"My good young man," replied Miss Nightingale, "more dead and wounded have passed through my hands than I hope you will ever see on the battlefield during the whole of your military career; believe me, I have no fear of death."
Then she fell ill with Crimean fever, and through the army the news was received with more consternation than a severe defeat. Men broke down and cried like children when they heard that Miss Nightingale lay at the point of death, and the Commander in Chief, Lord Raglan, rode through sleet and mud for hours to visit her personally. She did not die, however, but recovered to take up again her duties as chief nurse and organizer.
When the war was ended Miss Nightingale remained at the Crimea until the last soldiers were sent home, and then, and not till then, she followed them. After most of the men had left and only a few remained she still worked faithfully to serve them, establishing "reading huts" and places of recreation such as the Red Cross and the Y.M.C.A. established in France and Belgium in the course of the World War some sixty years later.
As a matter of fact the work performed by Miss Nightingale was indirectly responsible for the birth of the Red Cross which was organized in Switzerland some four years after she had finished her work at the Crimea, and certainly no name in the Red Cross, in spite of the host of noble men and women who have served there, has ever equaled the glory of her own.
She returned to England quietly as she had left, although a British Government placed a battleship at her service—and she lived in England engaged in useful and philanthropic work for a great many years. With a fund of about $250,000 she founded the Nightingale Home for the proper training of nurses, a fund that she could have doubled or trebled had she so desired, or if the needs of the home had required it. In the following years she was frequently consulted on hospital organization in the armies not only of Great Britain but of Continental nations as well. She died in 1910, one of the great figures among the heroines of history.
CHAPTER XXVI
FATHER DAMIEN
Many are the stories of brave doctors and ministers who have sacrificed themselves in times of pestilence and plague, caring for the sick, allowing experiments to be performed on their own bodies, and giving their lives without fear in the hope of saving invalids and sufferers; but no story is more thrilling than that of the Belgian priest named Father Damien.
Father Damien's real name was Joseph de Veuster, and he was born in the year 1840, in the little village of Tremeloo in Belgium, not far from the city of Louvain that became famous in the World War when the Germans sacked it, burned its university and murdered its inhabitants.