“Soldiers,” she wrote, “must obey orders. And to you the ‘roughing’ it has been the resigning yourself to ‘comforts’ which you detested and to work which you did not want, while the work which wanted you was within reach. A severe kind of ‘roughing’ indeed—perhaps the severest, as I know by sad experience.
“But it will not last. This short war is not life. But all will depend—your possible future in the work, we pray for you, O my Cape of Good Hope—upon the name you gain here. That name I know will be of one who obeys authority, however unreasonable, in the name of Him who is above all, and who is Reason itself—of one who submits to disagreeables, however unjust, for the work’s sake and for His who tells us to love those we don’t like—a precept I follow oh so badly—of one who never criticizes so that it can even be guessed at that she has criticism in her heart—and who helps her companions to submit by her own noble example....
“I have sometimes found in my life that the very hindrances I had been deploring were there expressly to fit me for the next step in my life. (This was the case—hindrances of years—before the Crimean War.)” And elsewhere she writes: “To have secured for you all the circumstances we wished for your work, I would gladly have given my life. But you are made to rise above circumstances; perhaps this is God’s way—His ways are not as our ways—of preparing you for the great work which I am persuaded He has in store for you some day.”
It is touching to find her adding in parenthesis that before her own work was given to her by the Great Unseen Commander, she had ten years of contradictions and disappointments, and adding, as if with a sigh from the heart, “And oh, how badly I did it!”
There we have the humility of true greatness. All her work was amazing in its fruitfulness, but those who knew her best feel sometimes that the part of her work which was greatest of all and will endure longest is just the part of which most people know least. I mean her great labour of love for India, which I cannot doubt has already saved the lives of millions, and will in the future save the health and working power of millions more.
Florence Nightingale would have enriched our calendar of uncanonized saints even if her disciplined high-hearted goodness had exercised an unseen spell by simply being, and had, by some limitation of body or of circumstance, been cut off from much active doing: for so loving and obedient a human will, looking ever to the Highest, as a handmaiden watches the eyes of her mistress, is always and everywhere a humane influence and a divine offering. But in her life—a light set on a hill—being and doing went hand in hand in twofold beauty and strength, for even through those years when she lay on her bed, a secluded prisoner, her activities were world-wide.
In addition to the work for which she is most widely revered and loved, Miss Nightingale did three things—each leaving a golden imprint upon the history of our time:—
She broke down a “Chinese wall” of prejudice with regard to the occupations of women, and opened up a new and delightful sphere of hard, but congenial, work for girls.
She helped to reconstruct, on the lines of feminine common sense, the hygiene and the transport service of our army—yes, of the entire imperial army, for what is a success in one branch of our dominions cannot permanently remain unaccepted by the rest. And in all her work for our army she had, up to the time of his death, unbounded help from her friend, Lord Herbert.
Last, and perhaps greatest of all, she initiated, with the help of Sir Bartle Frere, Sir John Lawrence, and other enlightened men of her time, the reform of insanitary and death-dealing neglect throughout the length and breadth of India, thus saving countless lives, not only from death, but from what is far worse—a maimed or invalid existence of lowered vitality and lessened mental powers.