II
On June 3 the Secretary of State wrote to Miss Nightingale, “as the period is now fast approaching when your generous and disinterested labours will cease, with the occasion which called them forth,” to inquire what arrangements should be made for her return. “In thus contemplating,” he continued, “the close of those anxious and trying duties, which you imposed upon yourself solely with a view to alleviate the sufferings of Her Majesty's Army in the East, and which you have accomplished with a singleness of purpose beyond all praise, it is not necessary for me to inform you how highly Her Majesty appreciates the services you have rendered to Her Army; as Her Majesty has already conveyed to you a signal proof of Her gracious approbation. But I desire now, on behalf of my colleagues and myself, to offer you our most cordial thanks for your humane and generous exertions. In doing so, I feel confident that I simply express the unanimous feelings of the people of this country.”
There were things which Miss Nightingale valued more highly than the approbation of the people. One of them was correctly surmised by Sir Henry Storks. Writing to her from Headquarters at Scutari, on July 25, he said:—
I have received your kind note with mingled feelings of[302] extreme pleasure and regret—the former, because I appreciate your good opinion very highly; the latter, because your note is a Farewell. It will ever be to me a source of pride and gratification to have been associated with you in the work which you have performed with so much devotion and with so much courage. Amidst the acknowledgments you have received from all classes, and from many quarters, I feel persuaded there are none more pleasing to yourself than the grateful recognition of the poor men you came to succour and to save. You will ever live in their remembrance, be assured of that; for amongst the faults and vices, which ignorance has produced, and a bad system has fostered and matured, ingratitude is not one of the defects of the British soldier. I indulge the hope that you will permit me hereafter to continue an acquaintance (may I say friendship?) which I highly value and appreciate.
The gratitude of the British soldier was very dear to Miss Nightingale, and the disposition which she ultimately made of her Crimean decorations was characteristic. Before she left the East, the Sultan had presented her with a diamond bracelet and a sum of money for the nurses and hospitals, both of which presents the Queen permitted her to accept.[217] The bracelet, with the badge given by the Queen, may be seen to-day in the Museum of the United Service Institution, placed there in accordance with her desire that they should be deposited “where the soldiers could see them.”
At length it was time for Miss Nightingale, having seen off the last of her nurses, and filed the last of her inventories and accounts, to leave also. The Government had offered her a British man-of-war for the voyage home. The view she was likely to take of such a proposal had been correctly surmised in the House of Lords some weeks before. On May 5 Lord Ellesmere moved the Address on the conclusion of peace. He was something of a poet, as well as a statesman, and this was his last appearance in the House. In a speech, which was much admired at the time, and which may still be read with pleasure as a specimen of the more ornate kind of parliamentary eloquence, he paid a tribute to the memory of Lord Raglan, and then passed by a happy transition to the heroine of the war: “My Lords, the agony of that time has become matter of history. The vegetation of two successive springs has obscured the vestiges of Balaclava and Inkerman. Strong voices now answer to the roll-call, and sturdy forms now cluster round the colours. The ranks are full, the hospitals are empty. The angel of mercy still lingers to the last on the scene of her labours; but her mission is all but accomplished. Those long arcades of Scutari in which dying men sat up to catch the sound of her footstep or the flutter of her dress, and fell back content to have seen her shadow as it passed, are now comparatively deserted. She may probably be thinking how to escape, as best she may on her return, the demonstrations of a nation's appreciation of the deeds and motives of Florence Nightingale.”
