Upon those behind the scenes, upon ministers and officials, it was the former side of her activity that made the profounder impression. Some of them applauded what she did, recognizing that only the advent of a new force could have driven a way through the quagmire; others complained that in her methods there was something too imperious and masterful; all alike perceived her power and strength of will. But to the sick and wounded among whom she lived and moved, and to the great public at home which heard of her work, it was the softer side of her character that made the more instant appeal. By them she was known and honoured not as the rigid disciplinarian or creative organizer, but as the compassionate and tender nurse. Those who had no means of knowing what other work she had to do supposed that ministration to the sick, in the narrower sense, comprised it all. But, in fact, as she wrote to Mr. Herbert (Jan. 14, 1855), nursing was “the least important of the functions into which she had been forced”; and those on the spot, who watched the arduousness of these other duties, wished that she could be persuaded to spare herself more of one kind of work or of the other. The marvel is that in unstinted measure she combined them both.

Her devotion and her power of work were prodigious. “I work in the wards all day,” she said, “and write all night”; and this was hardly exaggeration. A letter from Miss Stanley (Dec. 21, 1854) gives an interesting glimpse of Florence Nightingale at work in the Barrack Hospital:—

The occasion described by Miss Stanley was post-day. Still busier were the awful days on which fresh consignments of sick and wounded arrived from the Crimea. Miss Nightingale has been known, said General Bentinck, to pass eight hours on her knees dressing wounds and administering comfort. There were times when she stood for twenty hours at a stretch, apportioning quarters, distributing stores, directing the labours of her staff, or assisting at the painful operations where her presence might soothe or support. She had, said Mr. Osborne, “an utter disregard of contagion. I have known her spend hours over men dying of cholera or fever. The more awful to every sense, any particular case, especially if it was that of a dying man, the more certainly might her slight form be seen bending over him, administering to his ease by every means in her power, and seldom quitting his side till death released him.”[148] “We cannot,” wrote Mr. Bracebridge to her uncle, Mr. Smith (Dec. 18, 1854), “prevent her self-sacrifice for the dying. She cannot delegate as we could wish; but the cases are so interesting and painful; who could leave them when once taken up?—boys and brave men dying who can be saved by nursing and proper diet.” It is recorded that on one occasion she saw five soldiers set aside as hopeless cases. The first duty of the overworked surgeons was with those whom there seemed to be more hope of saving. She asked to be given the care of the five men, and the surgeons consented. Assisted by one of her nurses, she tended the cases throughout the night, administering nourishment from her stores, and in the morning they were found to be in a fit condition for surgical treatment.[149] “Miss Nightingale,” said a Chelsea pensioner, in recalling his experiences at Scutari, “was always coming in and out. She used to attend to all the worst cases herself. Some of the new men were a bit shy at first, but many a time I've heard her say, ‘Never be ashamed of your wounds, my friend.’”[150] “I believe,” wrote a Civilian doctor who saw her at work, “that there was never a severe case of any kind that escaped her notice, and sometimes it was wonderful to see her at the bedside of a patient who had been admitted perhaps but an hour before, and of whose arrival one would hardly have supposed it possible she could be already cognisant.”[151]

Sometimes when exhausted nature could not be denied repose, she would depute the last sad office to another lady. “Selina [Mrs. Bracebridge] is sitting up with a dying man. Florence at last asleep, 1 A.M.” Her days were always long; for she deemed it well not to allow any of her nurses to be in the wards after eight at night. And often, when all else was quiet, and she had been sitting up to finish her heavy correspondence, she would make a final tour of the wards. A lady volunteer, who two days after her arrival was sent for to accompany Miss Nightingale on such a tour, recalled the scene. “We went round the whole of the second story, into many of the wards and into one of the upper corridors. It seemed an endless walk, and it was one not easily forgotten. As we slowly passed along, the silence was profound; very seldom did a moan or cry from those deeply suffering ones fall on our ears. A dim light burned here and there. Miss Nightingale carried her lantern, which she would set down before she bent over any of the patients. I much admired her manner to the men—it was so tender and kind.”[152] The description of these midnight vigils, given by Mr. Macdonald, the commissioner of the Times Fund, became famous, by adaptation, throughout the world:—

