“‘“No, no! not at all, my dear lady,” said Lord Raglan; “you did very right; for I perceive that Miss Nightingale has not yet received my letter, in which I announced my intention of paying her a visit to-day—having previously inquired of the doctor if she could be seen.”’”[15]
The doctors, after her twelve days of dangerous illness, were urgent for Miss Nightingale’s instant return to England; but this she would not do: she was sure that, with time and patience, she would be able once more to take up her work at Scutari. Lord Ward placed his yacht at her disposal, and by slow degrees she made recovery, though Lord Raglan’s death, June 18, 1855, was a great grief and shock to her.
Wellington said of Lord Raglan that he was a man who would not tell a lie to save his life, and he was also a man of great charm and benevolence, adored by his troops. He felt to the quick the terrible repulse of our troops before Sebastopol that June, having yielded his own counsels to those of France rather than break the alliance, and he died two days after the despatch was written in which he told the story of this event.
Writing to the Duke of Newcastle in October, he had entreated for his army a little repose—that brave army, worn out, not only by the ordinary fatigues of a military campaign, and by the actual collecting of wood and water to keep life from extinction, but by cholera, sickness, and the bitter purgatorial cold of a black hillside in a Russian winter.
“Repose!” echoes Kinglake with sardonic bitterness, and we too echo it, remembering how, two days afterwards, it was riding through the devil’s jaws at Balaclava, to hurl itself but a little later against its myriad assailants at Inkermann!
Repose! uncomplaining and loyal, in the bitter grasp of winter on the heights of the Chersonese, holding day and night a siege that seemed endless, the allied armies had proved their heroism through the slow tragedy. And when at last, on the day of victory, amid the fury of the elements and the avenging fury of their own surging hearts, they grasped the result of their patient agony, though
“Stormed at with shot and shell,
Boldly they rode and well,”
that final moment of onset did but crown the fortitude of those long, slow days of dying by inches in the slow clutch of starvation, that had been so much harder to bear, while they saw their comrades in the anguish of cholera and felt their own limbs freezing beneath them.
But it was doubtless a brave assault, and it was sad that their loved commander was not there to see; for, while the Malakoff fell before the French, it was the British troops that took the Redan—that Redan of which it has been written that “three months before it had repulsed the attacking force with fearful carnage, and brought Lord Raglan to a despairing death.”