III
The offer of the man-of-war was declined; and Miss Nightingale, with her aunt, sailed in the Danube for Athens, Messina, and Marseilles. A Queen's messenger was in attendance to help the travellers with passports. They stayed a night in a humble hotel in Paris (August 4), and travelling thence, as Miss Smith, she reached London next day. The “return of Florence Nightingale is on every one's lips,” said a letter of the time, and all the newspaper-world was alert to discover her movements. “Weary and worn as she is,” wrote her aunt, “I cannot tell you the dread she has of the receptions with which she is threatened.” It became known that on her arrival in England she would proceed at once to her country-home. Triumphal arches, addresses from mayors and corporations, and a carriage drawn by her neighbours were at once suggested; but Miss Nightingale had prudently withheld information of her time-table even from her family, and the public reception was avoided. It had been proposed, too, that the reception should be military. “The whole regiments” of the Coldstreams, the Grenadiers, and the Fusiliers “would like to come, but as that was impossible, they desired to send down their three Bands to meet her at the station and play her home, whenever she might arrive, whether by day or by night, if only they could find out when.” But the attention even of her soldiers was eluded. She lay lost for a night in London, and at eight o'clock next morning she presented herself, according to a promise given to the Bermondsey Nuns, at their Convent door. It was the first day of their annual Retreat, and she rested with them for a few hours. Then, taking the train, she reached her home on August 7, 1856, after nearly two years' absence in the East, arriving at an unexpected hour, having walked up from the little country station. “A little tinkle of the small church bell on the hills, and a thanksgiving prayer at the little chapel next day, were,” wrote her sister, “all the innocent greeting.”
Florence's spoils of war, as Lady Verney wrote to Mrs. Gaskell, arrived in advance, and were characteristic. There was, first, William, a one-legged sailor boy, who was ten months in her hospitals. Occupation was found for him. Next there was Peter,[218] a little Russian prisoner who came into hospital, and of whom, as he was an orphan, she took charge. “One of the Lady Nurses was his theological instructor, and asked him where he would go when he died if he were a good boy? He answered, ‘To Miss Nightingale.’ Thirdly, there was a big Crimean puppy, given her by the soldiers. He was found in a hole in the rocks near Balaclava, and was called ‘Rousch,’ which is supposed to be ‘soldier’ in Russian. A little Russian cat, a similar gift, died on the road; but the three remaining are the happiest things I have seen for some time, careering about in the intervals of school, where they are made much of, and ‘glory’ is more agreeable to them than to their mistress!” But Florence had another Crimean spoil, unknown, perhaps, to her sister, which she accounted one of the most sacred of her possessions. It was a bunch of grass which she had “picked out of the ground watered by our men's blood at Inkerman.”
IV
“If ever I live to see England again,” she had written in November 1855, “the western breezes of my hill-top home will be my first longing, though Olympus with its snowy cap looks fair over our blue Eastern sea.” It was to Lea Hurst, then, that she went on her return. It was there, ten years before, that she had found a fortnight's happiness in the humble work of parish nursing and visiting, and had thought to herself that with a continuation of such life she would be content.[219] The aspirations of her youth were to receive, as this second Part of the volume has shown, a larger, a fuller, and a more conspicuous attainment. Yet it would be a mistake to regard Miss Nightingale's mission in the Crimean War either as the summit of her attainment or the fulfilment of her life. Rather was it a starting-point.
