In the Days of Queen Victoria

by Eva March Tappan

The Queen was always against war, but when it was finally declared, early in 1854, she did everything in her power for the success of England. When the first regiments that were ready to go to the Crimea marched through the courtyard of Buckingham Palace, she and the Prince stood on the balcony as enthusiastic as the troops. Then she hastened to Osborne to say farewell to the warships that were starting for the Baltic. Prince Alfred had already made up his mind to be a sailor, and the Duke's little namesake was destined to follow the Duke's example and be a soldier, but they were as yet only small children, and the Queen exclaimed, "How I wish I had two sons in the army now and two in the navy!" Nothing that affected the war was too great or too small for her to notice, and she had a definite opinion on every subject.

"Your Majesty," said Lord Aberdeen, the Prime Minister, "it is proposed to have a day of humiliation and fasting for the success of our arms."

"I approve most heartily of a day of prayer," declared the Queen, "but not of calling it a day of humiliation. We are not humiliated. It is not our wickedness, but the selfish ambition and want of honesty of the Emperor which have brought on this war. We believe that our cause is just, and that we are contending for what is right."

"But it has long been the custom to call such days times of fasting and prayer," the Prime Minister suggested.

"We will thank God for the blessings we have enjoyed," said the Queen, "and ask His help and protection, but it is my particular wish that we call the day one of prayer and supplication."

The war was begun, and during the two years following, no one in the land suffered more intensely than the Queen. A powerful nation is always inclined to expect that its enemies may be crushed at a blow, but Russia was not so easily crushed.

The Queen was prepared for battles lost and battles won, but not for blunders and poor management; and to a woman as prompt and as careful of details as she, such faults were unpardonable. Before many months came the report of the Charge of the Light Brigade, which Tennyson has made famous in his poem. This useless charge by which six hundred men were sent to attack an army was caused by a mistake. "Someone had blundered." Thousands of copies of the poem were printed and sent to the soldiers who were besieging Sebastopol.

The Queen was in constant anxiety. Telegrams were false and misleading, and if one brought good news in the morning, she dared not rejoice lest it should be contradicted before night. It was then that the work of the "special correspondent" began, for a physician who was at the scene of the war sent letters to the London Times, and for the first time, the people at home knew the daily life of their soldiers.

The story told in the columns of the Times was a narration of terrible suffering, which was all the worse because so much of it was unnecessary. It does not seem possible that such stupid blunders could have been made. Food was sent that was not fit to eat. A whole shipload of much-needed shoes braved the storms of the Atlantic and Mediterranean—and proved to be all for the left foot! Clothes, blankets, and medicines in generous quantities lay in the holds of English vessels off Balaklava Bay, while men were dying for the lack of them. Shiploads of cattle arrived at Balaklava, and instead of being driven to the front, where there was sore need of beef, they were killed at once, and then came a long delay in arranging for transportation. The trouble was that it was no one's business to transport the stores, and no one had the right to interfere. The hospitals were so inefficient that nine-tenths of the men who died, perished of disease and mismanagement, and not from the bullets of the Russians.

When such news as this reached England, the whole country was aroused, but it was helpless. There was no time to change the organization of the conflicting "departments," and the Minister of War finally decided to do exactly what the Romans used to do in times of great difficulty: he appointed a dictator, with full power to go to the Crimea and do precisely as she thought best in making arrangements for the sick and wounded soldiers. This dictator was a woman named Florence Nightingale. She had a large fortune and a beautiful home, but she cared more for helping the sick than for living in luxury. For more than ten years she had been studying nursing, not only in England, but in France and Germany. Late in 1854 she went to the Crimea, taking forty-two nurses with her. It was no small task that she had undertaken, for in a short time ten thousand sick men were in her charge. The sanitary arrangements of the camp and the hospital were all in her hands. She was a gentle, modest woman, by nature shy and retiring, but where the comfort of her soldiers was concerned, she would never yield a point to anyone. "She had a voice of velvet and a will of steel," they said of her; and as she walked down the long aisles of the hospitals—in one of them the rows of beds stretched along for nearly two and a half miles—the poor sufferers kissed her very shadow. It was of her that Longfellow wrote: