II
From the moment when public announcement of her mission was made, she had, indeed, become a popular heroine. Though well known in Society, she had been as yet a stranger to public fame; so much so that the Times itself, in printing the announcement (Oct. 19), said: “We are authorised to state that Mrs. Nightingale,” etc. Delane cannot have kept his eye on the news-columns, for not until some days had elapsed was it discovered to the public that “Mrs.” Nightingale was in fact “Miss.” “Who is ‘Mrs.’ Nightingale?” was a heading in the Examiner (Oct. 28), and the question was answered in a biographical article. Some passages of it deserve record here, for it went the round of the press throughout the world, and was the source from which, from that day to this, the popular idea of Florence Nightingale has been derived. The article stated succinctly, and with substantial accuracy, the course of her life; dwelt upon the facts that she was “young, graceful, feminine, rich, and popular”; enlarged, with less accuracy, upon her delight in the “palpable and heart-felt attractions” of her home; described her forsaking the “assemblies, lectures, concerts, exhibitions, and all the entertainments for taste and intellect with which London in its season abounds,” in order to sit beside the sick and dying; and concluded thus: She had set out for the scene of war
… at the risk of her own life, at the pang of separation from all her friends and family, and at the certainty of encountering hardship, dangers, toils, and the constantly renewing scene of human suffering, amid all the worst horrors of war. There are few who would not recoil from such realities, but Miss Nightingale shrank not, and at once accepted the request that was made her to form and control the entire nursing establishment for all sick and wounded soldiers and sailors in the Levant. While we write, this deliberate, sensitive, and highly-endowed young lady[165] is already at her post, rendering the holiest of women's charities to the sick, the dying, and the convalescent. There is a heroism in dashing up the heights of Alma in defiance of death and all mortal opposition, and let all praise and honour be, as they are, bestowed upon it; but there is a quiet forecasting heroism and largeness of heart in this lady's resolute accumulation of the powers of consolation, and her devoted application of them, which rank as high and are at least as pure. A sage few will no doubt condemn, sneer at, or pity an enthusiasm which to them seems eccentric, or at best misplaced; but to the true heart of the country it will speak home, and be there felt that there is not one of England's proudest and purest daughters who at this moment stands on so high a pinnacle as Florence Nightingale.
The discovery by the public that the head of the Nursing Expedition was not “Mrs.” Nightingale, a matron, but a young lady, “graceful, rich, and popular,” added to the enthusiasm which her devotion called forth. Her services were rendered gratuitously; her necessary expenses were to be defrayed by the Government, and officialdom opined that no voluntary contributions, either in money or in kind, were needed. Happily for the comfort of our soldiers in the East, private individuals took a different view, and—in addition to the Times Fund—donations were sent to Miss Nightingale personally, both by her friends and by the general public. An account rendered after her return[78] from the East shows that from the general public she received nearly £7000 in money. This fund, added to the help which she obtained from the Times, and supplemented by expenditure out of her private purse, enabled Miss Nightingale greatly to extend the scope of her work. The statement that she was rich requires some qualification. Her father was rich, but the personal allowance which he had made to her, when she declared her independence in 1853, was £500 a year, and it remained at this figure for several years. During her mission to the East she devoted the whole of it to her work.
Gifts in kind and offers of personal service also poured in. Now that Miss Nightingale was at sea, the task of dealing with such matters was undertaken by her sister and a friend. The Nightingale family had taken a house for the time in Cavendish Square (No. 4), which became the headquarters of a charitable bureau.
“I am well nigh writ out,” wrote Lady Verney to Madame Mohl (Nov. 6), “170 letters to answer in the last fortnight, and very difficult ones, some of them. I should like you to hear a batch of the offers of all kinds we receive, some so pretty, some so queer. Old linen is abating, I am happy to say; even knitted socks are slacker; but nurses, rabble and respectable, ladies, and very much the reverse, continue to rain. It is tremendous; however, having reached No. 276, we are going to shut the door. Mary Stanley and I sit daily at the receipt of custom, and funny things do we see and hear! Human nature is a wondrous work, whether of God Almighty I sometimes begin to doubt.”
It is worth noting, in view of an unfortunate dispute that presently arose, that both Lady Verney and Miss Stanley distinctly understood that additional nurses would only be sent “if Flo asks.” All applicants were so informed; but so keen was the desire to serve, that “many ladies,” so Lady Verney wrote, “are undergoing hospital training on chance.”