Her work in the East did, it is true, attain some great ends, and satisfy in some measure the aspiration of her mind and heart. “She has done a great deed,” wrote a friend in December 1854, “not less than that of those who stood at Inkerman or advanced at the Alma; and she has made the first move towards wiping away a reproach from this country—that our women could not do what others do, irreproachably, and with advantage to their fellow-creatures.” She had proved that there was room for nurses in British military hospitals. She had shown the way to a new and high calling for women. “What Florence has done,” wrote Lady Verney to a friend (April 1856), “towards raising the standard of women's capabilities and work is most important. It is quite curious every day how questions arise regarding them which are answered quite differently, even when she is not alluded to, from what they would have been 18 months ago.” Lord Stanley, in the speech at Manchester already mentioned, had made the same point. “Mark,” he said, “what, by breaking through customs and prejudices, Miss Nightingale has effected for her sex. She has opened to them a new profession, a new sphere of usefulness. I do not suppose that, in undertaking her mission, she thought much of the effect which it might have on the social position of women. Yet probably no one of those who made that question a special study has done half as much as she towards its settlement. A claim for more extended freedom of action, based on proved public usefulness in the highest sense of the word, with the whole nation to look on and bear witness, is one which must be listened to, and cannot be easily refused.” Lord Stanley was mistaken in supposing that Miss Nightingale thought little of the effect of her mission upon the position of women; for, though she had misgivings about “woman's missionaries,” yet to make “a better life for woman”[220] was an object very near her heart. When she was in the Crimea, working as hard as any of the men, confronting disease and death with the bravest of them, administering, reforming, counselling as energetically as the best of them, this resolute woman felt that she and her companions had raised their sex to the height of a great occasion. “War,” she wrote to her friend, Mr. Bracebridge (Nov. 4, 1855), “makes Deborahs and Absaloms and Achitophels; and when, if ever the Magnificat has been true, has it been more true than now, every word of it? My soul doth magnify the Lord, and my spirit hath rejoiced in God my Saviour. For He hath regarded the lowliness of His handmaiden.” The words, which had often been in her mouth in moments of despondency and thwarted yearning,[221] came to her with the sense of happy fulfilment when she had been able to act as the handmaiden of God in the service of the sick and wounded soldiers. Her sister, understanding her better in the years of attainment than in those of aspiration, wrote to her (Nov. 15, 1855): “What anxious work you have upon you, my Greatheart, and yet in spite of it all have you not found your true home—the home of your spirit?”
All this was true. Yet Miss Nightingale's Crimean mission was, in the scheme of her life as she had planned it, and in the facts of her life so far as failing health permitted, not so much a climax, as an episode. It was an episode remarkable in itself, and it had given her a world-wide reputation; but in reputation she saw nothing except an opportunity for further work. “The abilities which she has displayed,” said Mr. Sidney Herbert in Willis's Rooms, “cannot be allowed to slumber. So long as she lives, her labours are marked out for her. The diamond has shown itself, and it must not be allowed to return to the mine.” Her friend well knew that he was only expressing the feelings of her own mind. What she sought on her return to England was to utilize her reputation and her experience for the furtherance of her ideals. Her experiences during the Crimean War had enlarged the scope of her work. She had gained an insight into military administration, and had shown a grasp of the subject, which had caused the Queen and Prince to “wish we had her at the War Office.” Her first duty, then, was to use her experience, so far as opportunity offered, to improve the medical administration of the Army. But the main desire of her life had been to raise nursing to the rank of a trained calling. Her mission to the East had not accomplished this object. It had only advertised it, and for the rest had shown how urgently the thing needed to be done. The world praised her achievement. She was rather conscious of its shortcoming, and of the obstacles and difficulties with which it had been attended. She came back from the East more resolved than ever to be a pioneer in the reform of nursing.
But first she needed rest and seclusion. Rest, in which to recuperate from the long strain of labours, hardships, and anxieties. Seclusion, in which to hide herself from publicity and applause. The world praised her self-sacrifice. She felt that she had made none. Rather had she been privileged to attain that harmony between the soul of a human being and its appointed work, in which, according to her philosophy, lay the union of man with the Divine Spirit. She shrank from glory in dread of vain-glory. “‘Paid by the world, what dost thou owe Me?’ God might question.” “I believe,” she had written to her father in 1854, shortly before her Call to the Crimea came, “that there is, within and without human nature, a revelation of eternal existence, eternal progress for human nature. At the same time I believe that to do that part of this world's work which harmonizes, accords with the idiosyncrasy of each of us, is the means by which we may at once render this world the habitation of the Divine Spirit in Man, and prepare for other such work in other of the worlds which surround us. The Kingdom of Heaven is within us. Those words seem to me the most of a revelation, of a New Testament, of a Gospel—of any that are recorded to have been spoken by our Saviour.” Her period of rest was to be very short, as we shall learn; but let us leave her communing silently in her chamber with such thoughts, till another Part opens a new chapter of activity in her life.
