Our Father arranged her going out: for she went, if ever woman did, with a single eye to please Him and do her duty to the work and her Superintendent. “Is it well with the child?” “It is well.” Let us who feel her loss so deeply in the work not grudge her to God.
As one of you yourselves said: “She died like a good soldier of Jesus Christ, well to the front.” Would any one of us wish it otherwise for her? Would any one of us wish a better lot for herself? There is but one feeling among us all about her: that she lived as a noble Christian girl, and that she has been permitted to die nobly: in the post of honour, as a soldier thinks it glorious to die. In the midst of our work, so surely do we Nurses think it glorious to die.
But to be like her we must have a mind like hers: “enduring, patient, firm, and meek.” I know that she sought of God the mind of Jesus Christ, “active, like His; like His, resigned”; copying His pattern: ready to “endure hardness.”
We give her joy; it is our loss, not hers. She is gone to our Lord and her Lord, made ripe so soon for her and our Father’s house. Our tears are her joy. She is in another room of our Father’s house. She bids us now give thanks for her. Think of that Easter morn when she rose again! She had indeed “another morn than ours”—that 17th of April.
Florence Nightingale.
VI
Easter Eve, 1879, 6 A.M.
My dear Friends,—I am always thinking of you, and as my Easter greeting, I could not help copying for you part of a letter which one of my brother-in-law’s family had from Col. Degacher (commanding one battalion of the 24th Regiment in Natal), giving the names of men whom he recommended for the Victoria Cross, when defending the Commissariat Stores at Rorke’s Drift. (His brother, Capt. Degacher, was killed at Isandhlwana.) He says:
“Private John Williams was posted, together with Private Joseph Williams and Private William Harrison (1/24th Regiment), in a further ward of the Hospital. They held it for more than an hour—so long as they had a round of ammunition left, when, as communication was for the time cut off, the Zulus were enabled to advance and burst open the door. A hand-to-hand conflict then ensued, during which Private Joseph Williams and two of the Patients were dragged out and assegaied (killed with a short spear or dagger).
“Whilst the Zulus were occupied with the slaughter of these unfortunate men, a lull took place, which enabled Private John Williams (who with two of the Patients were by this time the only men left alive in the Ward) to succeed in knocking a hole in the partition and taking the two Patients with him into the next ward, where he found Private Henry Hook.