lead to no real progress.”
The despatch with its accompanying documents went to Miss Nightingale for
her remarks before it was sent out. Her commentary was as follows:—
“I find nothing to add or to take away in the memorandum
(sanitary). It appears to me quite perfect in itself—that is,
it is quite as much as the enemy will bear, meaning by the
enemy—not at all the Government of India in India, still less
the Government of India at home, but—that careless and ignorant
person called the Devil, who is always walking about taking
knowledge out of people’s heads, who said that he was coming to
give us the knowledge of good and evil, and who has done just
the contrary.
“It is a noble paper, an admirable paper—and what a present to
make to a government! You have included in it all the great
principles—sanitary and administrative—which the country
requires. And now you must work, work these points until they
are embodied in local works in India. This will not be in our
time, for it takes more than a few years to fill a continent
with civilization. But I never despair that in God’s good time
every man of us will reap the common benefit of obeying all the
laws which He has given us for our well-being.
“I shall give myself the pleasure of writing to you again about
these papers. But I write this note merely to say that I don’t
think this memorandum requires any addition.
“God bless you for it! I think it is a great work.”[25]
It _was_ a great work, and it might have been delayed for scores of
years, with a yearly unnecessary waste of thousands of lives, if she had
not initiated it.
[Illustration: Florence Nightingale in her Last Days.
(_From a drawing from memory. Copyright A. Rischgitz._)]
Her words to Sir Bartle Frere at the outset had been: “It does seem that
there is no element in the scheme of government (of India) by which the
public health can be taken care of. And the thing is now to create such
an element.”
As early as 1863, in her “Observations on the Sanitary State of the Army
in India,” she had written:—
“Native ‘caste’ prejudices appear to have been made the excuse
for European laziness, as far as regards our sanitary and
hospital neglects of the natives. Recent railroad experience is
a striking proof that ‘caste,’ in their minds, is no bar to
intercommunication in arrangements tending to their benefit.”
Sir C. Trevelyan justly says that “a good sanitary state of the military
force cannot be secured without making similar arrangements for the
populations settled in and around the military cantonments; that sanitary
reform must be generally introduced into India for the civil as well as
the military portion of the community.”
And now that the opportunity arrived, all was done with wise and swift
diplomacy. The way was smoothed by a call from Frere on his old friend
Sir Richard Temple, at that time Finance Minister at Calcutta, asking him
to help.
Those who know India best, and know Miss Nightingale best, are those who
are most aware of the mighty tree of ever-widening health improvement
that grew from this little seed, and of the care with which Miss
Nightingale helped to guard and foster it.
“She was a great Indian,” her friend General Evatt repeated to me more
than once, “and what a head she had! She was the only human being I
have ever met, for instance, man or woman, who had thoroughly mastered
the intricate details of the Bengal land-purchase system. She loved
India, and she knew it through and through. It was no wonder that every
distinguished Indian who came to England went to see Miss Nightingale.”
She bore her ninety years very lightly, and made a vision serene and
noble, as will be seen from our picture, though that does not give the
lovely youthful colouring in contrast with the silvery hair, and we read
of the great expressiveness of her hands, which, a little more, perhaps,
than is usual with Englishwomen, she used in conversation.
It was a very secluded life that she lived at No. 10 South Street; but
she was by no means without devotees, and the bouquet that the German
Emperor sent her was but one of many offerings from many high-hearted
warriors at her shrine.
And when she visited her old haunts at Lea Hurst and Embley she delighted
in sending invitations to the girls growing up in those village families
that she had long counted among her friends, so that to her tea-table
were lovingly welcomed guests very lowly, as well as those better known
to the world.
Her intense and sympathetic interest in all the preparations for nursing
in the South African campaign has already been touched upon, as well as
her joy that some of her own nurses from among the first probationers at
St. Thomas’s were accepted in that enterprise with praise and gratitude.
It would be a serious omission not to refer my readers to a very moving
letter which she wrote to Cavaliere Sebastiano Fenzi, during the Italian
War of Independence in 1866, of which a part is given in Mrs. Tooley’s
book, and from which I am permitted to quote the following:—
“I have given dry advice as dryly as I could. But you must
permit me to say that if there is anything I could do for you
at any time, and you would command me, I should esteem it
the greatest honour and pleasure. I am a hopeless invalid,
entirely a prisoner to my room, and overwhelmed with business.
