She herself was still busy nursing some of the Roman Catholic members of her staff in the huts on the snowclad heights of Balaclava, and how heartily she valued them may be judged from these closing sentences of a letter to their Reverend Mother:—
“You know that I shall do everything I can for the Sisters whom you have left me. I will care for them as if they were my own children. But it will not be like you.”
Not very far from the sanatorium on the heights above Balaclava, two new camp hospitals had been put up, and while superintending the nursing there, our Lady-in-Chief lived in a three-roomed hut with a medical store attached to it, where she was quite near to sanatorium and hospitals. She and the three Sisters who were with her had not very weather-proof quarters. One of them, whose letters are full of interest, tells of their waking one morning to find themselves covered with snow, and leading a life of such adventurous simplicity that when the Protestant chaplain brought some eggs tied up in a handkerchief the gift was regarded as princely! Happily, they were able to reward the gentleman by washing his neckties, and ironing them with an ingenious makeshift for the missing flat-iron, in the shape of a teapot filled with hot water. Every night everything in the huts froze, even to the ink. But Miss Nightingale tells how brave and entirely self-forgetful the Sisters were under every hardship and privation.
Miss Nightingale’s Medals and Decorations.
By those who have never had the privilege of knowing such women intimately, her affection for them may be the better understood from the following graphic letter written by Lord Napier:—
“At an early period of my life I held a diplomatic position under Lord Stratford de Redcliffe in Constantinople. During the distress of the Crimean War the Ambassador called me one morning and said: ‘Go down to the port; you will find a ship there loaded with Jewish exiles—Russian subjects from the Crimea. It is your duty to disembark them. The Turks will give you a house in which they may be placed. I turn them over entirely to you.’ I went down to the shore and received about two hundred persons, the most miserable objects that could be witnessed, most of them old men, women, and children. I placed them in the cold, ruinous lodging allocated to them by the Ottoman authorities. I went back to the Ambassador and said: ‘Your Excellency, these people are cold, and I have no fuel or blankets. They are hungry, and I have no food. They are dirty, and I have no soap. Their hair is in an indescribable condition, and I have no combs. What am I to do with these people?’ ‘Do?’ said the Ambassador. ‘Get a couple of Sisters of Mercy; they will put all to right in a moment.’ I went, saw the Mother Superior, and explained the case. I asked for two Sisters. She ordered two from her presence to follow me. They were ladies of refinement and intellect. I was a stranger and a Protestant, and I invoked their assistance for the benefit of the Jews. Yet these two women made up their bundles and followed me through the rain, without a look, a whisper, a sign of hesitation. From that moment my fugitives were saved. I witnessed the labours of those Sisters for months, and they never endeavoured to make a single convert.”
The military men were not less enthusiastic. When Colonel Connolly, brother-in-law to Mr. Bruin, of Carlow, was travelling, after his return from the war, near the Bruin estate, a fellow-traveller spoke disrespectfully of nuns. The colonel, a Protestant, not only made a warm defence of the ladies who had nursed him in Russia and Ottoman regions, and for their sakes of all other nuns, but handed the assailant his card, saying: “If you say another word against these saintly gentlewomen I shall call you out.” The slanderer subsided very quickly.
Sister Aloysius, one of those very Sisters who were with Miss Nightingale in the huts, has written in her “Memories of the Crimea”:—