Footnotes:
[69] For the actual number, see below, p. [149].
[70] Life of Lord Houghton, vol. i. p. 521.
[71] This famous letter—obviously private at the time—was printed in extenso, for a controversial purpose (see below, p. [245]), in the Daily News of October 28, 1854. Miss Nightingale was much distressed when she heard of the publication, and her family could not think how it had “got into the papers”; but they had shown it, and copies of it, too widely.
[72] The text of the instructions may be found in the Journal of the Royal Army Medical Corps, October 1910.
[73] Stanmore, vol. i. p. 342.
[74] Miss Jones resigned her appointment at St. John's House in 1868, owing to differences of opinion with the Council, and set up a private nursing establishment. She died in 1887.
[75] Stanmore, vol. i. p. 342.
[76] From the Life and Death of Athena, an Owlet from the Parthenon, a manuscript book charmingly written and illustrated by Lady Verney. She wrote it in 1855, and sent it to Scutari “to try and make Flo and Mrs. Bracebridge laugh when F. was recovering from her fever.”
[77] Letter to Captain Galton, May 5, 1863.
[78] The Statement (see Bibliography A, No. 5).
[79] Statement, pp. 3–4.
[80] Roebuck Committee, Q. 14625.
[81] Pincoffs, p. 79.
[82] See on this point the references given below, p. [210] n.
[83] Statement, p. 13 n.
[84] Notes (Bibliography A, No. 8), sec. iii. p. xxxiii.
[85] Grant, p. 174.
[86] For a lively description of like discomforts endured by her staff, see Eastern Hospitals, vol. i. pp. 91–94.
[87] J. B. Atkins, Life of Sir W. H. Russell, vol. i. p. 143.
[88] Notes, sec. i. p. xxii.
[89] This Commission is referred to on later pages as “The Duke of Newcastle's.”
[90] Notes, sec. iii. pp. iii., ix.
[91] If any reader desires to be sickened, I recommend to him the Report on the Hospitals by the Sanitary Commissioners of 1855. And if any one desires to find painful details under some of these heads detailed above, without recourse to Blue-books, he may be referred to the report in Hansard of the speech made by Mr. Augustus Stafford (an eye-witness of what he described) in the House of Commons, Jan. 29, 1855.
[92] Roebuck Committee, Fifth Report, pp. 17, 19.
[93] Dean Stanley, Memorials of Edward and Catherine Stanley, 2nd ed., p. 335. So, too, Mr. Sidney Herbert, in his speech at Willis's Rooms on Nov. 29, 1855, referred to her as “a woman of genius.”
[94] Statement to Subscribers, p. vii.
[95] See Pincoffs, p. 79.
[96] Eastern Hospitals, vol. i. p. 71.
[97] Notes, p. 152.
[98] Stanmore, vol. i. p. 349.
[99] St. John's House: a Record, p. 8.
[100] W. E. Henley, In Hospital.
[101] Memories of the Crimea, by Sister Mary Aloysius, p. 17. The “frightful scarf” was a plain band worn, I suppose, over one arm and under the other.
[102] Journal of the Royal Army Medical Corps (Bibliography B, No. 52), p. 393.
[103] The manuscript of this document is preserved among the archives of the War Office. The text of these, “the earliest rules defining the position and duties of a female nurse in any military hospital,” has been printed elsewhere (Bibliography B, No. 52).
[104] Especially by Lord Stanmore in his Memoir of Sidney Herbert. He handles it, I think, with some needless asperity, and he might have mentioned Mr. Herbert's letter which is here quoted.
[106] It was Mr. Bracebridge who took the notes of the interview.
[107] Miss Nightingale made some criticisms in an official letter to the War Office, May 1, 1855; printed at pp. 389, 390 of the pamphlet No. 52 in Bibliography B. And in another letter (March 5) she begged Lord Panmure to relieve her of responsibility for the hospitals at Koulali.
