W ^ \
^^^^^^^^
THE LIBRARY
OF
THE UNIVERSITY
OF CALIFORNIA
LOS ANGELES
GIFT OF
DR. AND MRS. ELMER BELT
Florence Nightingale.
(From a »iodel of the statue by A. G. Walker. By kind tennissiorz
of the Sctilptor.)
FLORENCE
NIGHTINGALE
A BIOGRAPHY
BY
ANNIE MATHESON
AUTHOR OF
"THE STORY OF A BRAVK CHILD OOAN OF ARC)'
THOMAS NELSON AND SONS, Ltd.
LONDON, EDINBURGH, AND NEW YORK
Ac
S
NS
D
PREFACE. RAt^e
It is hardly necessary to say that this little bio-
graphy is based mainly upon the work of others,
though I hope and believe it is honest enough to
have an individuality of its ow^n and it has cer-
tainly 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
iv PREFACE.
is good that my readers should have their im-
pressions 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 w^ords 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 Nightin-
gale 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 per-
mitted, and in most cases so clearly acknowledged
PREFACE. V
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 interest-
ing 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
vi PREFACE.
and for like privileges in relation to the, lives of
Sir John MacNeill and Sir Bartle Frere. To
Messrs. William Blackw^ood, 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
PREFACE. vii
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 be-
stowing 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 mono-
graph ; 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.
viii PREFACE.
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 in-
exorable 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.
" The Lady with the Lamp."
{from the statuette in the Nightingale Home.)
CONTENTS
Introductory Chapter . . . • .15
I. Florence Nightingale : her home, her birth-
place, and her family . . .25
II. Life at Lea Hurst and Embley . . 41
III. The weaving of many threads, both of
evil and of good . . . - SS
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 CONTENTS.
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 hu-
mour— 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 Night-
ingale remains at her post, organizing
healthy occupations for the men off
duty — Sisters of Mercy — The
Queen's jewel — Its meaning . . 27
CONTENTS. xi
XIX. Her citizenship — Her initiative — Public
recognition and gratitude — Her re-
turn 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 — In-
firmaries— 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 ....
"The Lady with the Lamp." Statuette
Embley Park, Romsey, Hants
Florence Nightingale's Father
Florence Nightingale (after Augustus
Egg, R.A.) ....
Florence Nightingale in 1854
At the Therapia Hospital .
At Scutari .....
Miss Nightingale's Medals and Decora
tions .....
The Nightingale Nursing Carriage
At the Herbert Hospital, Woolwich
A Letter from Miss Nightingale
Miss Nightingale's London House
Florence Nightingale in her Last Days
Frontispiece
Fac,
ngp. 8
16
32
112
176
192
280
296
304
320
344
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 man-
hood 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.
For one of her St. Thomases 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
i6 INTRODUCTION.
not least, perhaps, of those boy scouts and girl
guides who would like better a life of adven-
ture 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 ex-
perience.
" 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, how-
(i.r64)
o
w
o
fcJO
flH
INTRODUCTION. 17
ever 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 thai
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 else-
where 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 paren-
thesis that before her own work was given to
her by the Great Unseen Commander, she had
(1.V64) 2
i8 INTRODUCTION.
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 great-
ness. All her work was amazing in its fruit-
fulness, 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 beings 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
INTRODUCTION. 19
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 Nightin-
gale did three things — each leaving a golden
imprint upon the history of our time : —
She broke down a "Chinese wall" of preju-
dice 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
20 INTRODUCTION.
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
INTRODUCTION. 21
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
cither 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 her-
self 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
22 INTRODUCTION.
and humility of self-efFacement the more beauti-
ful 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 statu-
esque 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 unrighteous-
ness.
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 every-
where (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,
INTRODUCTION. 23
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
24 INTRODUCTION.
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
26 FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE.
stories, clerk and parson dividing the service
betw^een 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 dow^n from those
days suggests that the parson w^as 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 sup-
porters of the cheap schools of the neighbour-
hood, 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 de-
FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE. 27
cided 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 marvel-
lous 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 school-
fellow in the room devoted to " lessons " at Lea
28 FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE.
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
FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE. 29
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 Wing-
field, 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
30 FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE.
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 veni-
son 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 in-
cluded 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
FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE. 31
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 meadow-
sweet and clover, and in the tall hedges wild
roses mingle their sweetness with the more power-
ful 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."
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
32 FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE.
— 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 re-
sembled, lives before us in more warm and glow-
ing colours, as one who did much to break down
the barriers of caste and, with a heart of over-
flowing 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 prob-
ably 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,
Florence Nightingale's Father.
FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE. 33
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 M^here slackness
and disorder v^ere 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 delight-
ful 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 English-
women, 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 * — was it Ruskin or
* 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.
34 FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE.
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, climb-
ing 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 Night-
ingale was born, her parents were staying at the
FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE. 35
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.*
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
* Her full name was Frances Parthenope Nightingale.
