The events of the war in the autumn of 1854 will convey some idea of the number of wounded men crowded into the hospitals on the Bosphorus when Florence Nightingale entered upon her duties at Scutari. Balaclava was fought on October 25th, four days after she left London; the battle of Inkerman followed on November 5th, the day after she landed. Before the average woman would have found time to unpack her boxes, Miss Nightingale was face to face with a task unparalleled in its magnitude and appalling in its nature.

The wounded arrived by the shipload until every ward, both in the General and in the Barrack Hospital, was crowded to excess, and the men lay in double rows down the long corridors, forming several miles of suffering humanity. During these terrible days Florence Nightingale was known to stand for twenty hours at a time, on the arrivals of fresh detachments of sick, apportioning quarters, directing her nurses and attending at the most painful operations where her presence might soothe and support. She would spend hours over men dying of cholera or fever. “Indeed,” wrote one who watched her work, “the more awful to every sense any particular case might be, the more certainly might be seen her slight form bending over him, administering to his ease by every means in her power and seldom quitting his side until death released him.”

Her womanly heart prompted her to acts of humanity which at once made her recognised by the men as the soldier’s friend. When the wounded were brought by hundreds to Scutari after Inkerman, the first duty of the surgeons was to separate the hopeful cases from the desperate. On one occasion Miss Nightingale saw five soldiers set aside in a hopeless condition. She inquired if nothing could be done for the poor fellows, and the surgeons replied that their first duty was with those whom there seemed to be more hope of saving.

“Will you give me these five men?” said the Lady-in-Chief.

“Do as you like with them,” replied the surgeons; “we think their case is hopeless.”

If life could be saved, Florence Nightingale was determined to save it, and throughout the night, assisted by one of the nurses, she sat beside the men, feeding them with a spoon until their senses awakened and their strength began to return. She washed their wounds, cheered their hearts with kind words, and in the morning had the satisfaction of finding that they were in a fit condition to be operated on.

At another time a Highland soldier was about to undergo an amputation. Miss Nightingale asked that the operation might be delayed, as she thought that careful nursing might render it unnecessary. Through her unremitting care the man’s arm was saved; and when asked what he felt towards his preserver, he said that the only mode he had of giving vent to his feelings was to kiss her shadow when it fell on his pillow as she passed through the wards on her nightly rounds.

When cholera and plague cases came in, foaming at the mouth and black in the face, none were too bad for Florence Nightingale’s patient care. Her influence over the men was established from the first. She was their “good angel” and their confidence in her was unbounded.

Still, her task was a heavy one in these first days. There was official prejudice to overcome, and an overwhelming number of patients to deal with in a huge building devoid of the commonest hospital accessories and arrangements. The Barrack “Hospital,” so called, had been designed only for soldiers’ barracks, so that when suddenly converted into a hospital it lacked almost everything necessary for the sick, and the supplies forwarded from England had by a series of misadventures been delayed. A letter sent home by one of the nurses six days after the arrival of Miss Nightingale and her band may be quoted as giving a graphic picture of the state of affairs at this time. She writes:—

“I have come out here as one of the Government nurses, and the position in which we are placed induces me to write and ask you, at once, to send out a few dozens of wine, or in short anything which may be useful for the wounded or dying, hundreds of whom are now around us, under this roof, filling up even the passages to the very rooms we occupy. Government is liberal, and for one moment I would not complain of their desire to meet all our wants, but with such a number of the wounded coming in from Sebastopol, it does appear absolutely impossible to meet the wants of those who are dying of dysentery and exhaustion; out of four wards committed to my care, eleven men have died in the night, simply from exhaustion, which, humanly speaking, might have been stopped, could I have laid my hand at once on such nourishment as I knew they ought to have had.

“It is necessary to be as near the scene of war as we are, to know the horrors which we have seen and heard of. I know not which sight is most heartrending—to witness fine strong men and youths worn down by exhaustion and sinking under it, or others coming in fearfully wounded.

“The whole of yesterday was spent, first in sewing the men’s mattresses together, and then in washing them, and assisting the surgeons, when we could, in dressing their ghastly wounds, and seeing the poor fellows made as easy as their circumstances would admit of, after their five days’ confinement on board ship, during which space their wounds were not dressed.

“Miss Nightingale, under whom we work, is well fitted in every way to fill her arduous post, the whole object of her life having hitherto been the superintendence of hospitals abroad. Wine and bottles of chicken broth, preserved meat for soups, etc., will be most acceptable.

“We have not seen a drop of milk, and the bread is extremely sour. The butter is most filthy—it is Irish butter in a state of decomposition; and the meat is more like moist leather than food. Potatoes we are waiting for until they arrive from France.”