III
Miss Nightingale, meanwhile, was at sea on her way to Constantinople, revolving many things in her mind. She had been called to a mission upon which issues very near to her heart depended. If it succeeded, then, as Mr. Herbert had written to her, not only would an enormous amount of good be done now to the sick and wounded, but “a prejudice would have been broken through, and a precedent established, which would multiply the good to all time.” And so, as we all know, it was destined to be. But at the time the fate of the experiment was doubtful. It was Mr. Herbert's conviction that no one except Florence Nightingale could make it succeed, but it was by no means certain that even she could do so. She took in her hands the reputation of the Minister who trusted her, and her own; and not her reputation only, but the hopes, the aspirations, the ambitions which had ruled her life.
She determined to succeed, and she counted the difficulties which would confront her. Writing two years later and giving account of her stewardship, she paid her tribute of thanks to those “among the officials, medical as well as military, to whose benevolence, ability, and unselfish devotion to duty she was indebted for facilities, without which, in a position such as hers, new to the service, and exposed to much criticism and difficulty, she would have been utterly unable to perform the work entrusted to her.”[79] She saw from the start that she would be exposed, in the very nature of the case, to some medical jealousy and much military prejudice.
The idea of employing female nurses at Scutari had been mooted before the army left for the East, but was abandoned, as the Duke of Newcastle explained, because “it was not liked by the military authorities.”[80] Of the military prejudice against the intrusion of women, even for the gentle office of nursing, into the rough work of war, some entertaining illustrations are happily on record. Lieutenant-Colonel Sterling, afterwards Sir Anthony Sterling, K.C.B., was on active service during the Crimean campaign, first as brigade-major, and afterwards as assistant adjutant-general to the Highland division. He was an elder brother of Carlyle's John Sterling, and himself possessed of some literary skill. “A solid, substantial man,” Carlyle calls him; he was also a man who loved to stand by the ancient ways. He wrote a series of lively letters during the campaign, and in his will directed that they should be published. Nowhere, so clearly as in Sterling's Highland Brigade in the Crimea, have I found contemporary evidence of the prejudices against which the experiment of Mr. Herbert and Miss Nightingale had to contend. During Miss Nightingale's visit to Balaclava in 1855, some dispute arose among the nurses. “Miss—— has added herself,” wrote Colonel Sterling, “to the hospital of the 42nd; and will not acknowledge the voice of the Nightingale, who has written an official letter to Lord Raglan on the subject. I suppose he will order a court-martial composed of nurses, who will administer queer justice.” Our Colonel is something of a wag. He cannot help laughing at “the Nightingale,” because, as he explains, he has such “a keen sense of the ridiculous.” He is so pleased with his quip about the female court-martial that he returns to it in another letter. He is tickled, too, by a saying of the mess-room, that “Miss Nightingale has shaved her head to keep out vermin.” One can almost hear the honest Colonel's guffaw as he wonders whether “she will wear a wig or a helmet?” Women, he supposes, imagine that “war can be made without wounds”; they will be teaching us how to fight next; and as for their ideas of nursing, why some of the ladies actually took to “scrubbing floors”! It amused him, but angered him no less. He has to admit that he believes “the Nightingale” has been of some use; but he bitterly resents her “capture” of orderlies for mere purposes of nursing, and when he is asked, “When will she go home?” answers with Christopher Sly, “Would it were done.” “However,” he writes, “—— (presumably Sidney Herbert) is gone; and I hope there is not to be found another Minister who will allow these absurdities.” Miss Nightingale read Sir Anthony's book when it came out in 1895, and made some severe marginalia upon it; remarking upon his “absolute ignorance of sanitary things,” noting the “misprints as a fair index to the whole,” and finally dismissing the book as “one long string of Seniority complaints.” But I protest that she need not have been so angry. And, indeed, perhaps she was not so angry as she seemed, for her caustic pen was not always a true index of her mind. For my part I take my hat off to Sir Anthony Absolute. His honest, old-fashioned outbursts let in a flood of light upon one side of the difficulties which were to confront Miss Nightingale upon landing at Scutari.