Famous, too, became the words which one poor fellow sent home. “What a comfort it was to see her pass even. She would speak to one and nod and smile to as many more; but she could not do it to all, you know. We lay there by hundreds; but we could kiss her shadow as it fell, and lay our heads on the pillow again, content.” “Before she came,” said another soldier's letter, “there was cussin' and swearin', but after that it was holy as a church.” Mr. Sidney Herbert read out these letters at a public meeting in November 1855.[154] Lord Ellesmere used Mr. Macdonald's description in the House of Lords in May 1856.[155] And Longfellow, in the following year, made a poem of it all, one of the most widely known poems, I suppose, that have ever been written:—

The men idolized her. They kissed her shadow, and they saluted her as she passed down their wounded ranks. “If the Queen came for to die,” said a soldier who lost a leg at the Alma, “they ought to make her queen, and I think they would.” Her lively sense of humour, which Mr. Osborne had discerned in talks with her in the hospital, was appreciated also by the patients. “She was wonderful,” said one, “at cheering up any one who was a bit low,” “She was all full of life and fun,” said another, “when she talked to us, especially if a man was a bit down-hearted.”[156] Who can tell what comfort was brought by the sound of a woman's gentle voice, the touch of a woman's gentle hand, to many a poor fellow racked by fever, or smarting from sores? And who can say how often her presence may have been as “a cup of strength in some great agony”? “The magic of her power over men was felt,” as Kinglake has described, “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.”[157] And when the hour of death came, how often must the passing have been soothed by a presence which, with words of womanly comfort, may have carried the soldier's last thoughts back to home and wife, or child? A member of Parliament, well known in London Society, Mr. Augustus Stafford, went out during the recess of 1854 to Scutari, and made himself very useful to Miss Nightingale. “He says,” wrote Monckton Milnes (Jan. 1855), “that Florence in the Hospital makes intelligible to him the Saints of the Middle Ages. If the soldiers were told that the roof had opened, and she had gone up palpably to Heaven, they would not be the least surprised. They quite believe she is in several places at once.”[158] They were impressed by her power, no less than they were touched by her tenderness, and ascribed to the Lady-in-Chief the gifts of leadership in the field. “If she were at their head, they would be in Sebastopol in a week;” was a saying often heard in the hospital wards.

II

Of all the documents that have passed under my eyes in writing this memoir, none have touched me more than a bundle of letters to and from friends and relatives of Crimean soldiers. Miss Nightingale was careful to take note of any dying man's last wishes or messages, and the letters in which she forwarded these, to wife or mother, must, by their touch of womanly sympathy, have brought balm to many a stricken heart. “My dear Miss,” writes one mother, “I feel the loss of my poor son's death very keenly, but if anything could help my grief it is the thought that he was looked to and cared for by kind friends when so many miles away from his native land.” “I beg,” writes a sister, “to return you my grateful thanks for all your kindness to my poor dear brother and for writing to tell me of his death. It is great consolation to know that both his soul and body were so kindly cared for.” “I can assure you,” writes another, “that you are beloved by every poor soldier I have seen.” Correspondence of this kind continued in the same manner when Miss Nightingale passed on from Scutari to the Crimea. One letter to a bereaved mother may be given as a representative of many:—

There is another bundle, hardly less touching, which contains letters of anxious inquiry addressed to Miss Nightingale from all parts of the United Kingdom, begging her to send, if she can, particulars of the whereabouts or of the illness or of the last hours of husband, brother, father, or son. “In order that you may know him,” writes one fond mother, “he is a straight, nice, clean-looking, light-complexioned youth.” “Died in hospital, in good frame of mind,” was Miss Nightingale's docket for the reply. Every letter was carefully answered, and every message was, I doubt not, given whenever it was in her power to do so. Many are the blessings invoked on Miss Nightingale's head. Often the writer begins by explaining that the newspapers have told of her great kindness and so she will forgive the intrusion. Others show that they take all that for granted by beginning, “Dear Friend,” or ending, “Yours affectionately.” Many wives beg her to let the soldier know that the children are well and happy. And one letter sends a message to a wounded Lancer from the girl he left behind him, “If alive, please mention my name to him.”