36 FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE.
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 Ark-
wright, 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 Night-
ingale'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
FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE. 37
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. Edu-
cated 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 begin-
ning 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
38 FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE.
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 neigh-
bourhood. 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
FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE. 39
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. Brown-
ing, 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
40 FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE.
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 Eng-
lish 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
42 FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE.
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, stretch-
ing 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
FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE. 43
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 blossom-
ing apple trees, has doubtless grown more delight-
ful 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 school-
room 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
44 FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE.
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, character-
istically 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
FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE. 45
gay postilions and varied occupants were on the
alert for neighbour or friend who might be post-
ing 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
46 FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE.
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."
WoUaton 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
FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE. 47
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 know-
ledge 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
48 FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE.
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, meet-
ing 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 TuUiver'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 Wirks-
worth 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
FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE. 49
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 conva-
lescence— 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.
(1.764) 4
50 FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE.
" 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
FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE. 51
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
art 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 band-
ages, 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
52 FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE.
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 shep-
herd 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 im-
portance 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 promptlv
tore it into strips.
Then back to Cap's hut she hastened, with
her small henchman beside her carrying the
FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE. 53
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 satisfac-
tion, 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," inter-
54 FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE.
posed 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 w^as
old Roger. But the doctor-nurse was not pre-
pared 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.
56 FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE.
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 supple-
mented by the far-reaching transmission of his
orders across the telegraph wires, and if King-
lake 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
FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE. 57
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 consider-
ing how it was possible at the beginning of the
nineteenth century to make the coarse Bona-
parte 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'etat — a massacre
probably the result of brutal panic on the part
58 FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE.
of the soldiers, the civilians, and that craven
president, Louis Napoleon himself, vs^hose con-
science made a coward of him, and v^hose
terror usually took the form of brutality — but
long before that date, by his callous plotting
and underhand self-seeking, he w^as 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.
FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE. 59
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 WaUer
Scott's nickname for her real name of Carohne
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 FeUcia 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 surround-
ings, though not in Italy but in Provence,
and was named after her French godmother,
a certain Comtesse de Felicite. 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
6o FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE.
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 Due 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 Nightin-
gale, 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
FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE. 6i
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 nick-
named Pompey, and being prepared for confirma-
tion by her father's friend. Dean Ramsay. We
are told of her that she might have said with
Coppee, " 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 be-
tween 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
FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE. 63
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. Some-
times 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
64 FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE.
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 easy-
going was allowed in the Embley schoolroom.
For any work carelessly done there was punish-
ment 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 hos-
pital, 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 Flor-
ence 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
FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE. 65
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 re-
laxed in favour of outdoor life ; but on the return
to Embley for the winter, schoolroom routine
was again enforced on very strict lines." *
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 Night-
ingale was twenty she had already begun to turn
her attention definitely in the direction of nur-
sing. 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
* Mrs. Tooley, p. 37.
(1.764) 5
66 FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE.
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 kins-
folk, 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 in-
fluence 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.
FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE. 67
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 stan-
dard 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
68 FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE.
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 ap-
peared 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 ap-
pears but those qualities of helpfulness, sympathy,
and love which could tame the most savage
natures, silence the voice of profanity and blas-
phemy, 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
FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE. 69
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 remem-
bers 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 Eliza-
beth 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 Nightin-
70 FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE.
gale 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
72 FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE.
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
FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE. 73
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 neigh-
bours, 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
74 FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE.
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 a 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 a 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 un-
FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE. 75
folds, 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 fem-
inine 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
76 FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE.
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 Nightin-
gale's youth, when the vicar and the Arkwright
of her day — old Sir Richard's tomb in the chan-
cel 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 your-
FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE. 77
selves 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 v^hich 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.
78 FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE.
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 hos-
pitals, with none to tend their wounds of soul
and body.
FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE. 79
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 Night-
ingale 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 know-
ledge 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
8o FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE.
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
FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE. 8i
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.
(1,764^ 6
82 FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE.
" 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 Eng-
land, 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
FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE. 83
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
84 FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE.
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 confi-
dence 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 role 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 cer-
FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE. 85
tain 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 feel-
ings in such rivalries, Louis Napoleon made
86 FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE.
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 Nessel-
rode 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
FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE. 87
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 ques-
tions, and the end of it was that his rage hood-
winked 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 em-
bassy 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 after-
wards cancelled by our Home Government, at
once quieted the terror in Constantinople ; but
88 FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE.
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, Mentschikojff 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.
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
Florence Nightingale.
LFr(>m the painting in the National Portrait Gallery by Augustus Egg, R.A.)
FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE. 89
despatches when consulted by Turkey. More-
over, 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 circ-
ling 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 Nightin-
gale 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 Epp-
stein, and perhaps he was the more determined
to prove to himself and others that he had a
FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE. 91
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 Got-
tingen, 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 preach-
92 FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE.
ing 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 Kaisers-
werth, 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
FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE. 93
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 New-
gate sent him back to his own parish all on
fire to help the prisoners of his own country,
and he began at once with Diisseldorf, 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 with-
out 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.
