II
Miss Nightingale, as I have already explained (p. [215]), had the ear of the Court, and she took an opportunity of laying her views before the Queen. The immediate sequel is told in a letter from Lord Granville to Lord Canning:—
Dec. 21 [1855]. In the Cabinet an interesting letter was read from Miss Nightingale thanking the Queen for a handsome present, and discussing the causes and remedies for the drunkenness in the army. Pam thought it excellent. Clarendon said it was full of real stuff, but Mars said it only showed that she knew nothing of the British soldier.[191]
But Lord Panmure, though a believer in the original sin of the soldier, was moved none the less by the forces thus set in motion to sanction some useful measures of reform. Miss Nightingale, however, had not waited for official action. That was never her way. When she wanted a thing done, she showed on such scale as was possible to her how to do it.
Her first endeavour was to help and encourage the soldiers in sending home a portion at least of their pay. She formed an extempore Money Order Office, in which, on four afternoons in each month, she received the money of any soldier who desired to send it home to his family. About £1000 was thus received monthly in small sums, which, by post-office orders obtained in England, were transmitted to their several recipients. Her uncle, Mr. Samuel Smith, undertook the English agency for her. After the Cabinet Council, just described, Lord Panmure wrote to the Commander of the Forces in the Crimea, adverting to Miss Nightingale's “cry,” and remarking that if a soldier wanted to send money home he could do so through the Paymaster, but adding that it had been decided to increase the facilities. In the following month (January 1856) the Government accepted the hint of Miss Nightingale's private initiative and established offices for money orders at Constantinople, Scutari, Balaclava, and “Headquarters, Crimea.” “It will do no good,” wrote “Mars,” convinced against his will; “the soldier is not a remitting animal.”[192] But in fact, during the following six months, a sum of £71,000 was sent home.[193] Miss Nightingale felt much satisfaction in having been the means of “rescuing this money from the canteen.” She was instrumental also in establishing a rival house, named, after a soldiers' battle, the “Inkerman Café.” This was pleasantly situated close to the shore of the Bosphorus, midway between the main hospitals at Scutari. Miss Nightingale devoted much attention to the details of this coffee-house, and framed the list of prices. In all such work for the good of the soldiers, she found a cordial supporter in Sir Henry Storks, who had succeeded Lord William Paulet in the command at Scutari in the latter part of 1855. Sir Henry agreed with her, as he wrote, “that drunkenness can be made the exception, not the rule, in the Army”; and in later years he referred in grateful recollection to the time when “we served together at Scutari.”
Her personal influence with the men was great. “I promised Her I would not drink,” or “I promised Her to send my money home,” they would say, “in such a tone,” as Mr. Stafford recorded, “as if it were ingrained in the very stuff of them.” A curious and, as I think the reader will agree with me, a pretty illustration of this side of Miss Nightingale's work, was brought under my notice during the preparation of this Memoir. On January 23, 1856, Miss Nightingale wrote the following letter from Scutari to the Rev. R. Glover, then Chaplain to the Forces at Maidstone:—
In reply to yours of Jan. 10—I have the pleasure to inform you that I have just seen Thomas Whybron, 12th Lancers, and that he has promised me that he will not only write to his wife, but transmit money to her through me after 1st of next month, when he will receive his pay. I trust he will keep his word. She had better also write to him herself, and send her letter through me. He tells me that he has had one letter from her. However he is well, but he has been in debt. However he sends his wife a kind message of love, which he begs me to give her through you, and to beg that she will not come out here. I[280] am myself of this opinion. Independently of the fact that, at this moment, I could not possibly receive any more nurses, there are many reasons against bringing out more soldiers' wives here, which you will readily apprehend. With regard to the Regiment, I consider the 12th Lancers the most “respectable” Regiment we have. They send home more money and put it to better uses than all the other Regiments here put together. And I hope that Whybron will improve in it.
In January 1912 Lieutenant-Colonel Clifton Brown, commanding the 12th Royal Lancers, then quartered at Potchefstroom in the Transvaal, bought the original of this letter, “beautifully written, not a blot or a scratch in it,” framed it with glass on both sides, and presented it to his regiment. Thus may an echo of Miss Nightingale's care for the British soldier and pride in his good name roll from soul to soul, and grow for ever and for ever.