III

The strain upon Miss Nightingale's physical and mental powers was incessant. Her health, as it proved in the end, was seriously impaired; but during all her work at Scutari, she was never absent from her post. “You had the best opportunities,” she was asked by the Royal Commission of 1857, “for observing the condition of the soldier when he entered the hospitals, while he resided in them, when he died and was sent to the cemeteries, when he was sent home as an invalid, and when he rejoined the army?” “Yes,” she answered; “I was never out of the hospitals.” During the worst time of cholera and typhus, three of her nurses died, and seven of the army doctors. Miss Nightingale tended two of the doctors in their last moments, and the thinning, for a while, of the medical ranks increased her labours. The amount of clerical work which devolved on her was, it may be well imagined, enormous. Lady Alicia Blackwood records that when she was starting a school in the women's and children's quarters at Scutari, Miss Nightingale said laughingly, “Oh, are you really going to do that unkind thing—to teach children to write? I am so tired of writing, I sometimes wish I could not write!” The laugh must have had a certain grimness in it, I fear. The extent of the correspondence which Miss Nightingale kept up with Ministers at home, with military and medical officers at the seat of war and at Scutari, may be gathered from the foregoing chapters. Her superintendence of the nurses entailed in account-keeping and in letters to complainants among them, and to their relatives, another mass of correspondence. Then I find next, amongst her papers, piles of store-keeping accounts (mostly in her own handwriting), and other bundles of correspondence referring to offers of help in money or in kind. That Miss Nightingale ultimately broke down under the strain was natural; the marvel is that she bore up against it so long. She could not have coped with the mass of detail involved in her multifarious labours without a good deal of help. To Mr. Macdonald's assistance I have already referred; and like assistance was rendered for a time by the Rev. and Hon. Sydney Godolphin Osborne, the famous S.G.O. of letters to the Times. Mr. Kinglake devotes a charming page to “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.” The reference is probably to Mr. Percy, mentioned in a previous chapter, or possibly to Mr. William Shore, a distant relative of Miss Nightingale's father; he was put in charge of a soldiers' library. But it was Miss Nightingale's old friends, Mr. and Mrs. Bracebridge, who rendered the longest and the most helpful aid. Mrs. Bracebridge shared alike her room and her labours, and with Mr. Bracebridge cared, as we have heard, for the soldiers' wives. But Mr. Bracebridge did much else. His knowledge of the East, and his persevering good humour, determined to help everybody about everything, were invaluable. Faithful, cheery, and indefatigable, no less now among the arduous labours of Scutari than in former days of sight-seeing at Rome and in Egypt, he fetched and carried for Miss Nightingale, wrote letters or orders for her, and kept minutes of her interviews; and, at times of less strain, relieved her of visitors or callers by taking them for excursions in the Straits or to Constantinople.

IV

Miss Nightingale's thoughtfulness devised many practical ways of helping the men who were not too ill to think of their worldly affairs. In order to encourage them as much as possible to occupy themselves and to keep up a communication with home, she supplied stationery and postage stamps to those in hospital. If a soldier was illiterate or too ill to write, she or one of her nurses, or some other volunteer, would write at the sick man's dictation. Mr. Augustus Stafford, as mentioned above, spent some portion of the autumn recess (Nov.–Dec. 1854) at Scutari, and he gave his experiences to the Roebuck Committee. He described the pitiable condition of the wounded on their arrival, “their thigh and shoulder bones perfectly red from rubbing against the deck” of the vessel which had brought them from the Crimea; but then Miss Nightingale's nurses came round, “and with a precision and rapidity which you would scarcely believe, would bring the soldiers arrowroot mixed with port wine, which was the greatest comfort; the men expressed themselves very thankfully, and said that they felt themselves in heaven.” But it was in writing letters for the soldiers that this “cherished, yet unspoilt, favourite of English society”[159] spent most of his time at Scutari. Of Miss Nightingale's reading-rooms some account will be found in another chapter (XI.).

