But, of course, what most made the men adore her was her loving individual care for each of those for whom she felt herself responsible. There was one occasion on which she begged to be allowed to try whether she could nurse back to possible life five wounded men who were being given up as “hopeless cases,” and did actually succeed in doing so.
In all that terrible confusion of suffering that surrounded her soon after her first arrival, the first duty of the doctors was to sort out from the wounded as they arrived those cases which they could help and save from those which it seemed no human surgery could help.
While this was being done she stood by: she never spared herself the sight of suffering, and her eyes—the trained eyes that had all the intuition of a born nurse—saw a glimmer of hope for five badly wounded men who were being set aside among those for whom nothing could be done.
“Will you give me those five men?” she asked. She knew how much might be done by gentle and gradual feeding, and by all the intently watchful care of a good nurse, to give them just enough strength to risk the surgery that might save them. With her own hand, spoonful by spoonful, as they were able to bear it, she gave the nourishment, and by her own night-long watching and tending in the care of all those details which to a poor helpless patient may make the difference between life and death—the purifying of the air, the avoidance of draughts, the mending of the fire—she nursed her five patients back into a condition in which the risks of an operation were, to say the least of it, greatly lessened. The operation was in each case successfully performed; by all human standards it may be said that she saved the lives of all the five.
She never spared herself, though she sometimes spared others. She has been known to stand for twenty hours out of the twenty-four, and at night, when she had sent her day-nurses to rest, it was she herself who watched in all the wards and silently cared for the needs of one and another. Is it any wonder that “there was worship almost in the gratitude of the prostrate sufferer, who saw her glide into his ward, and at last approach his bedside? The magic of her power over men used often to be felt in the room—the dreaded, the blood-stained room—where ‘operations’ took place. There, perhaps, the maimed soldier, if not yet resigned to his fate, might at first be craving death rather than meet the knife of the surgeon; but, when such a one looked and saw that the honoured Lady-in-Chief was patiently standing beside him, and—with lips closely set and hands folded—decreeing herself to go through the pain of witnessing pain, he used to fall into the mood for obeying her silent command, and—finding strange support in her presence—bring himself to submit and endure.”[13]
M. Soyer, who placed his culinary art at her service, has written a book about his experiences in which he tells us that, after a merry evening in the doctors’ quarters, when on his way back to his own, he saw by a faint light a little group—shadowy in the half-darkness—in a corner of one of the corridors. A Sister stood beside Miss Nightingale with a lighted candle that she might see clearly enough to scribble down the last wishes of the dying soldier who was supported on the bed beside her. With its deep colouring, described as like a grave study by Rembrandt, the little picture drew the passer-by, and for a few minutes he watched unseen while the Lady-in-Chief took into those “tender womanly hands” the watch and trinkets of the soldier, who with his last gasping breath was trying to make clear to her his farewell message to his wife and children. And this seems to have been but one among many kindred scenes.
We have all heard of the man who watched till her shadow fell across the wall by his bed that he might at least kiss that shadow as it passed; but few of us, perhaps, know the whole story. The man was a Highland soldier who had been doomed to lose his arm by amputation. Miss Nightingale believed that she might possibly be able to save the arm by careful nursing, and she begged that she might at least be allowed to try. Nursing was to her an art as well as a labour of love. The ceaseless care in matters of detail, which she considered the very alphabet of that art, stand out clearly in her own Notes on Nursing. And in this instance her skill and watchfulness and untiring effort saved the man’s arm. No wonder that he wanted to kiss her shadow!
To the wives of the soldiers she was indeed a saving angel. When she arrived at Scutari, they were living, we are told, literally in holes and corners of the hospital. Their clothes were worn out. They had neither bonnets, nor shoes, nor any claim on rations. Poor faithful creatures, many of them described in the biographies as respectable and decent, they had followed their husbands through all the horrors of the campaign, and now, divided from them and thrust aside for want of space, they were indeed in sorry case.
Well might Miss Nightingale write later, and well may we all lay it to heart—“When the improvements in our system are discussed, let not the wife and child of the soldier be forgotten.”