III
Then Miss Nightingale set herself to establish and equip reading-rooms and class-rooms. She took measures to let her schemes be made known in England, and the popularity of the heroine led to a speedy and generous response from all classes—from the Royal Family to the humblest printer's boy. Miss Nightingale's relations at home received, and transmitted to her, the gifts. Her cousin, Mr. Henry Bonham Carter, was especially useful. “Harry Carter,” she wrote (Jan. 6, 1856), “must be a man of business; for I can assure you that the boxes he sent me are the only ones which have not lost me hours of unnecessary labour, because he has given me invoices of the contents of each box and bills of lading.” Her sister was receiver-general, and from Lady Verney's letters we obtain a lively account of the work:—
(To Miss Ellen Tollet.) [Nov. 1855.] I don't know whether Mrs. Milnes told you how hard we worked to send off boxes for F.'s education of the army! let me tell you, Ma'am, to instruct 50,000 men is no joke. Seriously tho', my love, it is small things any one can do amid such a mass, which made one the more anxious to enable her to do what she could, and we have sent a dose of 1000 copybooks, writing materials in proportion, Diagrams,[281] Maps, books illustrated and other. Macbeth (6) to read 6 at a time, and the music in the interludes, which Mr. Best (a pattern man whom I love more even than the Dean of H.) recommended as having been successful in his village. Chess, Footballs, other games, a magic Lanthern for Dissolving views, a Stereoscope (very fine!), plays for acting, music, &c. &c. Finally I thought a little art would be advisable, and had a number of prints stretched and varnished which are to be my subscription towards the improvement of the British army!
But, my dear, you can't conceive how pretty the sort of help is that everybody poured in; the P. & O. says, nothing is to be paid, Miss N.'s things all go free.
(To Florence Nightingale.) [Nov. 16, 1855.] Please, my dear, acknowledge a print which the Queen sends you for the soldiers. She heard thro' Lady Augusta Bruce that you had asked for one of her for the “Inkerman Café”; and she accordingly sends you the one of the Duke of Wellington presenting May flowers to the little Prince Arthur his godson; which is very pretty of her, for it combines so many things. It is sent to you to do what you like with, so I have said you most likely will wish to have it at Balaclava for your Reading Room plans. We have been racking our brains to get together amusing things for your men.… To mitigate the science I have slipped in the Madonna of the Sedia; which, my love, is domestic, if you please, not Popish. The Duchess of Kent sends a capital lot of books; she has been so pleased to be of use.
Both in the Crimea and at Scutari Miss Nightingale carried on, as opportunity offered, what her sister laughingly called “the education of the British Army.” But it was at Scutari, where she principally stayed, that the effort took the largest scope. Outside the Barrack Hospital a building was bought by Sir Henry Storks, on behalf of the Government, to provide a reading-room and a school-room. The reading-room, opened in January 1856, was supplied by Miss Nightingale with books, prints, maps, games, and newspapers. The other room was used as a garrison school; two schoolmasters were sent out; and evening lectures and classes were given. A second school was conducted in a hut between the two large hospitals at Scutari.[194] For the convalescents, Miss Nightingale had at an earlier date established reading-huts in the Barrack Hospital, furnishing them with books, newspapers, writing materials, prints, and games. In all the reading-huts the men attended numerously and constantly, their behaviour when there being, Miss Nightingale added, uniformly quiet and well-bred. The good manners, no less than the uncomplaining heroism of the common soldier, made an indelible impression upon the Lady-in-Chief.
It was out of her experiences in the Crimean War that grew her love for the British soldier, to whose health, care, and comfort, at home and in India, she was to devote many years of her long life. In extreme old age, when failing powers were not equally alert to every call, she would sometimes, I have been told, show listlessness if her companion talked of nurses or nursing, but the old light would ever come into her eye, and the faltering mind would instantly stand at attention, upon the slightest reference to the British soldier.
CHAPTER XII
TO THE CRIMEA AGAIN
(September 1855–July 1856)
I am ready to stand out the War with any man.—Florence Nightingale (Nov. 4, 1855).
On September 8, 1855, Sebastopol fell, after assaults, as every one remembers, which had filled the British cemeteries and hospitals. Miss Nightingale's time from this date to the end of the war was divided between the Crimea and Scutari. On October 9, 1855, she left Scutari for Balaclava, and she remained in the Crimea till the end of November, when she hurried back to Scutari on hearing of a serious outbreak of cholera in the Barrack Hospital at that place. On Good Friday, 1856 (March 21), she again left Scutari for Balaclava, in consequence of an urgent appeal from the hospitals of the Land Transport Corps, and she remained there till the beginning of July. She left Scutari for England on July 28.
