“When I had a moment I went to him. ‘Tell me at once what you want; I have worse cases to see after’—he did not happen to be very bad. ‘All I want to know, ma’am, is, are you one of our own Sisters of Mercy from Ireland?’ ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘your very own.’ ‘God be praised for that!’
“Another poor fellow said to me one day, ‘Do they give you anything good out here?’ ‘Oh yes,’ I said; ‘why do you ask me?’ ‘Because, ma’am, you gave me a piece of chicken for my dinner, and I kept some of it for you.’ He pulled it out from under his head and offered it to me. I declined the favour with thanks. I never could say enough of those kind-hearted soldiers and their consideration for us in the midst of their sufferings.”
CHAPTER XVI.
Inexactitudes—Labels—Cholera—“The Lady with the Lamp”—Her humour—Letters of Sister Aloysius.
About the middle of December Miss Nightingale had to rebuke very severely one of her own nurses, who had written a letter to the Times which made a great sensation by its lurid picture of the evils in the hospital—a misrepresentation so great that the nurse herself confessed in the end that it was “a tissue of exaggerations”—perhaps “inexactitudes” would be our modern word.
Meanwhile, the small-minded parochial gossips at home were wasting their time in discussing Miss Nightingale’s religious opinions. One who worked so happily with all who served the same Master was first accused under the old cry of “Popery,” and then under the equally silly label of “Unitarianism.” Her friend Mrs. Herbert, in rebuking parish gossip, felt it necessary to unpin these two labels and loyally pin on a new one, by explaining that in reality she was rather “Low Church.” The really sensible person, with whom, doubtless, Lady Herbert would have fully agreed, was the Irish parson, and his like, when he replied to some foolish questions about her that Miss Nightingale belonged to a very rare sect indeed—the sect of the Good Samaritans.
Miss Stanley tells a most amusing story of how one of the military chaplains complained to Miss Jebbut that very improper books had been circulated in the wards; she pressed in vain to know what they were. “As I was coming away he begged for five minutes’ conversation, said he was answerable for the men and what they read, and he must protest against sentiments he neither approved nor understood, and that he would fetch me the book. It was Keble’s ‘Christian Year,’ which Miss Jebbut had lent to a sick midshipman!”
It was a brave heart indeed that the Good Samaritan needed now, with cholera added to the other horrors of hospital suffering, and the frost-bitten cases from Sebastopol were almost equally heart-rending.
It was early in January 1855 that Miss Stanley escorted fifty more nurses. Most of them worked under Miss Anderson at the General Hospital at Scutari, but eight were sent into the midst of the fighting at Balaclava, and of the life there “at the front” the letters of Sister Aloysius give a terrible picture. We have, for instance, the story of a man ill and frost-bitten, who found he could not turn on his side because his feet were frozen to those of the soldier opposite. And it came to pass that for two months the death-rate in the hospitals was sixty per cent.