THE LADY WITH THE LAMP: MISS NIGHTINGALE IN THE HOSPITAL AT SCUTARI.
(After the Picture by Henrietta Rae [Mrs. Normand.)]
In these circumstances the horrors of the winter could only be mitigated by an ample supply of mules and horses. By the breaking up of the road, the land transport at the disposal of Commissary-General Filder was reduced to one-sixth; for whereas a horse and cart could transport six hundred pounds' weight to the front, a horse alone could only carry two hundred pounds'. It follows that the supplies could only be maintained by extra work on the part of the animals, or by an extra number of animals. At a critical moment, when he wanted more horse power, Mr. Filder sent a steamer to fetch animals from his depôt; but, by some cause unexplained, the steamer was detained at Constantinople for three weeks. Then, although there was a large park of ponies and horses on the Bosphorus, they not being forthcoming, the valuable chargers of the cavalry, and even the teams of the artillery and the horses belonging to the officers, were put in requisition. Still all this was not enough. The horses, from hard usage by their drivers and keepers, from overwork and exposure, from neglect to feed them, although forage was at hand, died by scores. The drivers, imported from Turkey, died, deserted, refused to work: they could not stand the exposure and fatigue. The consequence was that, during the most critical period, there was never more transport than was sufficient to feed the troops irregularly and from hand to mouth, and to keep the men and guns supplied with the minimum of ammunition consistent with safety. The burden of responsibility, the amount of work required from the commissariat, was too heavy and too vast for a body so imperfectly organised and so undermanned. The harbour of Balaclava was too small, its shores were too confined, for the service demanded at an emergency. Months of labour were required to make it suitable. But making every allowance—and the exceptional position of the commissariat, with large extra labours imposed upon it, requires in justice large allowance—it is plain that, from some cause never fully explained, the commissariat failed to import and keep in the Crimea a supply of transport adequate to the extraordinary demands of the army. When the perilous position of the army dawned upon them, Ministers thought of an Army Works Corps, employed Messrs. Peto & Co. to make a railway, and instructed Colonel M'Murdo to raise a Land Transport Corps. But then it was too late. So we come round again to the original sources—not of all the suffering, for war and suffering are inseparable—but of the peculiar kind of suffering endured by the army in the Crimea, namely, inadequate and unorganised military establishments; and the responsibility for this rested not upon one Government alone, but upon all Governments from 1830 up to that time, and not upon all Governments only, but also upon the nation.
Had there been a good road from Balaclava to the camp—had there been plenty of transport, plenty of clothing, plenty of shelter, plenty of fuel—the sufferings of the army from hard work and exposure would have been very great; for war is not a condition of existence conducive to health and long life, even in the most favourable circumstances; and when war is carried on through the winter, when the form of that war is a siege, when the army carrying on the siege is itself besieged by the enemy, and restricted to one narrow pass leading to a little bay for all its supplies, for everything to keep it alive except water, the ordinary miseries and hardships of war become intense, terrible, and destructive. So it was in the Crimea. Scantily clothed, irregularly fed, existing, when on duty, in the mud and water of the trenches, sleeping, when they returned to their tents, in wet clothes on a wet floor, improvident of the little means within their reach which would have lessened their sufferings, none but the most iron constitutions could endure this and live. Our brave, obstinate, hardy soldiers were like children in all that lies beyond the range of their regular duties, and many perished because they were ignorant and reckless. But the bulk of the sickness and mortality was caused by overwork and exposure, necessarily consequent upon the discharge of their duty. A few figures will suggest better than pages of writing how much this army suffered. On the 1st of October—that is, just after the arrival of the army before Sebastopol—the number of men and officers in a state fit for duty was 23,000; and the number sick, including the wounded, was 6,713. On the 3rd of November the number fit for duty had fallen to 22,343, the number of sick had increased to 7,116. Then came the battle of Inkermann. On the 14th of November the effective force was 20,780, the number of sick and wounded 8,366. The force of "bayonets"—that is, privates and corporals of infantry, "rank and file," as the technical term is—had fallen to 14,874; and it is on the bayonets that a quartermaster-general relies for his working and fatigue parties. But now reinforcements began to trickle in. Troops to the number of 3,480 men arrived. Yet so severe was the pressure, even in the middle of November, that this augmentation only raised the effective force from 20,780 to 22,825. The next item explains this. The roll of sick had risen from 8,366 to 9,170, an increase of 804 in one week. A week later, on the 30th of November, in spite of the reinforcements, the effective force had fallen to 21,895; the sick had increased to 10,095, although 640 men had landed in the interval. Let us pass over a month—a month in which nearly 5,000 men landed at Balaclava. What do we find? That on the 1st of January, 1855, the effective force stands at only 21,973, or 78 more than it stood on the 30th of November; while the number of sick had increased to 13,915. A fortnight later, and the effective force was 20,444; the sick 16,176; while the force of bayonets was actually fewer by 36 than it was on the 14th of November, before any of the 10,000 reinforcements had arrived. Nor must it be forgotten that all this time the dead were being buried, and the convalescents were returning to duty, and going again into the hospital. These figures are the measure of the unspeakable sufferings of the army in the Crimea, the main and unavoidable causes of which we have described.