94 FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE.
and he and his wife led her in to the place pre-
pared 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 Kaisers-
FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE. 95
werth, 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 deacon-
esses 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
96 FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE.
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.
FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE. 97
The pastor was so pleased with Miss Caroline
that he then and there offered her the choice
of becoming either his wife or the Superin-
tendent 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 Charite Hospital.
Caroline, young though she was, made a good
Deaconess Mother,* 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
* 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.)
(1.7M) -7
98 FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE.
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 quaint-
ness and their interest for all who are feeling
their way in the education of young children : —
" In the Orphan Asylum," wrote Miss Night-
ingale, " 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 under-
stands 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. . . .
FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE. 99
" 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 recon-
ciled, 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
loo FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE.
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,
102 FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE.
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 observa
tion touches the smallest detail. Miss Nightin-
gale never wasted time in unpractical theorizing.
In discussing the far-off attainment of ideal nurs-
ing 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.
FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE. 103
pointing a finger of scorn at what we named the
superstition of other countries, we were yet con-
tent to sec 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 dis-
cipline, 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 con-
cerning this matter in the history of that time,
in the work of a distinguished member of the
Society of Friends, even before Florence Night-
ingale or Felicia Skene had been much heard
of. We read that " the heavenly personality of
Elizabeth Fry (whom Miss Nightingale sought
104 FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE.
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 win
ning 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 cxcep-
FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE. 105
tions, 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 be-
come 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.
io6 FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE.
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*
was right when, at the end of Miss Nightin-
gale'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 pa-
tient 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
* The reference here is not to Miss Nightingale's book, but to
the periodical which at present bears that name.
FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE. 107
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 " misericorde "
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.
io8 FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE.
and the pastor's friendship for Miss Nightin-
gale's revered counsellor, Elizabeth Fry, must
have been one pleasant link in the happy bond.
Fliedner was certainly a w^onderful 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
FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE. 109
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.
no FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE.
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 EngUshwoman." Agnes Jones, who
was trained there before her work in Liver-
pool left a memorable record of life spent in
self-denying service, tells how the workers at
FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE. iii
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 through-
out 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 shrewd-
ness 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
112 FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE.
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
Florence Nightingale in 1854.
(From a drawing by H. M. B. C)
FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE. 113
use of drugs which was then so much in fashion,
and she no doubt saw many interesting experi-
ments at Matlock Bank in helping Nature to do
her own work.
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
(1,764) 8
114 FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE.
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 un-
fortunate circumstances of their lives, was not
an easy one, but Miss Nightingale had a calm
FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE. 115
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 educa-
tion 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
ii6 FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE.
to give work and service of as good a kind as
lies within their povvrer, rather than to snatch
at its exact value in coin, even if that vs^ere
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 VIIL
The beginning of the war — A sketch of Sidney Herbert.
It was on April ii, 1854, that war was
declared by Russia, and four days later the in-
vasion 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,
ii8 FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE.
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 Rich-
mond, will realize that he too, like Florence
Nightingale, was born in a very beautiful spot.
FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE. 119
His father, the eleventh Earl of Pembroke, had
married the daughter of Count Woronzow, the
Russian Ambassador, and, in Sidney's knowledge-
able 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
120 FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE.
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
FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE. 121
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
122 FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE.
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 : —
FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE. 123
" 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 New-
castle 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,
124 FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE.
to which he had himself gone as an under-
graduate 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
FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE. 125
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, forgiv-
ing 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 de-
scended, 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 sin-
126 FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE.
cerity, and . . . England has had greater states-
men, but never so choice a union of the qualities
which make a Sidney. His fame is founded on
those personal qualities of which his contem-
poraries 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
FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE. 127
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 under-
stand 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
128 FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE.
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 co-
adjutor, 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 pres-
ence," 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.* There are, however,
* "Memoir of Sidney Herbert," by Lord Stanmore. (John
Murray. )
FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE. 129
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,
(1.764) 9
130 FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE.
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 care-
lessness, as he saw them through Florence Night-
ingale's letters, made of him England's greatest
sanitary reformer in army matters, with the
single exception of Florence Nightingale herself.
FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE. 131
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 Nightin-
gale 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).
132 FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE.
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
FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE. 133
glimpse of home again, Florence Nightingale
was the last friend to whom he bade farewell.
But that was not till 1861, and in the inter-
vening years they worked incessantly together,
for the good of the army and the improvement
of sanitary conditions.
CHAPTER IX.
Tfu 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 equip-
ment 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
FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE. 135
deceived and defrauded. The clothing provided
for the men before Sebastopol, where, in at
least one instance, man w^as 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 un-
selfish, 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
136 FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE.
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
FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE. 137
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
138 FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE.
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.
FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE. 139
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 ofKcial
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
140 FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE.
service, a hand was put forth to accept and
use it."
Just as he sought to explain the awful condi-
tion 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
FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE. 141
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,
FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE. 143
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 edu-
cation, 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
144 FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE.
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
FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE. 145
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 under-
stand 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
(1.764) 10
146 FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE.
be difficult — no one knows that better than your-
self. 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 a 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 Govern-
FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE. 147
ment 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 Govern-
148 FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE.
ment, 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 Night-
ingale, 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 Super-
intendent of Nurses at Scutari. She has been
pressed to accept of sums of money for the
FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE. 149
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
150 FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE.
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
FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE. 151
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 Super-
intendent 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 pro-
vinces. 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
152 FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE.
silly (laughters, 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 ' ?
" // 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
FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE. 153
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. Prob-
ably 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. Tou 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 delight-
ful 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
154 FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE.
laws of life and death for men, and what the laws
of health for wards (and wards are healthy or un-
healthy 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
FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE. 155
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 Mere Angelique
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 ! "
156 FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE.
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 per-
suasive 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
FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE. 157
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 imper-
ceptibly 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 follow-
ing 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 extra-
ordinary 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
158 FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE.
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
FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE. 159
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 con-
stant 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
i6o FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE.
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
FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE. i6i
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 ques-
tions 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." *
* " Felicia Skene of Oxford," by E. C. Rickards.
(1.7«4) II
CHAPTER XL
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
FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE. 163
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 Guardiafi, 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 im-
pulsive, but ignorant, goodwill, and he issued a
sort of little manifesto in which he said that
" many ladies whose generous enthusiasm prompts
them to offisr 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 effi-
ciency and their help.
The English Sisterhoods had made a difficulty
about surrendering control over the Sisters they
164 FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE.
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 regi-
ment, she left with her friends a vision of good
cheer and high courage.
FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE. 165
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
wrho 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. Vin-
cent 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
i66 FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE.
Malta, for the wind, as with St. Paul, was " con-
trary " and blew a hurricane dead against them,
so that their ship, the Fectis, 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 blossom-
ing briars of them ; and among those graves she
found a nameless one, on which, without reveal-
ing 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 — ';he 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.
FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE. 167
Unspeakable indeed must have been the diffi-
culties 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
i68 FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE.
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. Her-
bert'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 man-
ners, 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
FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE. 169
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
I70 FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE.
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 help-
lessness of the down-stricken soldier to the help-
lessness 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 obey-
ing with strictness the orders of the medical
officers.
FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE. 171
" 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 attend-
ing upon any of the officers." *
* Kinglake's " Invasion of the Crimea," vol. ri. (William Black-
wood and Sons.)
CHAPTER XII.
The tribute of Kinglake and Macdonald and the Chelsea
Pensioners.
But before continuing the story of Miss Night-
ingale's expedition, we must turn aside for a
moment in Kinglake's company to realize some-
thing 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 Night-
ingale, 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
FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE. 173
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
174 FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE.
' 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 King-
lake, " 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 hos-
pital 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 :
FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE. 175
* 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 in-
structions were obeyed. What number of lives
were saved — saved even in that pest-stricken hos-
pital 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 approach-
ing 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
176 FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE.
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 senti-
ment ; and sometimes, indeed, he disclosed a wild
faith in the ministering angel that strained be-
yond 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
FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE. 177
stronghold. When this happened, almost all of
the sufferers who had not yet lost their conscious-
ness 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."
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
countrv 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 fore-
thought, that agile brain power, that organizing
and governing faculty of which our country had
(i,7M) 1 •?
178 FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE.
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 them-
selves 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 ex-
FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE. 179
perience 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 Night-
ingale, 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 amiabihty, do not realize
what she had to do, nor with what fearless, un-
flinching force she went straight to her mark,
not heeding what was thought of herself, over-
looking 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 care-
i8o FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE.
less, 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 mis-
managed 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
FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE. i8i
not the medicines, nor the wine, nor any of the
comforting things they would hke 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 Night-
ingale 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.
i82 FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE.
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 ex-
FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE. 183
pected 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 as-
siduity, 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
184 FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE.
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 over-
whelming 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
FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE. 185
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 diffisrent. 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 Nightin-
gale'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
i86 FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE.
have prevented their recovery. " Ah, she was
a good w^oman," 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 rum-
our 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
FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE. 187
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
i88 FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE.
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
FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE. 189
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 danger-
ous 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
190 FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE.
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 surpris-
ing calmness of judgment and promptitude and
decision of character."
The soldier w^ho 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.
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
FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE. 191
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 manage-
ment. Charged to be in the wards, to smooth
192 FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE.
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, what-
ever her orders, she could hardly be expected to
give a sufferer food which she perceived to be
bad or unfit. If the males * did not quite under-
stand 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
* Kinglake's " Invasion of the Crimea," vol. vi. p. 426.