Nursing in a hospital which received soldiers straight from the battlefield, their wounds aggravated by days of neglect, was a difficult task under the most favourable circumstances, but when intensified by the lack even of proper food, such as the above letter discloses, the task was indeed formidable.

There was an organising brain, however, at work in that dreadful Barrack Hospital now, and within ten days of her arrival, in spite of the terrible influx of patients which taxed her powers to the utmost, Miss Nightingale had fitted up an impromptu kitchen, from which eight hundred men were daily supplied with well-cooked food and other comforts. It was largely supplied with the invalid food from the private stores of the Lady-in-Chief, which fortunately she had brought out with her in the Vectis. Beef-tea, chicken broth, jelly, and little delicacies unheard of before were now administered to the sick by the gentle hands of women nurses. Small wonder that the poor fellows could often only express their gratitude in voices half-choked with sobs!

One Crimean veteran told the writer that when he received a basin of arrowroot on his first arrival at the hospital early in the morning, he said to himself, “Tommy, me boy, that’s all you’ll get into your inside this blessed day, and think yourself lucky you’ve got that. But two hours later, if another of them blessed angels didn’t come entreating of me to have just a little chicken broth! Well, I took that, thinking maybe it was early dinner, and before I had well done wondering what would happen next, round the nurse came again with a bit o’ jelly, and all day long at intervals they kept on bringing me what they called ‘a little nourishment.’ In the evening, Miss Nightingale she came and had a look at me, and says she, ‘I hope you’re feeling better.’ I could have said, ‘Ma’am, I feels as fit as a fightin’ cock,’ but I managed to git out somethin’ a bit more polite.”

Hitherto, not only had there been a lack of food, but the cooking had been done by the soldiers themselves in the most free and easy manner. Meat and vegetables were boiled together in the huge coppers, of which there were thirteen in the kitchen attached to the barracks. Separate portions were enclosed in nets, and all plunged together into the seething coppers, and taken up when occasion demanded. Some things were served up done to rags, while others were almost raw. This kind of cooking was bad enough for men in ordinary health, but for the sick it meant death.

The daily comforts which the nurses’ kitchen afforded received ample testimony from the witnesses before Mr. Roebuck’s Commission for inquiry into the conduct of the war. In one day sometimes thirteen gallons of chicken broth and forty gallons of arrowroot were distributed amongst the sick. At first nearly all the invalid food had to come from the private stores brought out by the Lady-in-Chief, which the charitable at home replenished as the true state of affairs became known, for not only was there a deficiency in the Government stores, but the things supplied officially were often not fit for food. It was the general testimony of witnesses before the Commission that Miss Nightingale’s services were invaluable in the hospital as well for what she did herself as for the manner in which she kept the purveyors to their duties.

The method of distributing the Government stores was as erratic as the cooking. There appeared to be no regulations as to time. Things asked for in a morning were probably not forthcoming until evening, when the cooking fires in the barracks kitchen were all but out. Nothing could be obtained until various “service rules” had been observed. An official board must inspect and approve all stores before they could be distributed. One can think of nothing more exasperating to the Lady-in-Chief, in her responsible duty towards the sick, than to see exhausted men dying for want of the proper nourishment because the board of inspection had not completed its arrangements. On one recorded occasion she took the law into her own hands, and insisted that the stores should be given out, inspected or not. She could not ask under-officials to incur the penalty of martial law by fulfilling her behests, but she could brave the authorities herself and did so. The storehouse was opened on the responsibility of the Lady-in-Chief, and the goods procured for the languishing soldiery.

Miss Nightingale’s defiance of red-tape made her some enemies, and the “groove-going men,” as Kinglake calls them, “uttered touching complaints, declaring that the Lady-in-Chief did not choose to give them time, and that the moment a want declared itself, she made haste to supply it herself.”

“This charge,” says the same authority in an appendix note, “was so utterly without foundation as to be the opposite of truth. The Lady-in-Chief used neither to issue her stores, nor allow any others to do so, until the want of them had been evidenced by a duly signed requisition. Proof of this is complete, and has been furnished even by adversaries of the Lady-in-Chief.”

After her improvised kitchen was in working order, Miss Nightingale next set to work to establish a laundry for the hospital and institute a system for disinfecting the clothes of fever and cholera patients. Up to the time of her arrival there was practically little washing done, the “authorities” had only succeeded in getting seven shirts washed, and no attempt was made to separate the bed-linen and garments of infectious patients from those suffering only from wounds. Washing contracts were in existence, but availed little. At the General Hospital the work was in the hands of a corps of eight or ten Armenians. There was no fault to be found with the manner in which they did the work, only they stole so habitually that when a man sent his shirt to be washed he was never sure that he would get it back again, and in consequence the sick were unwilling to part with their garments.