[108] In an appendix to the second edition (1880) of his Memorials of Edward and Catherine Stanley.
[109] Roebuck Committee, Q. 6140.
[110] This fact, reported by the Roebuck Committee, barbed one of Mr. Kinglake's sarcasms against the males (vi. 427 n.). It also greatly impressed John Bright. See Mr. G. M. Trevelyan's Life of him, 1913, p. 242.
[111] Statement, p. 26 n.
[112] Letter to Mr. Herbert, Feb. 5, 1855.
[113] Narrative of a Residence on the Bosphorus, p. 49. Any reader who wishes to be harrowed should read the following pages in Lady Alicia's Journal. She died in July 1913 in her 95th year.
[114] Roebuck Committee, Fifth Report, pp. 20, 21.
[115] Eastern Hospitals, vol. i. p. 68.
[116] Scutari and its Hospitals, by S. G. O., p. 24.
[117] Kinglake, p. 430. He cites an example of the complaints in a private letter from Sir John Burgoyne to Lord Raglan (March 27, 1855). The complaint of the “groove-going men” has been revived in our own day by Lord Stanmore, who complains of Miss Nightingale (Memoir of Sidney Herbert, vol. i. p. 381) that she got things (which the Purveyor had failed to get) instead of informing him where they could be got. She acted on what is a golden rule in cases of emergency. When she wanted a thing done without delay, she did it herself.
[118] Pincoffs, pp. 82–83; and see Hall, p. 378.
[119] La Guerre de Crimée, by M. L. Baudens, p. 104. Miss Nightingale paid a tribute to the “wise and enlightened sanitary views” of M. Baudens. See her Subsidiary Notes, p. 133 n.
[120] For a reference to this matter by Miss Nightingale, see below, p. [224].
[121] My statements are based on a letter from Miss Nightingale to Mr. Sidney Herbert of Dec. 5, 1854.
[122] Statement, pp. 19, 26. How greatly Miss Nightingale's strict rules were resented is shown by attacks upon her administration printed by certain of Miss Stanley's nurses. The most bitter of these is to be found in the text and appendix of The Autobiography of a Balaclava Nurse, 1857 (No. 13, Bibliography B). See also Eastern Hospitals, 3rd ed., pp. 44–5, 52–3.
[123] I take them from Pincoffs, pp. 58, 79.
[124] Memoir of Sidney Herbert, vol. i. pp. 357, 360. It will be noticed that he adopts some of Miss Nightingale's expressions.
[125] Life and Letters of Sir John Hall, p. 403, where “Bracebridge” is misprinted “Bainbridge.”
[126] Roebuck Committee, Second Report, p. 723.
[127] The classical passage in this sense is in the Life and Correspondence of the Rt. Hon. Hugh C. E. Childers, 1901, vol. ii. p. 104, where it is said, in relation to the Egyptian Expedition of 1882: “The Queen with her well-known solicitude for the welfare of her Army, wrote many letters at this time to Mr. Childers to satisfy herself that all precautions were being taken for the health and comfort of the troops: one day alone brought seventeen letters from Her Majesty, or her private secretary, Sir Henry Ponsonby.”
[128] The Letters of Queen Victoria, vol. iii. p. 79.
[129] See, on these two points, above, p. [206], and below, p. [242].
[130] In a letter to Colonel Lefroy, Aug. 25, 1856.
[131] Hodder's Life of Lord Shaftesbury, pp. 503 seq.
[132] Report of the Sanitary Commission, March 1857.
[133] For the figures, see below, pp. [254], 314.
[134] Statement to Subscribers, pp. 9–10, and letter to Sidney Herbert, January 22, 1855.
[135] See Panmure, vol. i. p. 356.
[136] In 1865 Miss Nightingale, after an energetic correspondence with the War Office, secured payment, long before promised, to an English custode.
[137] This is the “Palace Hospital.” See above, p. [174].