:3
o
bX)
fe
o
FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE. 193
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 afflict-
ing 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
(1,W4) 13
194 FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE.
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 vs^hich it had pleased God
to call him.' The v^ill of the w^oman, w^hilst
stronger, flew also more straight to the end ; *
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 accord-
ingly she knew and felt the worth, rightly judg-
ing that, in all sorts of matters within what she
deemed its true range, her word must be law.
* Kinglake's " Invasion of the Crimea," vcJ. vi.
FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE. 195
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 her-
self. 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 oncof a kind
less dependent upon her personal qualities. Know-
196 FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE.
ing thoroughly the wants of a hospital, and foresee-
ing, 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 Inker-
mann, 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 sense-
FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE. 197
less 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 stead-
fast 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
198 FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE.
never been bound by red tape, and her whole
soul rose up in arms at sight of the awful suffer-
ing 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 Fectis, stores of
invalid food, and all sorts of little delicacies sur-
prised 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 morn-
ing, 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
FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE. 199
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." *
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.
* " The Life of Florence Nightingale," by Sarah Tooley.
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 con-
tinual 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
FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE. 201
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 in-
competent, 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," * who had left the gaieties of London
to fetch and carry for the Lady-in-Chief, and —
to quote Mrs. Tooley, " did anything and every-
♦ Stafford O'Brien.
202 FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE.
thing 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 encom-
passed them on their hospital pallets ; and men
still remember how graciously, how simply, how
naturally, if so one may speak, the ambassadress
FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE. 203
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.
204 FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE.
" There was grace — grace almost mediaeval —
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 Nightin-
gale'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 : " When-
FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE. 205
ever 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 declar-
ing 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
2o6 FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE.
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 in-
tuition 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.
FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE. 207
" 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
2o8 FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE.
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." *
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
* Kinglake's " Invasion of Crimea."
FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE. 209
— 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 amputa-
tion. Miss Nightingale believed that she might
possibly be able to save the arm by careful
nursing, and she begged that she might at least
(1,764) 14
210 FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE.
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
FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE. 211
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 base-
ment, 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 requisi-
tioned 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
212 FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE.
from I OS. 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. Brace-
bridge, 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
FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE. 213
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 sym-
pathy 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 ex-
pression which could distress a gentlewoman."
214 FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE.
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 when-
ever 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 every-
thing. So Rev. Mother at once interposed, and
said if the doctors allowed it, she would have it
FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE. 215
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 un-
becoming 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
FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE. 217
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 pa-
tients), 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 dread-
ful 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 mis-
tress. 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.
2i8 FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE.
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.
FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE. 219
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
220 FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE.
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 Con-
stantinople 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 nos-
pitals told him " nothing was wanted," and on
pushing his inquiry with a yet more dis-
tinguished personage, he was actually advised to
spend the money on building a church at Pera !
" Yet at that very time," says Kinglake,
FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE. 221
"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 ap-
pliances 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. Mac-
donald soon learned the truth, and the course he
then took was one of the simplest kind, but it
222 FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE.
worked a mighty change. He bought the
things needed, and the authorities, succumbing
at last to this excruciating form of demonstra-
tion, 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
FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE. 223
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 hap-
pened. 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
224 FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE.
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-Chicf
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
FLORENCE NlGHllNGALE. 225
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, wsls chiefly the result of mismanage-
ment— mismanagement on the part of those v^rho
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
(1,764) jlj
226 FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE.
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-fettles 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 arrange-
ments 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
FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE. 227
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
228 FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE.
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 satisfac-
tory way by nothing short of a miraculous energy
with the means it would require. The men are
landed necessarily in a rnost pitiable state, and
have to be carried up steep ground for con-
siderable distance, either by those beasts of
Turks, who are as stupid as callous, or by our
invalids, who arc 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.
FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE. 229
" There seems now, so far as I can sec, 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 sur-
geons 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 estab-
lishment, the crisis is still too great ; there arc
wanting hundreds of beds — that is, many hun-
dreds have only matting between the beds and
the stone floor. I slept here Sunday night, and
230 FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE.
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 lattei
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 press-
ing 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
FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE. 231
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
232 FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE.
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 Night-
ingale. 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.
FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE. 233
This was not accepted. Mr. Herbert's gener-
ous 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 Thcrapia
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
234 FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE.
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 Stan-
ley, 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
Nightingales 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 : —
" Wc 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
236 FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE.
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, look-
ing 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
FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE. 237
is there any jelly to-day ; try him with some
eggs, etc'
" ' Please, Mr. Gordon wishes to sec 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 Nightin-
gale 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 com-
munity.
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
238 FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE.
the hospital kitchen at Scutari. He was an
expert and an enthusiast, and very amusing.
Also what he offered was of no slight impor-
tance 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
FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE. 239
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 organiza-
tion 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 fore-
sight 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.