Otherwise how gladly would I answer to your call and come and
do my little best for you in the dear city where I was born. If
the giving my miserable life could hasten your success but by
half an hour, how gladly would I give it!”
How far she was ahead of her time becomes every day more obvious; for
every day the results of her teaching are gradually making themselves
felt. For example, it can no longer, without qualification, be said,
as she so truly said in her own day, that while “the coxcombries of
education are taught to every schoolgirl” there is gross ignorance, not
only among schoolgirls, but also even among mothers and nurses, with
regard to “those laws which God has assigned to the relations of our
bodies with the world in which He has put them. In other words, the laws
which make these bodies, into which He has put our minds, healthy or
unhealthy organs of those minds, are all but unlearnt. Not but that these
laws—the laws of life—are in a certain measure understood, but not even
mothers think it worth their while to study them—to study how to give
their children healthy existences. They call it medical or physiological
knowledge, fit only for doctors.”
In her old age, loved and honoured far and wide, she toiled on with all
the warm enthusiasm of a girl, and the ripe wisdom of fourscore years and
ten spent in the service of her one Master, for she was not of those who
ever tried to serve two. And when she died at No. 10 South Street, on
August 10, 1910—so peacefully that the tranquil glow of sunset descended
upon her day of harvest—the following beautiful incident was recorded in
_Nursing Notes_, to whose editor I am specially indebted for bringing to
my notice the verses in which the story is told[26]:—
“At Chelsea, under the lime tree’s stir,
I read the news to a pensioner
That a noble lord and a judge were dead—
‘They were younger men than me,’ he said.
“I read again of another death;
The old man turned, and caught his breath—
‘She’s gone?’ he said; ‘she too? In camp
We called her the Lady of the Lamp.’
“He would not listen to what I read,
But wanted it certain—‘The Lady’s dead?’
I showed it him to remove his doubt,
And added, unthinking, ‘The Lamp is out.’
“He rose—and I had to help him stand—
Then, as he saluted with trembling hand,
I was abashed to hear him say,
‘The Lamp she lit is alight to-day.’”
F. S.
CHAPTER XXIII.
_A brief summing up._
Those who write of Florence Nightingale sentimentally, as though she
spent herself in a blind, caressing tenderness, would have earned her
secret scorn, not unflavoured by a jest; for she stood always at the
opposite pole from the sentimentalists, and perhaps had a little of her
father in her—that father who, when he was _giving_ right and left, would
say to some plausible beggar of society who came to him for wholesale
subscriptions, “You see, I was not born generous,” well knowing that his
ideas of generosity and theirs differed by a whole heaven, and that his
were the wider and the more generous of the two.
She had a will of iron. That is what one of her greatest admirers has
more than once said to me—and he knew her well. No doubt it was true.
Only a will of iron could have enabled a delicate woman to serve, for
twenty hours at a time, with unwearying tenderness and courage among
the wounded and the dying. Even her iron resolution and absolute
fearlessness could not prevent her from taking Crimean fever when she
insisted on visiting a second time the lonely typhus patient outside
Balaclava, at a moment when she was worn out with six months of nursing
and administration combined. But it did enable her to go back to her post
when barely recovered, and, later in life, even when a prisoner within
four walls, who seldom left her bed, that will of iron did enable her to
go on labouring till the age of ninety, and to fulfil for the good of
mankind the dearest purpose of her heart. Nothing is harder than iron,
and that which is made of it after it has been through the furnace has
long been the very symbol of loyalty and uprightness when we say of a man
that he is “true as steel.”
Yes, iron is hard and makes a pillar of strength in time of need. But
he who forges out of it weapons and tools that are at once delicate
and resistless, knows that it will humbly shoe the feet of horses, and
cut the household bread, and will make for others besides Lombardy a
kingly crown. And when iron is truly on fire, nothing commoner or softer
nor anything more yielding—not even gold itself—can glow with a more
steadfast and fervent heat to warm the hands and hearts of men.