[138] See Pincoffs, p. 55.
[139] See the words cited at the head of this chapter, and below, pp. [324], [325].
[140] Scutari and its Hospitals, p. 25.
[141] Letter to Captain Galton, June 28, 1862. On the general question, see vol. ii. p. 64.
[142] It was a mot of Mr. Stafford's that he had only met two men in the East, Omar Pacha (the Turkish Commander) and Florence Nightingale.
[143] Scutari and its Hospitals, p. 27.
[144] See Kinglake, vol. vi. pp. 43, 436.
[145] Miss Nightingale's camp bedstead was at this time behind a screen in the kitchen, for she had given up her room to the widow of an officer.
[146] He had died in hospital from his wounds, and his body was to be sent to England.
[147] Stanmore, vol. i. p. 373.
[148] Scutari and its Hospitals, p. 26.
[149] Daily News, June 2, 1855.
[150] Wintle, p. 113.
[151] Pincoffs, p. 78, where a particular case in point is recorded.
[152] Eastern Hospitals, vol. i. pp. 69–70.
[153] The lamp of famous memory was a camp lamp, and was taken possession of by Mrs. Bracebridge.
[156] Wintle, pp. 106, 108.
[157] Invasion of the Crimea, vol. vi. p. 425.
[158] Life of Lord Houghton, vol. i. p. 505.
[159] Kinglake, p. 436.
[160] Notes, p. 94.
[162] Scutari and its Hospitals, p. 26.
[163] Blackwood, p. 232.
[165] Grant, p. 165.
[166] See the Autobiography of a Balaclava Nurse (a Welshwoman), vol. ii. p. 146.
[167] Life and Letters of Dean Stanley, vol. i. p. 492. There is a curious echo of “the Religious Difficulty” in Purcell's Life of Manning (vol. ii. p. 53, 1st ed.), where a letter of Feb. 13, 1856, will be found from Manning to Cardinal Wiseman, discussing whether Roman Catholic chaplains should or should not encourage collections for the Nightingale Fund. The solution suggested was “to let the collection be passively made without any ecclesiastical recognition of it.”
[168] Wilfred Ward's Life of Wiseman, vol. ii. p. 191. And see Miss Nightingale's own words given below, p. [299].
[170] See Bibliography B, No. 15.
[171] Robert Robinson, on his return to England, was sent to school and an agricultural college by Miss Nightingale, and obtained employment on Lord Berners's estate in Scotland. Miss Nightingale was constantly befriending him, e.g. in paying his expenses for a visit to London to see the Exhibition of 1862, and in sending him illustrated newspapers, and even the Times. There was another Crimean lad, besides Tommy, one William Jones, with a wooden leg. See below, p. [304], where account is also given of another protégé, Peter.
[172] See, e.g., below, pp. [317], [488], and Vol. II. p. [411].
[173] Found among the Prince Consort's papers, and printed in Sir Theodore Martin's Life of him, vol. iii. p. 214.
[174] Letter on the Volunteers, 1861. See Bibliography A, No. 25.
[175] Panmure Papers, vol. i. p. 215.
[176] Blackwood, p. 115.
[177] Memoirs of Lady Eastlake, vol. ii. p. 44.
[178] She was especially pleased when in March 1856 her name appeared for the first time in General Orders; see below, p. [293].
[180] The words in inverted commas were quotations from Miss Nightingale's letters. These had been shown to a friend, who thereupon wrote the lines, above quoted, and sent them to her.
[181] For the text see Bibliography B, No. 7. An article in the Quarterly Review of April 1867, entitled “The Nightingale in the East,” is “a study of the Poetry of Seven Dials.” The popular ditty about Miss Nightingale has been sung under many skies and to many audiences; never to greater effect than on Christmas Day 1870 in St. Thomas's Hospital (then in the Surrey Gardens). The nurses had arranged a Christmas treat; the children had sung hymns, and older patients had given popular songs of the day. A patient in the Accident Ward, a coal-heaver with a broken leg, then volunteered; when the words of the refrain caught the ears of the Nightingale nurses, “we dropped all work” (says one of them), “and listened intently till the song was over, all enthusiasm for our Chief.” The singer told them that he was an old soldier, and had been nursed by Miss Nightingale in the General Hospital at Balaclava.