She was much touched by the men's appreciation of these attentions, and she was no less impressed by the conduct of the orderlies in the hospitals. In describing to the Secretary of State certain sanitary reforms which she carried out in the hospitals of Scutari, she wrote: “I must pay my tribute to the instinctive delicacy, the ready attention of orderlies and patients during all that dreadful period; for my sake they performed offices of this kind (which they neither would for the sake of discipline, nor for that of the importance to their own health, which they did not know), and never was there one word nor one look which a gentleman would not have used; and while paying this humble tribute to humble courtesy, the tears come into my eyes as I think how, amidst scenes of loathsome disease and death, there rose above it all the innate dignity, gentleness, and chivalry of the men (for never, surely, was chivalry so strikingly exemplified), shining in the midst of what must be considered as the lowest sinks of human misery, and preventing instinctively the use of one expression which could distress a gentlewoman.”[160]

Even in the lowest sinks of human misery there are chords which will respond to a sympathetic touch. It was the innate dignity of her bearing that struck every one who saw Florence Nightingale; and, amidst those scenes of loathsome disease and death, she was herself “the sweet presence of a good diffused.”

CHAPTER VIII

THE RELIGIOUS DIFFICULTY

Every generation has its own “religious difficulty,” by which phrase is meant, not the difficulty which the individual soul or the collective soul of a nation may find in its religious beliefs themselves, but a difficulty which intrudes itself into allied or alien matters from the sphere of religious disputation. In the present day, the religious difficulty with which we are most familiar concerns questions of education. In the days of Miss Nightingale's mission to the East there was a religious difficulty in questions of nursing.

It was not enough that such a mission as hers was conceived in the very spirit of the Founder of Christianity: “I was sick, and ye visited me.” The question was eagerly and angrily canvassed under which of the rival Christian banners the visitation of the sick soldiers should be, and was being, carried on. The country had at the time hardly recovered its mental equilibrium after the shock administered to it by the Tractarian movement, and echoes of the “No Popery” cry of 1850 were still resonant in many quarters. The religious difficulty appeared at the very start of Miss Nightingale's Crimean work, and dogged her footsteps to the end of it. I have dealt already with the difficulties which her experiment encountered from social ideas, military prejudices, official routine; but I am not sure that of all her difficulties the religious one was not the most wearing and worrying, as it was also assuredly the most unnecessary and the least excusable. It enveloped a noble undertaking in a fog of envy, strife, and futile railing.

Mr. Sidney Herbert, who was supposed to be of the High Church persuasion, had scented the difficulty from the first, as we have heard, and Miss Nightingale was keenly alive to it. They had desired to make the first party of nurses representative of all the leading sects; but owing to the abstention of a Protestant institution, the Roman Catholics and the High Church party were in a considerable majority among the thirty-eight nurses. This fact gave the alarm, and a sectarian hue-and-cry was immediately raised. It began, as I am sorry to have to say, in the Daily News; it was taken up, as goes without saying, in the so-called “religious press.” On October 28, 1854, when Miss Nightingale was on her way to Scutari, an attack upon her was given great prominence in the first-named paper. It was signed “Anti-Puseyite,” and it included the text of Mr. Herbert's letter which had somehow or other been obtained.[161] “Miss Nightingale recruited her staff of nurses from Miss Sellon's house [a High Church one] and from a Romanist establishment.” This awful fact explained “the party spirit which actuated the choice of Miss Nightingale for this important and responsible office, and which set aside Lady Maria Forester”—a lady, it seems, of Evangelical principles. It was not yet too late to remedy the offence “if the feeling of the nation be at once aroused and expressed.” “A Reader of the Bible” and other correspondents followed, and the controversy raged furiously. Mrs. Sidney Herbert's intervention, with an assurance that Miss Nightingale was somewhat Low Church, did not stop it. S. G. O. referred to it in his book. “I have heard and read,” he wrote, “with indignation the remarks hazarded upon her religious character. Her works ought to answer for her faith. If there is blame in looking for a Roman Catholic priest to attend a dying Romanist, let me share it with her—I did it again and again.”[162] An admirable avowal, but not calculated, I fear, to allay the anger of “No Popery” fanatics. The publication of Queen Victoria's letter of December 6 (p. 215), showing the confidence which Her Majesty placed in Miss Nightingale, did something to stem the tide, but for many months the feud flowed on in the press.