The picture of Miss Nightingale that dwells in the popular mind no
doubt owes its outline to the memories of the men she nursed with such
tenderness and skill. And it is a true picture. Like all good workmen,
she loved her work, and nursing was her chosen work so long as her
strength remained. None can read her writing, and especially her _Nursing
Notes_ and her pamphlet on nursing among the sick poor, without feeling
how much she cared for every minutest detail, and how sensitively she
felt with, and for, her patients.
But such a picture, as will have been made clear by this time, shows only
one aspect of her life-work. One of her nearest intimates writes to me of
her difficulties in reforming military hospitals, and her determination
therefore to give herself later in life to the reform of civilian
nursing; but in reality she did both, for through the one she indirectly
influenced the other, and began what has been widening and unfolding in
every direction ever since.
Those who knew her best speak almost with awe of her constructive and
organizing power. She was indeed a pioneer and a leader, and girt about
with the modesty of all true greatness.
Like Joan of Arc, she heeded not the outward voices, but, through all
faults and sorrows, sought to follow always and only the voice of the
Divine One. This gave her life unity and power. And when she passed on
into the life beyond, the door opened and closed again very quietly,
leaving the whole world the better for her ninety years in our midst.
“When I have done with this old suit,” says George Meredith, “so much in
need of mending;” but hers, like his, was a very charming suit to the
last, and even to the end of her ninety years the colouring was clear and
fresh as a girl’s.
Like all strong, true, disinterested people, she made enemies—where is
there any sanitary reformer who does not?—yet seldom indeed has any one,
man or woman, won deeper and more world-wide love. But that was not her
aim; her aim was to do the will of her Commander and leave the world
better than she found it.
Seldom has there been a moment when women have more needed the counsel
given in one of the letters here published for the first time, when
she begs of a dear friend that her name may be that “of one who obeys
authority, however unreasonable, in the name of Him who is above all, and
who is Reason itself.”
And as we think of the debt the world owes to Florence Nightingale and of
all she did for England, for India, and not only for the British Empire,
but for the world, we may well pause for a moment on the words that
closed our opening chapter, in which she begs her fellow-workers to give
up considering their actions in any light of rivalry as between men and
women, and ends with an entreaty:—
“It does not make a thing good, that it is remarkable that a
woman should have been able to do it. Neither does it make a
thing bad, which would have been good had a man done it, that
it has been done by a woman.
“Oh, leave these jargons, and go your way straight to God’s
work, in simplicity and singleness of heart.”
The well-remembered words of Ruskin’s appeal to girls in “Sesame and
Lilies,” published but a few years earlier, were evidently in Miss
Nightingale’s mind when she wrote the closing sentences of her tribute
to Agnes Jones—sentences which set their seal upon this volume, and will
echo long after it is forgotten.
“Let us,” she writes, “add living flowers to her grave, ‘lilies
with full hands,’ not fleeting primroses, nor dying flowers.
Let us bring the work of our hands and our heads and our
hearts to finish her work which God has so blessed. Let us not
merely rest in peace, but let hers be the life which stirs up
to fight the good fight against vice and sin and misery and
wretchedness, as she did—the call to arms which she was ever
obeying:—
‘The Son of God goes forth to war—
Who follows in His train?’
“O daughters of God, are there so few to answer?”
APPENDIX.
LIST OF PUBLICATIONS BY FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE.
Letter (on the Madras Famine): The Great Lesson of the Indian Famine,
etc. 1877.
Life or Death in India. A Paper read at the Meeting of the National
Association for the Promotion of Social Science, Norwich, 1873, with an
Appendix on Life or Death by Irrigation. 1874.
Notes on Hospitals: being two Papers read before the National Association
for the Promotion of Science ... 1858, with the evidence given to the
Royal Commissioners on the state of the Army in 1857 (Appendix, Sites and
Construction of Hospitals, etc.).
Do., 3rd Edition, enlarged, and for the most part rewritten. 1863.
Notes on Matters affecting the Health, Efficiency, and Hospital
Administration of the British Army, founded chiefly on the experience of
the late war. 1858.
Notes on Nursing: What it is, and what it is not. 1860.
New Edition, revised and enlarged, 1860; another Edition, 1876.