Miss Nightingale's work during her second and third visits to the Crimea (of two months in 1855, and of three in 1856) was the most arduous, and in some respects the most worrying, of all her labours in the East. The distances between the several Crimean hospitals, enumerated in an earlier chapter (p. [254]), were great; how bad were the roads is known to every one who has read anything about the Crimean War; and Miss Nightingale experienced much of the rigour of a Crimean winter. “The extraordinary exertions she imposed upon herself would have been perfectly incredible,” wrote M. Soyer, “if they had not been witnessed by many. I can vouch for the fact, having frequently accompanied her to the [Castle] Hospital as well as to the Monastery. The return from these places at night was a very dangerous experience, as the road led across a very uneven country. It was still more perilous when snow was upon the ground. I have seen her stand for hours at the top of a bleak rocky mountain near the Hospital, giving her instructions while the snow was falling heavily.” She had for some years been somewhat subject to rheumatism, and in the Crimea she was at times tortured by sciatica. But she was “acclimatised,” she said, and was strong to endure. Sometimes she spent long days in the saddle. At other times she drove in a rough cart. Her first conveyance was a cart—drawn by a mule and driven, adds the lively Soyer, by a donkey; and she suffered a nasty upset in it. Colonel McMurdo, Commandant of the Land Transport Corps,[195] then kindly gave her the best vehicle procurable. It has been dignified by the name of “Miss Nightingale's Carriage,” but was, in fact, a hooded baggage-car without springs.[196] Some time later M. Soyer identified the vehicle among other “Crimean effects” which were on sale at Southampton. It was shown at the Victorian Era Exhibition forty years later,[197] and is still preserved at Lea Hurst.
In this hooded vehicle, or on horseback, or if the roads were very bad on foot, Miss Nightingale made her rounds in all weathers, her headquarters being sometimes at the General and sometimes at the Castle Hospital. She never presumed on her sex to save herself trouble or fatigue at the expense of others. She was now without Mr. Bracebridge's assistance, but she found that the absence of a civilian go-between was no disadvantage. “A woman,” she said, “obtains from military courtesy (if she does not shock either their habits of business or their caste prejudices) what a man who pitted the civilian against the military effectually hindered.” She superintended the nursing in all the hospitals under her orders. Of the hospital huts on the Genoese Heights, there is a vivid picture in Lady Hornby's Travels. “The first day of our arrival,” she wrote, May 1856, “we took a long ramble on the heights of Balaclava, by the old Genoese castle. On one side is a solitary and magnificent view of sea and cliffs; but pass a sharp and lofty turning, and the crowded port beneath, and all the active military movements, are instantly before your eyes. Higher up we came to Miss Nightingale's hospital huts, built of long planks, and adorned with neatly bordering flowers. The sea was glistening before us, and as we lingered to admire the fine view, one of the nurses, a kind, motherly-looking woman, came into the little porch, and invited us to enter and rest. A wooden stool was kindly offered to us by another and younger Sister. On the large deal table was a simple pot of wild flowers, so beautifully arranged, they instantly struck my eye. How charming the little deal house appeared to me, with its perfect cleanliness, its glorious view, and the health, contentment, and usefulness of its inmates! How respectable their few wants seemed; how suited their simple dress to the stern realities, as well as to the charities of life, and how fearlessly they reposed on the care and love of God in that lonely place, far away from all their friends; how earnestly they admired and tended the few spring flowers of a strange land,[198] these brave, quiet women, who had witnessed and helped to relieve so much suffering! This was the pleasantest visit I ever made. Miss Nightingale had been there but a few days before, and this deal room and stool were hers.”[199] Miss Nightingale established reading-rooms, bored for water to improve the supply near the hospitals, had the huts covered with felt for protection against the winter, and brought her extra-diet kitchens, with M. Soyer's good help, into full efficiency. In her absence the work had met with many difficulties from the supineness or hostility of officials towards what some regarded as her fads, and others as her interference. “In April,” she wrote to Mrs. Herbert from the Castle Hospital (Nov. 17, 1855), “I undertook this Hospital, and from that time to this we cooked all the Extra Diet for 500 to 600 patients, and the whole diet for all the wounded officers by ourselves in a shed; and though I sent up a French cook in July to whom I gave £100 a year, I could not get an Extra Diet Kitchen built, promised me in May, till I came up this time to do it myself in October. During the whole of this time, every egg, every bit of butter, jelly, ale, and Eau de Cologne which the sick officers have had has been provided out of Mrs. Samuel Smith's or my private pocket. On Nov. 4 I opened my Extra Diet Kitchen.”