[182] Report of the Nightingale Fund, “Addenda,” pp. 1–2.
[183] Reports of some of the meetings are collected in the Report of the Nightingale Fund. At Manchester (Jan. 17, 1856), in addition to Lord Stanley, Mr. Herbert and Mr. Milnes spoke; at Oxford (Jan. 23), Mr. Herbert again spoke; at Brighton (Jan. 14), Mr. Milnes.
[184] Speeches of the 15th Earl of Derby, 1894, vol. i. pp. 16, 18.
[185] Fitzmaurice, Life of the Second Earl Granville, vol. i. p. 136.
[186] Hall, p. 449.
[188] Wrongly dated “January 1856” in Letters of Queen Victoria, vol. iii. p. 215. The gift was announced in the Morning Post of December 20, 1855; the brooch reached Miss Nightingale in November, and her reply had been received by Dec. 21 (see below, p. [278]). An illustrated account of the gift appeared in the Illustrated London News, Feb. 2, 1856. It may now be seen in the Museum of the United Service Institution.
[189] In continuation of the letter quoted above, p. [255].
[191] Lord Fitzmaurice's Life of the Second Earl Granville, vol. i. p. 133.
[192] Panmure, vol. ii. p. 28.
[193] Statement, p. v.
[194] I take these particulars from a Memorandum, found among Miss Nightingale's papers, by the Rev. J. E. Sabin, Senior Chaplain at Scutari.
[195] Sir William Montagu Scott McMurdo (1819–94); K.C.B. 1881. Miss Nightingale had a very high opinion of his services in the Crimea, and Sidney Herbert appointed him Inspector-General of the Volunteers (see Miss Nightingale's Letter on the Volunteers, 1861).
[196] A woodcut of it appeared in the Illustrated London News, August 30, 1856.
[197] See Vol. II. p. [409]409.
[198] For another reference to the Crimean flowers, see below, p. [450].
[199] Hornby, pp. 306–7.
[200] There are applications of the kind among Miss Nightingale's papers.
[201] Stanmore, vol. i. p. 369.
[202] Notes, vol. i. sec. i. pp. xxiv.–v. In a private letter Miss Nightingale's irony was more bitter. “K.C.B.” meant, she supposed, “Knight of the Crimean Burial-grounds.”
[203] The Autobiography of a Balaclava Nurse, vol. ii. p. 163.
[204] Printed in extenso in Stanmore, vol. i. pp. 416–420.
[205] The letter is printed in Hall, p. 451.
[207] See Hall, p. 438.
[208] Hall, p. 450. The text of the General Order as issued on March 16 was printed in the Times of April 1, 1856.
[209] See on this subject her Report to the Secretary of State, Subsidiary Notes, pp. 1, 2.
[210] See the letters printed in Hall, p. 457.
[211] Notes, p. 158.
[212] It has often been stated that the cross was erected by Miss Nightingale, but this is not the case. The inscription was suggested by Mrs. Shaw Stewart. In 1863 a Maternity Charity was established at Constantinople “in honour of Florence Nightingale.”
[213] Letter from Lady Hornby to her sister Mrs. Vaillant, Jan. 5, 1856; Hornby, pp. 150, 152. The enamelled brooch was the Queen's jewel.
[214] John Henry Lefroy (1817–90), Lieut. R.A., 1837; engaged in a magnetical survey, 1839–42; F.R.S., 1848; at the War Office, 1854–57; inspector-general of army schools, 1857; afterwards governor successively of the Bermudas and Tasmania; K.C.M.G., 1877.