Miss Florence Nightingale ovy knitra o oŝctr̂ování nemocnŷch. z
anglického pr̂eloẑila. Králova, 1872.
Des Soins à donner aux malades ce qu’il faut faire, ce qu’il faut eviter.
Ouvrage traduit de l’Anglais. 1862.
Notes on Nursing for the Labouring Classes, with a Chapter on Children.
1861.
Do., New Edition, 1868 and 1876.
Observations on the ... Sanitary State of the Army in India. Reprinted
from the Report of the Royal Commission. 1863.
On Trained Nursing for the Sick Poor.... A Letter ... to _The Times_ ...
April 14, 1876.
Sanitary Statistics of Native Nursing Schools and Hospitals. 1863.
Reproduction of a printed Report originally submitted to the Bucks
County Council in the year 1892, containing Letters from Miss Florence
Nightingale on Health Visiting in Rural Districts. 1911.
Statements exhibiting the Voluntary Contributions received by Miss
Nightingale for the Use of the British War Hospitals in the East, with
the mode of their Distribution in 1854, 1855, 1856. Published, London,
1857.
A LIST OF SOME OF THE BOOKS CONSULTED
In case any of my readers wish to read further for themselves:—
Kinglake’s _Invasion of the Crimea_. (William Blackwood.)
_Memoir of Sidney Herbert_, by Lord Stanmore. (John Murray.)
_Life of Sir Bartle Frere_, by John Martineau. (John Murray.)
_Letters of John Stuart Mill_, edited by John Elliot. (Longmans.)
_William Rathbone_, a Memoir by Eleanor F. Rathbone. (Macmillan.)
_The Life of Florence Nightingale_, by Sarah Tooley. (Cassell.)
_Felicia Skene of Oxford_, by E. C. Rickards. (John Murray.)
_Memoir of Sir John MacNeill, G.C.B._, by his Granddaughter. (John
Murray.)
_Agnes Elizabeth Jones_, by her Sister. (Alexander Strahan.)
_A History of Nursing_, by M. Adelaide Nutting, R.N., and Lavinia L.
Dock, R.N. (G. P. Putnam and Sons.)
_A Sister of Mercy’s Memories of the Crimea_, by Sister Aloysius. (Burns
and Oates.)
_The Story of Florence Nightingale_, by W. I. W. (Pilgrim Press.)
_Soyer’s Culinary Campaign_, by Alexis Soyer. (Routledge.)
_Kaiserswerth_, by Florence Nightingale.
_Florence Nightingale_, a Cameo Life-Sketch by Marion Holmes. (Women’s
Freedom League.)
_Paterson’s Roads_, edited by Edward Mogg. (Longmans, Green, Orme.)
_The London Library_, No. 3, vol. of _The Times_ for 1910.
_Nursing Notes_, by Florence Nightingale, and other writings of Miss
Nightingale included in the foregoing list.
A BRIEF SKETCH OF GENERAL EVATT’S CAREER.
[As given in _Who’s Who_.]
EVATT, SURGEON-GENERAL GEORGE JOSEPH HAMILTON, C.B., 1903; M.D.,
R.A.M.C.; retired; Member, Council British Medical Association, 1904;
born, 11th Nov. 1843; son of Captain George Evatt, 70th Foot; married,
1877, Sophie Mary Frances, daughter of William Walter Raleigh Kerr,
Treasurer of Mauritius, and granddaughter of Lord Robert Kerr; one son,
one daughter. Educated, Royal College of Surgeons, and Trinity College,
Dublin. Entered Army Medical Service, 1865; joined 25th (K.O.S.B.)