II

Miss Nightingale's comment, when echoes of the storm reached her on the Bosphorus, was characteristic. “They tell me,” she wrote to Mr. Herbert (Jan. 28, 1855), “that there is a religious war about poor me in the Times, and that Mrs. Herbert has generously defended me. I do not know what I have done to be so dragged before the Public. But I am so glad that my God is not the God of the High Church or of the Low, that He is not a Romanist or an Anglican—or a Unitarian. I don't believe He is even a Russian, though His events go strangely against us. (N.B.—A Greek once said to me at Salamis, ‘I do believe God Almighty is an Englishman.’)” Excellent, too, was the answer given by an Irish clergyman when asked to what sect Miss Nightingale belonged. “She belongs to a sect which, unfortunately, is a very rare one—the sect of the Good Samaritan.” Miss Nightingale was by descent a Unitarian, by practice a communicant of the Church of England; but she was addicted neither to High Church nor to Low. Her God was the God of Moral Law, a God of infinite pity and benevolence, but also One who worked out His purpose by the free will of human instruments. Her service of God was the service of Man, and her service of Man mingled efficiency with tenderness. She applied only one kind of test to a nurse: Was she a good woman, and did she know her business? To be a good woman, a religious woman, a noble woman was not in itself sufficient. “Excellent, gentle, self-devoted women,” Miss Nightingale said in a note upon some of her staff, “fit more for Heaven than for a Hospital, they flit about like angels without hands among the patients, and soothe their souls, while they leave their bodies dirty and neglected. They never complain, they are eager for self-mortification. But I came not to mortify the nurses, but to nurse the wounded.” Therefore if a nurse was a good woman and knew her business, it was nothing that she was Romanist, Anglican, High Church, Low Church, or Unitarian. If she was not a good nurse, the fact that she belonged, or did not belong, to this or that persuasion was no recommendation. Miss Nightingale was, it is true, desirous from the first to include Roman Catholics in her staff, and she did so, in spite of many difficulties, to the end. But her reasons therein were practical, not sectarian. In the first place, many of the soldiers were Roman Catholics; and, secondly, her apprenticeship in nursing had shown her the excellent qualities, as nurses, of many Catholic Sisters. But here efficiency was the test, and a Protestant Deaconess from Kaiserswerth was all one to her with a Sister from “a Romanist establishment.” And one practical advantage of vowed Sisters was that she did not lose them from marriage. One morning six nurses came in to Miss Nightingale, declaring that they one and all wished to be married. They were followed by six soldiers—sergeants and corporals—declaring their desire to claim the nurses as brides. This matrimonial deluge carried off six of her best nurses.[163]