240 FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE.
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 counten-
ance, 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 recog-
nize 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."
FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE. 241
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 ;
(i,7fl4) 16
242 FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE.
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
FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE. 243
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 surround-
ing 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
244 FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE.
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
FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE. 245
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
246 FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE.
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 iMtnp^ —
Her humour — Letters of Sister Aloysius.
About the middle of December Miss Nightin-
gale 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,
248 FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE.
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
FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE. 249
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 cor-
ridors watching over the welfare of her patients,
and to them she was " the Lady with the
Lamp."
We still see with the American poet : —
250 FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE.
" 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^oo</ 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 wound-
ing and pain.
For herself, in the long days of sacrificial service,
FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE. 251
was there any human solace, any dear companion-
ship, 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 out-
poured 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 danger-
ous 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
252 FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE.
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 * 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. EHzabeth, 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. How-
ever, 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
* " Memories of the Crimea," by Sister Mary Aloysius. (Bums
and Oates.)
FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE. 253
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 run-
ning 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 number-
less 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
254 FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE.
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.
FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE. 255
" 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 wc
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-
256 FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE.
feeding. We had wine, sago, arrowroot. In-
deed, 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
bv 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 re-
member 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
FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE. 257
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 pos-
session. 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
(1.7M) 17
258 FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE.
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 fearfuUv 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 cap-
tive 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 de-
manded another sacrifice from our devoted little
band. Dear Sister Mary Elizabeth was called
to a martyr's crown.
" She was specially beloved for her extra-
FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE. 259
ordinary 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 re-
organization 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 station-
26o FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE.
ery 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
262 FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE.
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,
FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE. 263
to whom the offer was made, immediately ac-
cepted 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 Eng-
264 FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE.
land" 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
FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE. 265
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 be-
266 FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE.
loved 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 de-
scribing his own visit, and tells the story through
FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE. 267
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.
268 FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE.
" ' 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
FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE. 269
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 per-
ceive 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." ' " *
The doctors, after her twelve days of danger-
ous 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
* "Soyer's Culinary Campaign," Alexis Soyer- (Routledge, 1857. '^
270 FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE.
work at Scutari. Lord Ward placed his yacht
at her disposal, and by slow degrees she made
recovery, though Lord Raglan's death, June
1 8, 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 v/as 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,
FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE. 271
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
272 FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE.
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
FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE. 273
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."
(l.T«4) X8
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 re-
joicings. 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
FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE. 275
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
276 FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE.
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 drunken-
ness— 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
eiTectually 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.
FLOREI^CE NIGHTINGALE. 277
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 jCs*^^* ^^^ then
gave the entire proceeds, about /^2,ooo, 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
278 FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE.
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, tender-
ness, and skill receive their crowning grace.
It has been said — I know not with what ex-
actitude— 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
FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE. 279
her shadow * 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
* 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.
28o FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE.
for the Sisters whom you have left me. T 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 them-
selves 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
^wi.
- . /
Q
(L)
fcuo
FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE. 281
and entirely self-forgetful the Sisters were under
every hardship and privation.
By those v^ho 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
282 FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE.
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 enthusi-
astic. When Colonel Connolly, brother-in-
law to Mr. Bruin, of Carlow, was travelling.
FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE. 283
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
2S4 FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE.
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
FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE. 285
work, and the bundles of magazines and illus-
trated 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
286 FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE.
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 jri,ooo 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 be-
came a popular advertisement.
FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE. 287
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 rem-
nant of our army was ordered home and the
hospitals were finally closed, Florence Nightin-
gale 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 Bala-
clava, where it still opens wide its arms for
every gleam of golden sunlight, every reflected
shimmer, through the dark night, of silvery moon
288 FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE.
and star, to hearten the sailors voyaging north-
ward 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 satisfac-
tion, though no surprise, on learning, as we
believe we are correct in stating, that Her
Majesty the Queen has, in a manner as honour-
able to herself as it must be gratifying to her
people, been pleased to mark her warm apprecia-
tion 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
FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE. 289
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 frame-
work for the shield, their stems at the bottom
(1,764) ig
290 FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE.
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 thif
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."
Punchy 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
FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE. 291
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.
Htr citizenship — Her initiative — Public recognition and gratitude —
Her return incognito — Village excitement — The country's wel-
come— Miss Nightingale^ s broken health — Th£ Nightingale
Fund — St. Thoma^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
FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE. 293
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 theo-
logical 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 Nightin-
gale'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
294 FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE.
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 lack-
ing. When the Treaty of Peace was under
discussion in the House of Lords, Lord EUes-
mere 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
FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE. 295
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 Nightin-
gale."
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 wonder-
ful tact, the wonderful tenderness, combined
with the extraordinary self-devotion, which have
been displayed by Miss Nightingale."
Lord Ellesmere was right when he hinted
296 FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE.
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, travel-
ling 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.
