“And you hadn’t much food, I hear, for your daily rations?” I said.
“Oh, we didn’t have food every day!” said he, with a touch of gently scornful laughter. “Every three days or so, we may have had some biscuits served out. But there was a lot of the food as wasn’t fit to eat.”
He was, however, a man of few words, and when I asked him what Miss Nightingale was like, he answered rather unexpectedly and with great promptitude, “Well, she had a very nice figger.” All the same, though he did not dilate on the beauty of her countenance, and exercised a certain reserve of speech when I tried to draw him out about the Lady-in-Chief, it was clear that hers was a sacred name to him, and that the bit of her handwriting which he possessed in the little book, so carefully unwrapped for me from the tin box holding his dearest possessions, which he uncorded under my eyes with his own capable but rather tired old hands, between two bouts of his wearying cough, had for long been the great joy and pride of his present quiet existence.
I had a talk with others of these veterans in their stately and well-earned home of rest in the Royal Hospital at Chelsea, and it was clear that to them all she was enshrined in memory’s highest place. This may be a fitting moment for recording the tribute of Mr. Macdonald, the administrator of the Times Fund, who wrote of her before his return to England:—
“Wherever there is disease in its most dangerous form, and the hand of the spoiler distressingly nigh, there is that incomparable woman sure to be seen; her benignant presence is an influence for good comfort, even among the struggles of expiring nature. She is a ‘ministering angel,’ without any exaggeration, in these hospitals, and, as her slender form glides quietly along each corridor, every poor fellow’s face softens with gratitude at the sight of her. When all the medical officers have retired for the night, and silence and darkness have settled down upon those miles of prostrate sick, she may be observed alone, with a little lamp in her hand, making her solitary rounds. The popular instinct was not mistaken, which, when she had set out from England on her mission of mercy, hailed her as a heroine; I trust she may not earn her title to a higher though sadder appellation. No one who has observed her fragile figure and delicate health can avoid misgivings lest these should fail. With the heart of a true woman, and the manners of a lady, accomplished and refined beyond most of her sex, she combines a surprising calmness of judgment and promptitude and decision of character.”
The soldier who watched for her coming, night by night, on her quiet rounds, after dark, when other nurses were by her orders resting, and who only knew her as “the Lady with the Lamp,” has been quoted all over the world; but it has been well said that she was also “the lady with the brain.” Hercules had not so big a task before him when he cleansed the Augean stables, and the swiftness with which order and comfort were created in this “hell” of suffering—for so it has been named by those who saw and knew—might well be called one of the wonders of the world.
“A Mission of Mercy.” Florence Nightingale at Scutari.
(After the painting by J. Barratt.)
The secret lay partly in the fact that Florence Nightingale’s whole life had been an offering and a preparation. She knew all it had been possible for her to learn of hospital management and training. She never wasted words, nor frittered away her power. Her authority grew daily. Mr. Herbert’s support, even at so great a distance, was, of course, beyond price. Lord Raglan soon found the value of her letters. She inspired her orderlies with utmost devotion, and it is needless to speak of what her patients themselves felt to her. Kinglake is not, like the present writer, a woman, and therefore he can write with a good grace and from his own knowledge what might come with an ill grace from a woman’s pen. He shall again therefore be quoted, word for word, through a few pages.