At the Barrack Hospital a Levantine named Uptoni had the washing contract, but broke it so repeatedly that the sick were practically without clean linen, except when they were able to get the soldiers’ wives to do a little washing for them. Such was the state of affairs in a hospital where two to three thousand men lay wounded and sick.

Miss Nightingale hired a house close to the hospital and set up an efficient laundry, partly out of her private funds, and partly out of money subscribed to The Times fund started for the relief of the soldiery. She had it fitted up with coppers and regulated under sanitary conditions, and there five hundred shirts and one hundred and fifty other articles were washed each week.

There was a further difficulty to meet, and that was to provide the men with a change of linen while the soiled went to the wash. Many of the wounded had been obliged to leave their knapsacks behind and had no clothing save the dirty and dilapidated garments in which they arrived. In the course of the first three months Miss Nightingale provided the men with ten thousand shirts from her own private sources.

There was the same scarcity in surgical dressings, and the nurses had to employ every minute that could be spared from the bedside of the sufferers in making lint, bandages, amputation stumps, and in sewing mattresses and making pillows.

Great confusion existed with regard to the dispensing of drugs. The apothecaries’ store at Scutari, which supplied the hospitals and indeed the whole army in the Crimea, was in the same state of confusion as everything else. The orderlies left to dispense often did not know what the store contained. On one occasion Mrs. Bracebridge, Miss Nightingale’s invaluable friend and helper, applied three times for chloride of lime and was told there was none. Miss Nightingale insisted on a more thorough search being made, with the result that 90 lbs. were discovered.

The defective system of orderlies was another evil which the Lady-in-Chief had to contend with. These men had been taken from the ranks, most of them were convalescents, and they did not trouble to understand the duties of an orderly because they were liable to return and serve in the ranks. The advent of the ladies had an excellent effect upon the orderlies in arousing their sense of chivalry, and they soon grew to think it an honour to serve the Lady-in-Chief. During all that dreadful period, when she had to tax the patience and devotion of the orderlies and other soldiers attending in the wards to the utmost, not one of them failed her “in obedience, thoughtful attention, and considerate delicacy.” For her they toiled and endured a strain and stress of work which mere officialdom would have failed to obtain. Yet “never,” Miss Nightingale says, “came from any one 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 arose 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.”

If such was the chivalrous devotion yielded by the orderlies and convalescent soldiers, it can readily be understood that the prostrate sufferers worshipped the Lady-in-Chief. Her presence in the operating room acted like magic. Case after case became amenable to the surgeon under the calming influence of her presence. It is not surprising that men prostrate with weakness and agonised with pain often rebelled against an operation. Anæsthetics were not administered as freely then as they are to-day, and many brave fellows craved death rather than meet the surgeon’s knife. But when they felt the pitying eyes of the Lady-in-Chief fixed upon them, saw her gentle face, heard her soothing words of comfort and hope for the future, and were conscious that she had set herself to bear the pain of witnessing pain, the men would obey her silent command, and submit and endure, strengthened by her presence.

Those who at first were inclined to cavil at the power which the Government had placed in the hands of the Lady-in-Chief speedily reversed their judgment, as day by day they witnessed her strength of character and her amazing fortitude and self-control in the midst of scenes which tried the strongest men.

The magnitude of Miss Nightingale’s work in the hospital wards has caused historians to overlook the womanly help and sympathy which she gave to the soldiers’ wives who had come out with their husbands. Even Kinglake, who is unsurpassed in his admiration for the Lady-in-Chief, does not mention this side of her work.

When Miss Nightingale arrived at Scutari she found a number of poor women, the wives or the widows (may be) of soldiers who had gone to the front, living in a distressing condition, literally in the holes and corners of the Barrack Hospital. These women, being detached from their husbands’ regiments, had no claim for rations and quarters. The colonel of each regiment had power to allow a certain number of women to accompany their husbands on foreign service. Each woman belonged to her regiment, and if separated, even through no choice of her own, there was no provision for her. No organisation to deal with them existed at this period, because for forty years there had been no general depôt of an English army. The widows were by degrees sent home by order of the Commandant, but the other women, many of them wives of soldiers in the hospital or of orderlies, refused to return home without their husbands.