III

Such, then, was Miss Nightingale's position; and one can understand the amused contempt with which she heard of the picture drawn of her in certain quarters as a conspirator in a Tractarian or Romanist plot. But she was a practical person, and, though herself broad-minded, took stock of a narrower world as she found it. She was intensely desirous of making her experiment of woman nurses a success, and she felt acutely the danger of wrecking it by even the suspicion of sectarian prejudice. This fact supplies a further explanation of the alarm with which she received the coming of the second party of nurses under Miss Stanley.[164] It included a batch of fifteen nuns. “The proportion of R. Catholics,” she wrote to Mr. Herbert, “which is already making an outcry, you have increased to 25 in 84. Mr. Menzies [the Principal Medical Officer] has declared that he will have two only at the General Hospital, and I cannot place them here [in the Barrack Hospital] in a greater proportion than I have done, without exciting the suspicion of the Medical Men and others.” The difficulty was ultimately adjusted, but only at the cost of infinite trouble and worry to Miss Nightingale. Her letters to Mr. Herbert are full of references to the subject, some of them very amusing, and perhaps it was her lively sense of humour that helped to carry her through this religious difficulty. “Such a tempest,” she wrote (Dec. 25, 1854), “has been brewed in this little pint pot as you could have no idea of. But I, like the Ass, have put on the Lion's skin, and when once I have done that (poor me, who never affronted any one before), I can bray so loud that I shall be heard, I am afraid, as far as England. However, this is no place for lions; and as for asses, we have enough.” One proposition made to her was that, as the doctors did not want many more woman nurses, “ten of the Protestants should be appropriated as clerical females by the chaplains, and ten of the nuns by the priests, not as nurses, but as female ecclesiastics. With this of course I have nothing to do. It being directly at variance with my instructions, I cannot of course appropriate the Government money to such a purpose.” Miss Nightingale's own proposition was to allocate the party in various proportions to various hospitals; but the Superior of the new set of nuns objected that “it would be uncanonical” for any of her party to be separated from her. Then Miss Nightingale proposed sending some of the nuns, either of the first or of the second batch, back to England; but Father Cuffe said that to send them away would be “like the driving of the Blessed Virgin through the desert by Herod.” “I believe it may be proved as a logical proposition,” wrote Miss Nightingale in the midst of her religious difficulty, “that it is impossible for me to ride through all this; my caique is upset, but I am sticking on the bottom still.” Three days later she still despaired. “The fifteen New Nuns are leading me the devil of a life, trying to get in vi et armis, and will upset the coach; there is little doubt of that.” However, she held her ground. She had started with a Protestant howl at her; she was now prepared to face “a Roman Catholic storm.” Happily the Reverend Mother of the first party of nuns was on her side, and strove to compose the canonical difficulty. To another Reverend Mother, who was less peaceably minded, Miss Nightingale often referred in her letters as “the Reverend Brickbat.” In any case, Miss Nightingale was resolved, as she wrote, “not to let our little Society become a hot-bed of Roman Catholic Intriguettes.” Ultimately it was arranged that five of the second party of nuns should go to the General Hospital, and ten to the newly opened hospital at Koulali. Miss Nightingale suspected some of the second party of a desire to proselytize; and presently she had to inform Mr. Herbert (Feb. 15, 1855) of “a charge of converting and rebaptizing before death, reported to me by the Senior Chaplain, by him to the Commandant, by him to the Commander-in-Chief.” She promptly exchanged the suspected nun.

The ingenuity of theological rancour was infinite. Having caught wind of the fact that there was some difference of view among the Roman Catholic Sisters, an Evangelical writer sought to fan the flame by denouncing the absurdity of “Catholic Nuns transferring their allegiance from the Pope of Rome to a Protestant Lady.” One of the Sisters, on hearing of this diatribe, playfully addressed Miss Nightingale as “Your Holiness,” who in turn dubbed the Sister “her Cardinal.”[165] I hereby give notice, in case Crimean letters from Miss Nightingale should chance to be printed (such as I have seen) in which she says, “I do so want my Cardinal,” that the expression signifies no dark and secret adhesion to any Prince of the Roman Church, but only a desire for the services of a particularly efficient nursing Sister. If a nurse was efficient, Miss Nightingale was on the friendliest terms with her, equally whether the nurse were Catholic or Protestant. Miss Nightingale herself was accused successively, and with equal absurdity in each case, of being prejudiced for, or against, Catholics and Protestants, and of being inimical to religious ministrations altogether.[166] The Protestant charges of proselytizing by Catholic nurses were of course met by counter-charges of attempts by Protestant nurses to convert Roman Catholic patients; and finally a chaplain solemnly appealed to the War Department in London to remove one of Miss Nightingale's staff on the ground that the nurse had been heard to avow herself a Socinian. Miss Nightingale protested successfully against any such disciplinary measure, urging that the lady, whether Socinian or not, was an excellent nurse. Much of all this perverse disputing was born of sheer ignorance and intolerance. One of Miss Stanley's ladies was accused by a certain chaplain of “circulating improper books in the wards.” Particulars were asked, and it was found that the offending book was Keble's Christian Year.[167]

