“She had the gracefulness, the wit, the unfailing cheerfulness—qualities so remarkable, but so much overlooked, in our Saviour’s life. She had the absence of all ‘mortification’ for mortification’s sake, which characterized His work, and any real work in the present day as in His day. And how did she do all this?... She was always filled with the thought that she must be about her Father’s business.”
CHAPTER XXII.
India—Correspondence with Sir Bartle Frere—Interest in village girls—The Lamp.
We come now to Miss Nightingale’s most monumental achievement of all, the reform of sanitary conditions in India—a reform ever widening and developing, branching forth and striking its roots deeper. Her interest in that vast population, that world-old treasury of subtle religious thought and ever-present mystical faith, may perhaps have been in part an inheritance from the Anglo-Indian Governor who was counted in her near ancestry. But there can be little doubt that her ardent and practical desire to improve the conditions of camp life in India began in her intimate care for the soldiers, and her close knowledge of many things unknown to the ordinary English subject. The world-wide freemasonry of the rank and file in our army enabled her to hear while at Scutari much of the life of the army in the vast and distant dominions of Burma and Bengal, and she had that gift for seeing through things to their farthest roots which enabled her to perceive clearly that no mere mending of camp conditions could stay the continual ravages of disease among our men. The evil was deeper and wider, and only as conditions were improved in sanitary matters could the mortality of the army be lessened. She saw, and saw clearly, that the reason children died like flies in India, so that those who loved them best chose the agony of years of parting rather than take the risks, lay not so much in the climate as in the human poisons and putrefactions so carelessly treated and so quickly raised to murder-power by the extreme heat.
Much of this comes out clearly in her letter to Sir Bartle Frere, with whom her first ground of friendship had arisen out of their common interest in sanitary matters.
What manner of man Sir Bartle was may be divined from a letter to him written by Colonel W. F. Marriott, one of the secretaries of the Bombay Government, at the time of his leaving Bombay:—
“The scene of your departure stirred me much. That bright evening, the crowd on the pier and shore as the boat put off, the music from the Octavia, as the band played ‘Auld Lang Syne’ as we passed, were all typical and impressive by association of ideas. But it was not a shallow sympathy with which I took in all the circumstances. I could divine some of your thoughts. If I felt like Sir Bedivere, left behind ‘among new men, strange faces, other minds,’ you must have felt in some degree like King Arthur in the barge, ‘I have lived my life, and that which I have done may He Himself make pure.’ I do not doubt that you felt that all this ‘mouth honour’ is only worth so far as it is the seal of one’s own approving conscience, and though you could accept it freely as deserved from their lips, yet at that hour you judged your own work hardly. You measured the palpable results with your conceptions and hopes, and were inclined to say, ‘I am no better than my fathers.’ But I, judging now calmly and critically, feel—I may say, see—that though the things that seem to have failed be amongst those for which you have taken most pains, yet they are small things compared with the work which has not failed. You have made an impression of earnest human sympathy with the people of this country, which will deepen and expand, so that it will be felt as a perpetual witness against any narrower and less noble conception of our relation to them, permanently raising the moral standard of highest policy towards them; and your name will become a traditional embodiment of a good governor.”[24]
Frere had seen that the filthy condition of many of the roads, after the passing of animals and the failure to cleanse from manure, was of itself a source of poison, though the relation between garbage and disease-bearing flies was then less commonly understood, and he was never tired of urging the making of decent roads; but this, he knew, was only a very small part of the improvements needed.
His correspondence with Miss Nightingale began in 1867, and in that and the five following years they exchanged about one hundred letters, chiefly on sanitary questions.