Miss Nightingale found these poor creatures, for the most part respectable women, without decent clothing—their clothes having worn out—going about bonnetless and shoeless and living as best they could. After many changes from one “hole” to another the women were housed by the authorities in three or four dark rooms in the damp basement of the hospital. The only privacy to be obtained was by hanging up rags of clothes on lines. There, by the light of a rushlight, the meals were taken, the sick attended, and there the babies were born and nourished. There were twenty-two babies born from November to December, and many more during the winter.

It needs no words to picture the gratitude of the women to the dear Lady-in-Chief who sought them out in their abject misery, gave them decent clothing and food from her own stores in the Nurses’s Tower, and saw that the little lives ushered into the world amid the horrors and privations of war had at least tender care. At the end of January, owing to a broken drain in the basement, fever broke out, and Miss Nightingale now persuaded the Commandant to remove the women to healthier quarters. A Turkish house was procured by requisition and Miss Nightingale had it cleaned and furnished out of her funds. Throughout the winter the women were assisted with money, food and clothes, and outfits were provided for widows returning home. Miss Nightingale also organised a plan to give employment to all the soldiers’ wives who were willing to work in her laundry at ten shillings to fourteen shillings a week. The upper part of the wash-house was divided into a sick ward and a laundry, and offered a refuge for the more respectable women. She obtained situations for others in families in Constantinople. A school was also started for the children. Lady Alicia Blackwood, wife of Dr. Blackwood, an army chaplain, visited the women and helped to care for them. Through Miss Nightingale’s initiative about five hundred women were raised from their wretched condition at Scutari and enabled to earn honest livings. “When,” wrote Miss Nightingale later, “the improvements in our system which the war must suggest are discussed, let not the wife and child of the soldier be forgotten.”

While Florence Nightingale was thus heroically grappling with disease, suffering, and death, and bringing order out of chaos in the hospitals at Scutari, small-minded fanatics at home were attacking her religious opinions. Some declared that she had gone to the East for the purpose of spreading Puseyism amongst the British soldiers, others that she had become a Roman Catholic, some people were certain that she was a Unitarian, while others whispered the dreadful heresy, “Supralapsarian.” A clergyman warned his flock against subscribing money for the soldiers in the East if it was to pass through Popish hands. Controversy waxed strong in The Times and The Standard, and Mr. and Mrs. Sidney Herbert warmly defended their absent friend.

“It is melancholy to think,” wrote Mrs. Herbert to a lady parishioner of an attacking clergyman, “that in Christian England no one can undertake anything without these most uncharitable and sectarian attacks, and, had you not told me so, I could scarcely believe that a clergyman of the Established Church could have been the mouthpiece of such slander. Miss Nightingale is a member of the Established Church of England, and what is called rather Low Church, but ever since she went to Scutari her religious opinions and character have been assailed on all points. It is a cruel return to make towards one to whom all England owes so much.”

An Irish clergyman, when asked to what sect Miss Nightingale belonged, made the effective reply: “She belongs to a sect which, unfortunately, is a very rare one—the sect of the Good Samaritan.”

Queen Victoria and the Prince Consort had from the first taken a sympathetic interest in Miss Nightingale’s work, and the following letter from the Queen to Mr. Sidney Herbert did much towards silencing adverse criticism, as it showed the confidence which her Majesty had in Miss Nightingale and her nurses:—

This kindly letter, coming straight from the good Queen’s heart, without any official verbiage to smother the personal feeling, was forwarded to Miss Nightingale, and on its receipt she placed it in the hands of one of the chaplains, who went from ward to ward reading it to the men, ending each recital of the letter with “God save the Queen,” in which the poor sufferers joined with such vigour as they possessed. Copies of the letter were afterwards posted up on the walls of the hospital.

Although the Lady-in-Chief’s work and personality had already overcome much official prejudice, there is no doubt that Queen Victoria’s letter greatly strengthened her position. It was now evident that it was to Miss Nightingale that the Sovereign looked for tidings of the wounded and in her that she trusted for the amelioration of their terrible sufferings.

When Christmas Day dawned in the great Barrack Hospital in that terrible war winter of 1854, it at least found its suffering inmates lying in cleanliness, with comfortable surroundings and supplied with suitable food. Not a man throughout the huge building but had such comforts as the willing hands and tender hearts of women could devise. This change had been brought about in less than two months by the clear head and managing brain which ruled in the Nurses’ Tower.

The “Merry Christmas” passed from man to man was not a misnomer, despite the pain and suffering; the men were at least “merry” that the “nightingales” had come. When the Queen’s health was drunk, in some cases from medicine glasses, each man in his heart coupled with the loyal toast the names of the Lady-in-Chief and her devoted band.