“It was said at one time that the War Office was on the point of issuing a mandate forbidding us to speak even to the Catholic soldiers on religion, or to say a prayer for them. However, that mandate never came; we often thought the guardian angels of the soldiers prevented it.”
It made no difference to the loyalty of their work together that Miss Nightingale was not a Roman Catholic; they all obeyed the Master who has taught that it is not the way in which He is addressed that matters, but whether we help those whom He gave His life to help, and in loving and serving whom, we love and serve Him.
So in London and in Balaclava the good of her influence was felt. In London the funds mounted, and at Balaclava the excellent work among the soldiers still went on.
Her very presence among the men helped to keep them sober and diligent, and in every way at their best, in those first months of victory when heads are only too easily turned. And she had the reward she most desired, for she was able to speak of these brave fellows—the nameless heroes of the long campaign—as having been “uniformly quiet and well-bred.” Those words, it is true, were spoken of the men attending the reading-huts; but they are quite in line with her more general verdict with regard to Tommy; though, alas, we cannot stretch them to cover his behaviour at the canteens, where we are told that much drunkenness prevailed.
She had advanced money for the building of a coffee-house at Inkermann, and had helped the chaplain to get maps and slates for his school work, and the bundles of magazines and illustrated papers, sent out from England in answer to her appeal, as well as books sent out by the Duchess of Kent, cheered and brightened many a long hour for the men. She was always on the alert to help them about sending home their pay, and quick to care for the interests of their wives and children.
Before she left the Crimea, her hut was beset by fifty or sixty poor women who had been left behind when their husbands sailed for home with their regiments. They had followed their husbands to the war without leave and, having proved themselves useful, had been allowed to remain. And now they were left alone in a strange land and, but for Florence Nightingale, the end of the story might have been bitter sorrow. But she managed to get them sent home in a British ship.
Many a mother at home must already have blessed her; for reckless boys who had enlisted, without the sanction of their families, had again and again been by her persuaded to write home, and in the first months of the war she had actually undertaken to stamp for the men any letters home which were sent to her camp. And at Scutari she had arranged a provisional money-order office where, four afternoons in each week, she received from the men the pay which she encouraged them to send home. When we are told that, in small sums, about £1,000 passed through this office month by month, we realize dimly something of the labour involved, and thinking of all her other cares and labours, which were nevertheless not allowed to stand in the way of such practical thoughtfulness as this, we do not wonder that “the services” loved her with a love that was akin to worship. The money, as she herself says, “was literally so much rescued from the canteens and from drunkenness;” and the Government, following her lead, had themselves established money-order offices later at Scutari, Balaclava, Constantinople, and the Headquarters, Crimea.
It is not surprising that, in the “Old Country,” songs were dedicated to her as “the good angel of Derbyshire,” and that her very portrait became a popular advertisement.
And we have it on good authority that her name was revered alike by English, French, Turks, and Russians.