“Not regarding her mission as one that needs should aim loftily at the reformation of the hospital management, Miss Stanley submitted herself for guidance to the medical officers, saying, ‘What do you wish us to do?’ The officers wisely determined that they would not allow the gentle women to exhaust their power of doing good by undertaking those kinds of work that might be as well or better performed by men, and their answer was to this effect: ‘The work that in surgical cases has been commonly done by our dressers will be performed by them, as before, under our orders. What we ask of you is that you will see the men take the medicines and the nourishment ordered for them, and we know we can trust that you will give them all that watchful care which alleviates suffering, and tends to restore health and strength.’
“With ceaseless devotion and energy the instructions were obeyed. What number of lives were saved—saved even in that pest-stricken hospital of Kullali—by a long, gentle watchfulness, when science almost despaired, no statistics, of course, can show; and still less can they gauge or record the alleviation of misery effected by care such as this; but apparent to all was the softened demeanour of the soldier when he saw approaching his pallet some tender, gracious lady intent to assuage his suffering, to give him the blessing of hope, to bring him the food he liked, and withal—when she came with the medicine—to rule him like a sick child. Coarse expressions and oaths deriving from barracks and camps died out in the wards as though exorcised by the sacred spell of her presence, and gave way to murmurs of gratitude. When conversing in this softened mood with the lady appointed to nurse him, the soldier used often to speak as though the worship he owed her and the worship he owed to Heaven were blending into one sentiment; and sometimes, indeed, he disclosed a wild faith in the ministering angel that strained beyond the grave. ‘Oh!’ said one to the lady he saw bending over his pallet, ‘you are taking me on the way to heaven; don’t forsake me now!’ When a man was under delirium, its magic force almost always transported him to the home of his childhood, and made him indeed a child—a child crying, ‘Mother! mother!’ Amongst the men generally, notwithstanding their moments of fitful piety, there still glowed a savage desire for the fall of Sebastopol. More than once—wafted up from Constantinople—the sound of great guns was believed to announce a victory, and sometimes there came into the wards fresh tidings of combat brought down from our army in front of the long-besieged stronghold. When this happened, almost all of the sufferers who had not yet lost their consciousness used to show that, however disabled, they were still soldiers—true soldiers. At such times, on many a pallet, the dying man used to raise himself by unwonted effort, and seem to yearn after the strife, as though he would answer once more the appeal of the bugles and drums.”
Florence Nightingale at the Therapia Hospital.
“I was sick, and ye visited me.”
Kinglake’s touching description of what womanly tenderness could do for our soldiers, and of the worship it called forth, is followed by these words:—
“But great would be the mistake of any chronicler fancying that the advantage our country derived from womanly aid was only an accession of nurses; for, if gifted with the power to comfort and soothe, woman also—a still higher gift—can impel, can disturb, can destroy pernicious content; and when she came to the rescue in an hour of gloom and adversity, she brought to her self-imposed task that forethought, that agile brain power, that organizing and governing faculty of which our country had need. The males at that time in England were already giving proofs of the lameness in the use of brain power, which afterwards became more distinct. Owing, possibly, to their habits of industry, applied in fixed, stated directions, they had lost that command of brain force which kindles ‘initiative,’ and with it, of course, the faculty of opportunely resorting to any very new ways of action. They proved slow to see and to meet the fresh exigencies occasioned by war, when approaching, or even by war when present; and, apparently, in the hospital problem, they must have gone on failing and failing indefinitely, if they had not undergone the propulsion of the quicker—the woman’s—brain to ‘set them going’ in time.”
He then goes on to tell of the arrival at “the immense Barrack Hospital” at Scutari of Miss Nightingale and her chosen band. “If,” he says, “the generous women thus sacrificing themselves were all alike in devotion to their sacred cause, there was one of them—the Lady-in-Chief—who not only came armed with the special experience needed, but also was clearly transcendent in that subtle quality which gives to one human being a power of command over others. Of slender, delicate form, engaging, highly-bred, and in council a rapt, careful listener, so long as others were speaking; and strongly, though gently, persuasive whenever speaking herself, the Lady-in-Chief, the Lady Florence, Miss Nightingale, gave her heart to this enterprise in a spirit of absolute devotion; but her sway was not quite of the kind that many in England imagined.”
No, indeed! Sentimentalists who talk as though she had been cast in the conventional mould of mere yielding amiability, do not realize what she had to do, nor with what fearless, unflinching force she went straight to her mark, not heeding what was thought of herself, overlooking the necessary wounds she must give to fools, caring only that the difficult duty should be done, the wholesale agony be lessened, the filth and disorder be swept away.
Her sweetness was the sweetness of strength, not weakness, and was reserved not for the careless, the stupid, the self-satisfied, but for the men whose festering wounds and corrupting gangrene were suffered in their country’s pay, and had been increased by the heedless muddle of a careless peace-time and a criminally mismanaged transport service.