No sooner was any one phase of the religious difficulty adjusted than another appeared. There were Anglicans and Roman Catholics among the Nightingale nurses, and there were others selected from English hospitals, who, so far as their religious views were concerned, might be anything or nothing. But why, it was asked, were there no Presbyterians? Representations were made to the War Office. “I object,” wrote Miss Nightingale (Feb. 19, 1855), “to the principle of sending out any one, qua sectarian, not qua nurse. But this having already been done in the case of the R.C.'s, etc., I do not see how the Presbyterians can be refused. And therefore let six trained nurses be sent out, if you think fit, of whom let two-thirds be Presbyterians. But I must bar these fat drunken old dames. Above 14 stone we will not have; the provision of bedsteads is not strong enough. Three were nearly swamped in a caique, whom Mr. Bracebridge was conducting to the ship, and, had he not walked with the fear of the police before his eyes, he might easily have swamped them whole.” The stout old dames were not Presbyterians; but, sad to relate, two of the Presbyterian party did turn out to be over-fond of drink, and Miss Nightingale had to return them to England. I regret to say that there were similar cases, not amongst the Presbyterians.

The charges and counter-charges of proselytism were referred by the chaplains to the Secretary of State. Lord Panmure, in reply (April 27, 1855), had “to say in the first place, that he has perused the correspondence with great regret, and that he deeply laments to find that religious differences have arisen to such an extent as to mar the united energies and labours of those who are devoting themselves with such disinterestedness and heroic courage and success to the relief of the sick and wounded.” The Minister then proceeded to promulgate instructions designed to prevent any proselytism by the nurses and Sisters. Unfortunately, his dispatch was so worded as to make things, from Miss Nightingale's point of view, no better, but rather worse. “The instructions,” she wrote to Lady Canning (Sept. 9, 1855), “have been so completely misunderstood that they have been my principal difficulty. The R.C.'s who before were quite amenable have chosen to construe the rule that they ‘are not to enter upon the discussion of religious subjects with any patients other than those of their own faith,’ to mean therefore with all of their own faith, and the second party of nuns who came out now wander over the whole Hospital out of nursing hours, not confining themselves to their own wards, nor even to patients, but ‘instructing’ (it is their own word) groups of Orderlies and Convalescents in the corridors, doing the work each of ten chaplains, and bringing ridicule upon the whole thing, while they quote the words of the War Office.” Lady Canning, who was at this time acting as Miss Nightingale's agent for the enlistment of nurses, had proposed to embody Lord Panmure's instructions in the printed Rules and Regulations. Miss Nightingale begged her to do no such thing. I doubt not that Miss Nightingale's own verbal instructions were less ambiguous. She was one who never failed to say exactly what she meant.

IV

A great obstacle with which Miss Nightingale's work in the East had to contend throughout was the scarcity at the time of properly trained nurses. She had long ago formed a resolve to remedy this defect; the seriousness of it was still further enforced upon her mind by painful experience in the Crimean War; and her resolve was the more strengthened. The religious difficulty—demanding that nurses should be selected, to some extent, not qua nurses, but qua sectarians—accentuated the obstacle of inadequate training, which, however, would in any case have existed. The case is excellently put, in terms which doubtless reflect Miss Nightingale's own views, in a letter from Lady Verney to Mrs. Gaskell (May 17, 1855):—