Regiment, 1866; Surgeon-Major, 1877; Lieutenant-Colonel, R.A.M.C., 1885;
Colonel, 1896; Surgeon-General, 1899; served Perak Expedition with Sir
H. Ross’s Bengal Column, 1876 (medal and clasp); Afghan War, 1878-80;
capture of Ali Musjid (despatches); action in Bazaar Valley, with General
Tytler’s Column (despatches); advance on Gundamak, and return in “Death
March,” 1879 (specially thanked in General Orders by Viceroy of India in
Council and Commander-in-Chief in India for services); commanded Field
Hospital in second campaign, including advance to relief of Cabul under
General Sir Charles Gough, 1879; action on the Ghuzni Road; return to
India, 1880 (medal and two clasps); Suakin Expedition, 1885, including
actions at Handoub, Tamai, and removal of wounded from MacNeill’s zareba
(despatches, medal and clasp, Khedive’s Star); Zhob Valley Expedition,
1890; commanded a Field Hospital (despatches); Medical Officer, Royal
Military Academy, Woolwich, 1880-96; Senior Medical Officer, Quetta
Garrison, Baluchistan, 1887-91; Sanitary Officer, Woolwich Garrison,
1892-94; Secretary, Royal Victoria Hospital, Netley, 1894-96; P.M.O.,
China, 1896-99; P.M.O., Western District, 1899-1902; Surgeon-General,
2nd Army Corps, Salisbury, 1902-3; raised with Mr. Cantlie R.A.M.C.
Volunteers, 1883; founded, 1884, Medical Officers of Schools Association,
London; and, 1886, drew up scheme for Army Nursing Service Reserve;
Member, Committee International Health Exhibition, 1884; Member of
Council, Royal Army Temperance Association, 1903; President, Poor Law
Medical Officers’ Association; contested (L.) Woolwich, 1886, Fareham
Division, Hampshire, 1906, and Brighton, 1910; Honorary Colonel,
Home Counties Division, R.A.M.C., Territorial Force, 1908; received
Distinguished Service Reward, 1910. _Publications_: Travels in the
Euphrates Valley and Mesopotamia, 1873; and many publications on military
and medical subjects.
THE END.
FOOTNOTES
[1] I wrote to the author of the charming sketch of Florence Nightingale
in which I found it quoted, but he has quite forgotten who was the writer.
[2] Her full name was Frances Parthenope Nightingale.
[3] Mrs. Tooley, p. 37.
[4] For a charming sketch of Fliedner’s first wife, a woman of rare
excellence, my readers are referred to “A History of Nursing,” by M.
Adelaide Nutting, R.N., and Lavinia P. Dock, R.N. (G. P. Putnam and Sons.)
[5] The reference here is not to Miss Nightingale’s book, but to the
periodical which at present bears that name.
[6] “Memoir of Sidney Herbert,” by Lord Stanmore. (John Murray.)
[7] “Felicia Skene of Oxford,” by E. C. Rickards.
[8] Kinglake’s “Invasion of the Crimea,” vol. vi. (William Blackwood and
Sons.)
[9] Kinglake’s “Invasion of the Crimea,” vol. vi. p. 426.
[10] Kinglake’s “Invasion of the Crimea,” vol. vi.
[11] “The Life of Florence Nightingale,” by Sarah Tooley.
[12] Stafford O’Brien.
[13] Kinglake’s “Invasion of Crimea.”
[14] “Memories of the Crimea,” by Sister Mary Aloysius. (Burns and Oates.)
[15] “Soyer’s Culinary Campaign,” Alexis Soyer. (Routledge, 1857.)
[16] I know not whether this was the man whose arm she had saved;
probably many others echoed his feeling, and he was not by any means the
only soldier who thus reverently greeted her passing presence.
[17] “Introduction to Memorials of Agnes Elizabeth Jones.” Reprinted from
_Good Words_ for June 1868. Florence Nightingale.
[18] The italics are added.
[19] A complete list is subjoined in the Appendix.
[20] Sir Harry Verney died four years later, and Claydon then passed to
Sir Edmund Hope Verney, the son of his first marriage.
[21] “Life of Florence Nightingale,” by Sarah Tooley, p. 295.
[22] See “Life of Florence Nightingale,” by Sarah Tooley, p. 268.
[23] “Florence Nightingale,” a Cameo Life-Sketch by Marion Holmes.
[24] “Life of Sir Bartle Frere,” by John Martineau. (John Murray.)
[25] “Life of Sir Bartle Frere,” by John Martineau. (John Murray.)
[26] “The Lady of the Lamp,” by F. S., reprinted from the _Evening News_
of August 16, 1910, in _Nursing Notes_ of September 1, 1910.
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