She pondered much also upon the possibilities of friction with the medical officers; and here, too, our Colonel has some light to give us. “The Chief Medical Officer out here,” he wrote, “ought to have been intrusted with Nightingale powers.” The Service in all its branches stuck together, it will be seen, and no blame to it for that! But if a fighting colonel smarted under what he deemed a slight upon an army medical officer, how much more might the Medical Service itself be expected to resent any encroachment upon its appointed province! How keenly it did resent such encroachment may be gathered from the Life and Letters of Sir John Hall, M.D., by Mr. Mitra, whose book supplies us with the same kind of illustration in regard to the army doctors that we may gather from Colonel Sterling's in regard to the soldiers. Sir John, like Sir Anthony, thought the whole thing “very droll.” He was stationed in the Crimea, and we shall hear something of the strained relations between him and Miss Nightingale, when we follow her thither. But at Scutari also, there were some few medical officers who retained even to the last a ridiculous jealousy of any “meddling” by Miss Nightingale and her staff.[81] She foresaw this danger, and made up her mind to avert it by every means in her power.
And there was a third danger which she foresaw also. Not only had she to overcome military prejudice and to avert medical jealousy, but she had also to prevent religious disputation. This last task was beyond her powers, as it has ever proved beyond those of men, women, and angels; for by this cause even the angels fell. No work, however beneficent, has ever yet been found beyond the capacity of the odium theologicum to mar and embitter. Miss Nightingale's mission did not escape the common lot, as we shall hear; but she was keenly sensible of the danger.
Miss Nightingale pondered over all these things as the ship sped on its way to the Golden Horn; and the more she pondered, the more she was driven to decide upon a course of action, very different from what many people supposed that she would adopt, but entirely consonant with the bent of her own mind. She saw quite clearly that, if she was to avoid the rocks ahead of her, what was needed was not so much genial, impulsive kindness, reckless of rules and defiant of constituted authority, but rather strict method, stern discipline, and rigid subordination. The criticisms to which she exposed herself in the superintendence of her nurses were based, not upon laxity, but upon her alleged severity.[82] As for her own conduct, she supposed that her work, when she landed, would be that of the matron of a hospital. If, as it turned out, she became rather (as she put it) mistress of a barrack, it was because she found herself in the midst of conditions which the constituted authorities at home had not foreseen, and before which those on the spot stood powerless. Miss Nightingale was happily possessed of an original mind and a resolute will. She saw evils which cried out for remedies; and new occasions taught new duties.
CHAPTER III
THE HOSPITALS AT SCUTARI
Dearth of creative brain-power showed itself in our Levantine hospitals, for there industrious functionaries worked hard at their accustomed tasks, and doggedly omitted to innovate at times when not to be innovating was surrendering, as it were, at discretion to want and misery. But 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.—Kinglake.
Miss Nightingale reported the arrival of her expedition at Constantinople in a short note to her parents:—
Constantinople, November 4, on board Vectis.—Dearest People—Anchored off the Seraglio point, waiting for our fate whether we can disembark direct into the Hospital, which, with our heterogeneous mass, we should prefer.
At six o'clock yesterday morn I staggered on deck to look at the plains of Troy, the tomb of Achilles, the mouths of the Scamander, the little harbour of Tenedos, between which and the mainshore our Vectis, with steward's cabins and galley torn away, blustering, creaking, shrieking, storming, rushed on her way. It was in a dense mist that the ghosts of the Trojans answered my cordial hail, through which the old Gods, nevertheless, peered down from the hill of Ida upon their old plain. My enthusiasm for the heroes though was undiminished by wind and wave.
We made the castles of Europe and Asia (Dardanelles) by eleven, but also reached Constantinople this morn in a thick and heavy rain, through which the Sophia, Sulieman, the Seven Towers, the walls, and the Golden Horn looked like a bad daguerrotype washed out.
We have not yet heard what the Embassy or Military Hospital have done for us, nor received our orders.
Bad news from Balaclava. You will hear the awful wreck of our poor cavalry, 400 wounded, arriving at this moment for us to nurse. We have just built another hospital at the Dardanelles.[172]
You will want to know about our crew. One has turned out ill, others will do.
(Later) Just starting for Scutari. We are to be housed in the Hospital this very afternoon. Everybody is most kind. The fresh wounded are, I believe, to be placed under our care. They are landing them now.
The Hospital, to which Miss Nightingale refers, was to be the chief scene of her labours for the next six months, and a few particulars about it and other hospitals, in which the nursing was under her superintendence, must be given in order to make future proceedings intelligible. The principal hospitals of the British army during the Crimean War—four in number—were at Scutari (or in its immediate neighbourhood), the suburb of mournful beauty which looks across to Constantinople from the Asiatic side of the Bosphorus.