[215] See a letter of Sidney Herbert printed in Stanmore, vol. i. p. 417.
[216] Stanmore, vol. i. pp. 404–5.
[217] Panmure, vol. i. p. 278.
[218] Peter Grillage afterwards became man-servant at Embley. See Vol. II. p. [302].
[220] See below, p. [385], and above, p. [102].
[PART III]
FOR THE HEALTH OF THE SOLDIERS
(1856–1861)
We can do no more for those who have suffered and died in their country's service; they need our help no longer; their spirits are with God who gave them. It remains for us to strive that their sufferings may not have been endured in vain—to endeavour so to learn from experience as to lessen such sufferings in future by forethought and wise management.—Florence Nightingale (Reply to Address from the Parishioners of East Wellow, Dec. 1856).
CHAPTER I
THE QUEEN, MISS NIGHTINGALE, AND LORD PANMURE
(August–November 1856)
To shape the whisper of a throne.—Tennyson.
Whenever the British people have muddled through a war, there is a time of repentance and heart-searching. England the Unready turns round uneasily and thinks that she must now mend her ways. The lessons of the war must be learnt. The word “efficiency” is blessed in every mouth. Radical reforms, with a view to ensuring a better state of preparedness next time, are canvassed, and a few of them are sometimes carried out. And then to the hot fit, a cold fit succeeds. War and its lessons fade into the past. Economy displaces efficiency as the favourite word. Peace seems to be more likely than another war, and, if war should unhappily come, it is cheerily hoped that England will again “muddle through somehow.” The spasm of reform is over, leaving the permanent vis inertiae of ministers and departments once more in undisturbed possession. Reformers, familiar with this succession of flow and ebb, know that they must seize the favourable moment, and more or less is done, according as they are more or less prompt and energetic. In the field of the Army Medical Service, where the Crimean War had exposed deficiencies both glaring and terrible, large and far-reaching reforms were set in motion during the years immediately following the Crimean peace. Indeed it may be said that from this period dates the first serious and sustained movement for the application of sanitary science to the British Army.
That effective use was thus made of the spasm of repentance which followed the Crimean War was due primarily and mainly to the zealous co-operation of two individuals, the same two whose alliance formed a principal subject of the preceding Part of this Memoir—Sidney Herbert and Florence Nightingale. When her friend died in 1861, worn out prematurely by unceasing labours for the British Army, Miss Nightingale devoted to his memory an account of his work during the years 1856–1861. In that pamphlet[222]—a model of lucidity and concision—while yet informed with comprehensive insight, and not untouched by emotion—she made no reference of any kind to her own share in the work. She described the reforms, and said that in all that was done “Sidney Herbert was head and centre.” And so in many respects he was. He was the Chairman of the Royal Commission and the Sub-Commissions. He was afterwards Minister for War. He was from first to last the official head of the reform movement. And he was much more than the official head. He worked with unfailing zeal, and threw his heart and soul into the work. Yet if Sidney Herbert had written the account, he might have said that Florence Nightingale was the head and centre of it all. If she could have done little without him, so also might he have done little without her. He was in the foreground, she in the background. His was the public voice; the words which he spoke or wrote were often the words of Florence Nightingale. He was the practical politician who carried out their common schemes. The initiating, the inspiring, the impelling force was hers. And she did much more than give general impetus. Her mastery of detail was ever at Mr. Herbert's elbow. “I never intend to tell you,” he wrote to her when the first of the Royal Commissions in which they co-operated was nearing its end (August 7, 1857), “how much I owe you for all your help during the last three months, for I should never be able to make you understand how helpless my ignorance would have been among the Medical Philistines. God bless you!” But between two such loyal allies and understanding friends, it were needless to apportion the relative shares. They spoke and wrote of their working together as “our Cabinet,” “our Cabal,” or “our Mess.” It is the story of this comradeship, rich in human interest, and fraught with lasting benefit to the British Army, that is to form the main subject of this and the following four chapters.