There was great joy among the villagers that
I I II ii I I i iiimiitflii
FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE. 297
" 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.
298 FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE.
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-
FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE. 299
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 sup-
port, 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
300 FLORENCE NIGHTIIslGALE.
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 Bal-
moral ; 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
FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE. 301
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 Nightin-
gale 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
302 FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE.
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 Night-
ingale'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
FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE. 303
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 i860, 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
304 FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE.
the fund began at St. Thomas's in i860, 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 i860, fifteen pro-
bationers were admitted in June, the first super-
intendent being Mrs. Wardroper. The proba-
tioners 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 examina-
tion, they were to be registered as certified
nurses.
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
o
o
O 2
X
X
-en ^
FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE. 305
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 dis-
missed, 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 appoint-
ments 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
(1.764) 20
3o6 FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE.
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.
FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE. 307
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
3o8 FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE.
honoured and certified profession, and year by
year, at St. Thomas's alone, thirty probationers
are trained, of whom fifteen pay ^i, is. 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 inter-
national 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
FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE. 309
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.' "
310 FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE.
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, quiet-
ness, 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
FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE. 311
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 arrange-
ments, 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 Rath-
bone'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 Liver-
pool had not only an important school of nurses
for the sick poor, but also led the way throughout
FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE. 313
the country in the reform of the hitherto scan-
dalous 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 men-
tioned more than once in these pages, left an un-
dying record on England's roll of honour. It was
of her that in 1868 Miss Nightingale wrote*: —
" 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. . . .
* ((
' Introduction to Memorials of Agnes Elizabeth Jones." Re-
printed from Good Words for June 1868. Florence Nightingale,
314 FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE.
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 pop-
ulations in the world to something like Christian
discipline, and had converted a vestry to the con-
viction 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 divi-
FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE. 315
sions, 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, Effi-
ciency, 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 Her-
3i6 FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE.
bert 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 depots on which
she has not been consulted, and matters concern-
ing the health and well-being of both services
have been constantly brought before her. Dis-
trict 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 Chis-
wick 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, show-
ing 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 Biog-
raphy," " her expert reputation was paramount,"
FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE. 317
and "during the American Civil War of 1862-4,
and the Franco-German War of 1 870-1, her
advice was eagerly sought by the governments
concerned." The " Dictionary of National Biog-
raphy " 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 direct-
ness, 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 " com-
manding 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
3i8 FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE.
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 under-
stand, 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
FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE. 319
of amusing children now, and not enough of
letting them amuse themselves."
What, again, could be more useful in its sim-
plicity 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 mc 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 dress-
making, 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 ;
320 FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE.
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 light-
ened, 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
FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE. 321
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 accom-
panied by doctors, but He meant all children
to be cared for by mothers. God bless your
work and labour of love."
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 con-
vincing, 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
(i,»64) 21
322 FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE.
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.^^ *
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 : —
* The italics are added.
FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE. 323
" 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 educa-
324 FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE.
tion, 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* were important, and her correspond-
ence, 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 election-
eering purposes, but not hitherto included
in any biography, which we are allowed to
reproduce here : —
* A complete list is subjoined in the Appendix.
FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE. 325
" 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."
326 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 :—
FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE. 327
" My Dear Lady Tulloch, — I give you joy,
I give you both joy, for this crowding 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. TuUoch'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 grate-
fully 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
328 FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE.
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 life-
long, 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 com-
mission for inquiry into barracks and hospitals ;
to him we are indebted for the reorganization of
the medical department of the army. To him
FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE. 329
we owe the commission of inquiry into, and re-
modelling 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 work-
ing 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
330 FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE.
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 a?td 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
332 FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE.
Societies, which throughout the European con-
tinent 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 blesses Mili-
taires, 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 ;^7o,ooo 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 Associa-
tion 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
FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE. 333
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 consign-
ment of beautiful holly and other evergreens
for Christmas festivities. H.R.H. the Princess
Christian is President of the Nursing Associa-
tion, 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 Nightin-
gale'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.
334 FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE.
The Royal Pension Fund for Nurses also, in
which Queen Alexandra was so specially in-
terested, 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
FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE. 335
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,
336 FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE.
who in 1858 became the second wife of Sir
Harry Verney,* 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 be-
tween 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 Buckingham-
shire Infirmary in 1 861, 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
* Sir Harry Verney died four years later, and Claydon then
passed to Sir Edmund Hope Verney, the son of his first marriage.
FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE. 337
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 compan-
ionship, 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 deter-
minately strove to lessen, fell from sixty-nine per
thousand to eighteen per thousand.* She strove —
and not in vain — to improve the sanitary condi-
tions 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
* " Life of Florence Nightingale," by Sarah Tooley, p. 295.