But these figures do not convey a full idea of the agonies of that winter campaign, except to those gifted with a lively imagination. It was the treatment of the sick and wounded, both in and out of the Crimea, that occasioned the worst of these agonies. The medical department utterly broke down under the burden thrown upon it. Although more medical men and more medicines and medical comforts were sent out to the East than ever were supplied to a force of similar strength, yet, in consequence of want of foresight, want of faculty, want of administrative skill, the medicines and medical comforts were so badly arranged and distributed, that, especially in the Crimea, they were not at hand when most required. The state of the hospitals at Scutari was the first thing that roused the public indignation. Government, having failed to organise a medical staff corps, had recourse to Miss Nightingale and a number of trained nurses collected by her, and sent them to the East; and the brightest picture in the dark story of the winter of 1854-5 is that of Florence Nightingale bringing order out of chaos, and tending the sick and wounded soldiers of England, in those far-off hospitals on the Asiatic shore of the Bosphorus. That was the work of Government. The public feeling showed itself in another form. Sir Robert Peel proposed to raise £10,000 for supplying the sick with comforts, to be called the Times Fund, and put down £200 towards it; and in a few days the whole amount demanded had reached Printing House Square. Three gentlemen were sent to superintend the expenditure, and it is to Miss Nightingale principally, and to these private persons, that we are bound to attribute the alleviation of the sad state of the sick and wounded at Scutari in the winter of 1854-5. The truth is, that Government had been kept in the dark as to the condition of the hospitals. Knowing that amply sufficient supplies had been sent to the East, they were confounded when they heard that not comforts only, but actual necessaries, were wanting. When we look into the facts, it is manifest that the medical department in the East had not been well organised on a scale sufficiently large, and that it had not been governed by men of energy, foresight, and decision. Hence the horrible condition of the tent-hospitals in the Crimea, and the various hospitals on the Bosphorus. It is impossible to exonerate Government from censure, but it is equally impossible not to see the evil influence of a system adapted to a state of peace suddenly applied to a state of war. By slow degrees all the hospitals were improved, and finally brought up to a state of high efficiency; but in the meantime thousands had died, and hundreds had become permanent invalids; and it is this loss of life which is the heaviest charge that lies at the door of the Aberdeen Administration.
Hence grew the demand for the Select Committee on the Army before Sebastopol. Those who originated it used, throughout the inquiry, the great power it gave them as a means of obtaining grounds, real and colourable, to sustain the preconceived conclusions with which they began their inquisition. It was a most imperfect investigation. "The fulness of the investigation," as the Committee had the candour to confess, "has been restricted by considerations of State policy, so that in the outset of this report, your Committee must admit that they have been compelled to aid an inquiry which they have been unable satisfactorily to complete." Indeed, to have probed the matter to the bottom, the Committee should have called at least General Canrobert and the Emperor of the French from the ranks of our allies, and in no case could any investigation be fair which did not include the evidence of Lord Raglan, General Airey, Mr. Filder, Miss Nightingale, and Lord Stratford de Redcliffe. Yet, without having examined any of these, Mr. Roebuck coolly asked the Committee to endorse the most sweeping and arrogant charges against the principal persons concerned, including those who were absent, and unable to say a word in their own defence. And although the report drawn up by Mr. Roebuck and Mr. Layard was rejected by all the other members of the Committee, by his casting vote Mr. Roebuck was enabled to append a paragraph replete with epigrammatic assertions that were untrue. By the time this Committee had ended an inquiry that they could not, from the very character of the investigation, complete, the army had recovered its health, strength, and efficiency, and the new Minister of War, Lord Panmure, had, in his place, candidly ascribed the change in the army, in great part, to the measures of the very Minister, the Duke of Newcastle, who had been made the victim of the national fury.