The first hospital to be established was in the Turkish Military Hospital. This was made over to the British in May 1854, and was called by them The General Hospital. Having been originally designed for a hospital, and being given up to the English partially fitted, it was, wrote Miss Nightingale, “reduced to good order early, by the unwearied efforts of the first-class Staff Surgeon in introducing a good working system. It was then maintained in excellent condition till the close of the war.”[83] It had accommodation for 1000 patients, but the Battle of the Alma showed that much larger accommodation would be wanted.
North of the General Hospital, and near to the famous Turkish cemetery of Scutari, are the Selimiyeh Barracks—a great yellow building with square towers at each angle. This building was made over to the British for use as a hospital after the Battle of the Alma, and by them was always called The Barrack Hospital. This is the hospital in which Miss Nightingale and her band of female nurses were first established, and in which she herself had her headquarters throughout her stay at Scutari. It is built on rising ground, in a beautiful situation, looking over the Sea of Marmora on one side, towards the Princes' Islands on another, and towards Constantinople and up the Bosphorus on a third. “I have not been out of the Hospital Walls yet,” wrote Miss Nightingale ten days after her arrival, “but the most beautiful view in all the world, I believe, lies outside.” Her quarters were in the north-west tower, on the left of the Main Guard (or principal entrance). There was a large kitchen or storeroom, of which we shall hear more presently, and out of it on either side various other rooms opened. Mr. Bracebridge and the courier slept in one small room; Miss Nightingale and Mrs. Bracebridge in another. The nurses slept in other rooms. The whole space occupied by Miss Nightingale and her nurses was about equal to that allotted to three medical officers and their servants, or to that occupied by the Commandant. “This was done,” she explained, “in order to make no pressure for room on an already overcrowded hospital. It could not have been done with justice to the women's health, had not Miss Nightingale later taken a house in Scutari at private expense, to which every nurse attacked with fever was removed.”[84] The quarters were as uncomfortable as they were cramped. “Occasionally,” wrote Miss Nightingale, “our roof is torn off, or the windows are blown in, and we are under water for the night.” The Hospital was infested also with rodents and vermin; and, among other new accomplishments acquired under the stress of new occasions, Miss Nightingale became an expert rat-killer. This skill was afterwards called into use at Balaclava. In the spring of 1856, one of the nuns whom she had taken with her to the Crimea—Sister Mary Martha—had a dangerous attack of fever. Miss Nightingale nursed the case; and one night, while watching by the sick-bed, she saw a large rat upon the rafters over the Sister's head; she succeeded in knocking it down and killing it, without disturbing the patient.[85] The condition of physical discomfort in which, surrounded by terrible scenes of suffering, she had to do her work, should be remembered in taking the measure of her fortitude and devotion.[86]
The maximum number of patients accommodated at any one time (Dec. 23, 1854) in the Barrack Hospital was 2434. It was half-an-hour's walk from the General Hospital, and an invalided soldier records that he used to accompany Miss Nightingale from one hospital to another in order to light her home on wet stormy nights, across the barren common which lay between them.
Farther south of the General Hospital, in the quarter of Haidar Pasha, was what was known as The Palace Hospital, consisting of various buildings belonging to the Sultan's Summer Palace. These were occupied as a hospital in January 1855. Miss Nightingale had no responsibility here; but in the summer of 1855, the female nursing of sick officers, quartered in one of these buildings, was placed under the superintendence of Mrs. Willoughby Moore, the widow of an officer who had died a noble death in the war, and four female nurses, sent out specially from England.
Finally, there were hospitals at Koulali, four or five miles farther north, upon the same Asiatic shore of the Bosphorus. These hospitals were opened in December 1854. The nursing in them was originally under Miss Nightingale's supervision, but she was presently relieved of it (p. [193] n.). The hospitals were broken up in November 1855, when, of the female nursing establishment, a portion went home, and the rest passed under Miss Nightingale into the hospitals at Scutari.
There were also five hospitals in the Crimea, but particulars of these may be deferred till the time comes for following Miss Nightingale upon her expeditions to the front. For the nursing in the Civil Military Hospitals (i.e. hospitals controlled by a civilian medical staff) at Renkioi (on the Dardanelles) and at Smyrna, and for the Naval Hospital at Therapia, Miss Nightingale had no responsibility, though there is voluminous correspondence among her papers showing that she was constantly consulted upon the site and arrangements of these hospitals. The medical superintendent of the hospital at Renkioi was Dr. E. A. Parkes, with whom Miss Nightingale formed a friendship which endured to the end of his life.