It is the fact, though it is not popularly known, that Miss Nightingale was at this time strongly opposed to “lady” nurses. She objected to them, not because they were ladies, but because they were unlikely to be well trained. Pious and benevolent ladies were more given, she said, to “spiritual flirtations with the patients,” than apt at the proper business of surgical nursing. It was the trained hospital nurses that she preferred. There were among the 125 women who passed through her hands in the East more efficient and less, and in so large a flock there were some black sheep. But amongst the band, in all classes and of all denominations, there were devoted and competent women, whose services deserve to be held in grateful remembrance beside those of their Lady-in-Chief. And as I have had to record Miss Nightingale's criticism upon some of the Roman Catholics among her flock, it should be added that of others she wrote to Mr. Herbert: “They are the truest Christians I ever met with—invaluable in their work—devoted, heart and head, to serve God and mankind—not to intrigue for their Church.” To the Reverend Superior, who came out from Bermondsey with the first party of nuns, Miss Nightingale was particularly attached. “She writes,” said Cardinal Wiseman, “that great part of her success is due to Rev. Mother of Bermondsey, without whom it would have been a failure.”[168]

The aspect of Miss Nightingale's work, touched upon in this chapter, adds another to the accumulation of difficulties with which she had to deal. It was the one which troubled her most. “In this sink of misery, in this tussle of life or death,” she felt the bitter futility of personal grievances and religious differences. It is worry, more than work, that kills; and the religious difficulty was perhaps the last straw which caused the Lady-in-Chief to break down, as we shall hear in the next chapter, under her heavy load of responsibility and care.

CHAPTER IX

TO THE CRIMEA—ILLNESS
(May–August 1855)

In the spring of 1855 Miss Nightingale decided to leave Scutari for a while in order to visit the hospitals in the Crimea. The conditions at Scutari were now greatly improved. Sanitary works had been executed. The hospitals were better supplied. The pressure in the wards, caused by the terrible winter before Sebastopol, was relieved. There were only 1100 cases in the Barrack Hospital, and of those only 100 were in bed. The rate of mortality had fallen from 42 per cent to 22 per thousand of the cases treated. The siege was likely soon to be accompanied by assaults, and the pressure might rather be in the hospitals at Balaclava, where the sick and wounded were if possible to remain, in order to avoid the sufferings of the sea passage to Scutari.

In the Crimea, besides the regimental hospitals, there were four general hospitals. There was the General Hospital at Balaclava, established after the British occupation in September 1854. There was the Castle Hospital, consisting of huts on the “Genoese heights” above Balaclava, opened in April 1855. There was the Hospital of St. George's Monastery, also consisting of huts, intended for convalescent and ophthalmic cases; and, lastly, there were the Hospitals of the Land Transport Corps, again consisting of huts, near Karani. All these hospitals had a complement of female nurses, though the Monastery Hospital not until December 1855, and the Land Transport Hospitals not until 1856. In the spring of 1855, then, there were already female nurses at the General Hospital and the Castle Hospital, under their own superintendents, but all ultimately responsible to Miss Nightingale—as she apprehended, and as the War Office intended. She was now anxious to inspect these hospitals; to increase the efficiency of the female nursing establishments; and, in particular, to introduce those washing and cooking arrangements which had been productive of so much benefit at Scutari. Her visit of inspection was approved by the War Office; and, by instructions dated April 27, she was invested with full authority as Almoner of the Free Gifts in all the British Hospitals in the Crimea. But in other respects her position was somewhat ambiguous. The original instructions, issued by Mr. Herbert, had named her as Superintendent of the female nurses in all the British military hospitals in Turkey; and these words gave a standing-ground to her opponents in the Crimea. The intention of the War Office was to give her general superintendence, but to relieve her of direct responsibility for the nurses in the Crimea so long as she was at Scutari. The matter was not, however, cleared up till a later date,[169] and the indefiniteness of her position in the Crimea exposed her to infinite worry and intrigues.

On May 2, Miss Nightingale set forth from Scutari, where Mrs. Bracebridge was left in charge:—