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:—
… The first time I saw your son was in going round the wards in the General Hospital at Balaklava. He had been brought in, in the morning.… He was always conscious, and remained so till the very last. He prayed aloud so beautifully that, as the Nurse in charge said, “It was like a sermon to hear him.” He asked “to see Miss Nightingale.” He knew me, and expressed himself to me as entirely resigned to die. He pressed my hand when he could not speak. He died in the night.… He was decently interred in a burial-ground we have about a mile from Balaklava. One of my own Sisters lies in the same ground, to whom I have erected a monument. Should you wish anything similar to be done over the grave of your lost son, I will endeavour to gratify you, if you will inform me of your wishes. With true sympathy for your loss, I remain, dear Madam, yours sincerely,
Florence Nightingale.
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
Your sectarians of every species, small and great, Catholic or Protestant, of high church or low, … these are the true fog children.—Ruskin.
Whereof cometh envy, strife, railings, evil surmisings, perverse disputings.—St. Paul.
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 [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.