(1,7M) 22
338 FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE.
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 prac-
tical her help was, we see clearly in her letters
and pamphlets. She delighted in making festivi-
ties 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 acci-
dental 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
FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE. 339
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, ven-
tilation is comparatively useless. . . . And now,
you think these things trifles, or at least ex-
aggerated. But what you ' think ' or what I
340 FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE.
'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 pyaemia 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 some-
thing 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 build-
ing 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.
FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE. 341
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 exaggera-
tion 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
342 FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE.
cent, to little more than three in every hundred
yearly.''^
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 in-
cessant 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 con-
tinuously 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 nurs-
ing 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
* See "life of Florence Nightingale," by Sarah Tooley, p. 268.
FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE. 343
campaign, and what he there experienced deter-
mined 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 delight-
ful 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 states-
man, 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 vora-
cious was the eager, sympathetic interest of Miss
Niehtingale in the men and women of that active
world whose streets, at the time he learned to
344 FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE.
know her, she no longer walked, that no con-
versation 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.'
»» *
* " Florence Nightingale," a Cameo Life-Sketch by Marioi)
Holmes.
^
Florence Nightingale's London House, lo South Street,
Park Lane (house with balcony), where she died,
August 14, 1 9 10.
FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE. 345
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 Bar tie 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
FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE. 347
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 mat-
ters could the mortality of the army be lessened.
She saw, and saw clearly, that the reason chil-
dren died like flies in India, so that those who
loved them best chose the agony of years of part-
ing 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
348 FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE.
Bombay Government, at the time of his leaving
Bombay : —
" The scene of your departure stirred me
much. That bright evening, the crow^d 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 sav, ' T am no better
FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE. 349
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.'* *
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 be-
tween garbage and disease-bearing flies was then
less commonly understood, and he was never tired
of urging the making of decent roads ; but this,
* "Life of Sir Bartle Frere," by John Martineau. (John
Murray.)
350 FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE.
he knew, was only a very small part of the im-
provements 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
FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE. 351
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
352 FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE.
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
Florence Nightingale in her Last Days.
{.From a drawing from memory. Copyright A. Rischgitz.)
FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE. 353
note merely to say that I don't think this mem-
orandum requires any addition.
" God bless you for it ! I think it is a great
work."*
It was a great work, and it might have been
delayed for scores of years, with a yearly un-
necessary waste of thousands of lives, if she had
not initiated it.
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
* "Life of Sir Baxtle Frere," by John Martineau. (John Murray.)
(1.W4) 23
354 FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE.
no bar to intercommunication in arrangements
tending to their benefit."
Sir C. Trevelyan justly says that " a good sani-
tary 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 im-
provement 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
FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE. 355
being I have ever met, for instance, man or
woman, who had thoroughly mastered the intri-
cate details of the Bengal land-purchase system.
She loved India, and she knew it through and
through. It was no wonder that every dis-
tinguished 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 expressive-
ness 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
356 FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE.
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
FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE. 357
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
358 FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE.
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. lo South Street, on August lo, 19 lo —
died 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 * : —
" 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 —
* "The Lady of the Lamp," by F. S., reprinted from the Evening
News of August 16, 1 910, in Nursing Notes of September i, 1910.
FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE. 359
' 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 XXIIL
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 whole-
sale 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
FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE. 361
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
362 FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE.
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 pam-
phlet 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
FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE. 363
hospitals, and her determination therefore to give
herself later in life to the reform of civiHan
nursing ; but in reaUty 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 hfe
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 colour-
ing was clear and fresh as a girl's.
Like all strong, true, disinterested people, she
364 FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE.
made enemies — where is there any sanitary re-
former 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
FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE. 365
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 single-
ness of heart."
The well-remembered words of Ruskin's ap-
peal 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.
366 FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE.
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 ot God, are there so few to
answer f "
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 Pro-
motion 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.
368 APPENDIX.
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. i860.
New Edition, revised and enlarged, i860 ;
another Edition, 1876.
Miss Florence Nightingale ovy knitra o osctfovani
nemocnych. z anglickeho prelozila. Krdlova,
1872.
Des Soins a donner aux malades ce qu'il faut
faire, ce qu'il faut eviter. Ouvrage traduit de
1' 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.
APPENDIX. 369
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. 191 1.
Statements exhibiting the Voluntary Contribu-
tions 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.
(1,764) 24
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 ^^athbone, a Memoir by Eleanor F. Rath-
bone. (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.)
APPENDIX. 371
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.)
Soyers Culinary Campaign, by Alexis Soyer.
(Routledge.)
Kaiserswerth, by Florence Nightingale.
Florence Nightingale, a Cameo Life -Sketch by
Marion Holmes. (Women's Freedom
League.)
Patersons 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, nth 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
APPENDIX. 373
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 ; com-
manded 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,
1 899- 1 902 ; Surgeon-General, 2nd Army Corps,
374 APPENDIX.
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 Inter-
national 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,
1 910. Publications : Travels in the Euphrates
Valley and Mesopotamia, 1873 ; and many
publications on military and medical subjects.
THE END.
PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN.
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