It is a relief to turn from party conflicts and the exhibition of national wrath, not in the wisest form, to the military operations of that grievous winter campaign. The first renewed sign of military activity was seen on the 20th of November. In the vicious plan of siege adopted the British played a wholly secondary part. The French theory was, that by assailing and carrying the Flagstaff Bastion at the southern apex of the town, they would obtain possession of a commanding position, which would necessitate an abandonment of the place by the enemy. To this end they worked. But as the batteries on the eastern face of the enemy's lines took their approaches almost in flank, our engineers had to construct batteries intended to draw off and keep down the fire of these Russian works. Thus the British attacks were subordinate and supplementary to the great French attack. The British theory was that the Malakoff was the key of the whole position on the southern side of the great harbour; but the French engineers could not see the justness of this theory, and General Canrobert was not a man of sufficient moral strength to overrule his engineers, even supposing that he had sufficient military insight to comprehend the views of Sir John Burgoyne. Therefore the French persisted in their original error; and a dreary period ensued, during which the Russians made frequent sorties with partial success, while on the side of the Allies the chief success was the capture of the Russian rifle-pits by Lieutenant Tryon on the 20th of November. And so the winter wore away.
January, during which the troops suffered most from disease, was nevertheless the turning-point from gloom to brighter days. For huts and warm clothing had arrived in superabundance, and transport was improved. The shores of Balaclava bay had been rendered passable by roads on both sides, and wharves had been built. The railway was creeping out of the port and ascending the hills towards the front; and as the French had at last sent a brigade to reinforce the right at Inkermann, our men got less labour and more rest. The French had as yet no huts. They were still sheltered only in dog-tents. But they were tolerably fed and clothed, and large reinforcements, including a brigade of the new Imperial Guard, had brought their numbers up to 80,000 men. The resolve of the Allies to take Sebastopol, far from suffering any abatement, had become stronger, and every energy and resource was applied to secure its fulfilment. The Russian Emperor, the cause of this heroic conflict, was not less resolute, and day and night his thoughts were bent upon frustrating at any and every cost the designs of the Allies. The government of Lord Aberdeen had obtained from the King of Sardinia the promise that he would join the alliance, and furnish 15,000 men for service in the Crimea, and there was some reason to suppose that Austria would at length take the field; but whether it was that Austria resented the entry of Sardinia into the Western league, or whether timid counsels prevailed at Vienna, Austria did not change her position from that of a passive to that of an active ally.
The month of February was marked by many important incidents. On both sides there were renewed vigour and activity, in spite of the severity of the weather. For the French Emperor, discontented with General Canrobert, who had failed to realise the expectations formed of him, had sent out the Duke of Montebello to examine the state of the siege, and report thereon. The consequence was that General Niel, one of the first engineers in the French service, received orders to hasten to the Crimea and direct the engineering operations. Niel had not been long in the French camp before he justified the early and oft-repeated counsels of Sir John Burgoyne, and declared that the Malakoff Hill was the key of Sebastopol. It was at once determined to break ground on that side. By every fair consideration, the right of doing so should have been made over to the English. But no. There were two overmastering reasons. The British had fewer numbers by almost one-half, and the French are always greedy of glory. Lord Raglan could not insist—the alliance depended on submission. The French Emperor was bent on reaping the lion's share of the glory. He needed it for himself and his army. Thus, by force of circumstances, the British were left in their old positions, one of which, the left attack, led no whither, the other led to the Redan, which it was impossible to reach; while the French took up their ground on the plateau leading to the Malakoff, and on the heights on the right of the Careening Ravine.