And let us not think that these things can be done in a day or a night. No, they are the result of no rough-and-ready method. The most important part of those efforts was to be found in the patient labour of years. These great tasks are not to be accomplished suddenly by raw fellows in a night; it is when discipline and training have become a kind of second nature to us that they can be accomplished every day and every night. The raw Native levies ran away, determining our fall at Isandhlwana. The well-trained English soldiers, led by their Officers and their Non-commissioned Officers, stuck to their posts.
Every feeling, every thought we have, stamps a character upon us, especially in our year of training, and in the next year or two.
The most unruly boys, weak in themselves—for unruliness is weakness—when they have to submit, it brings out all the good points in their characters. These boys, so easily led astray, they put themselves under the severest discipline, and after training sometimes come out the best of us all. The qualities which, when let alone, run to seed and do themselves and others nothing but harm, under proper discipline make fine fellows of them.
And what is it to obey? To obey means to do what we are told, and to do it at once. With the nurse, as with the soldier, whether we have been accustomed to it or not, whether we think it right or not, is not the question. Prompt obedience is the question. We are not in control, but under control. Prompt obedience is the first thing; the rest is traditional nonsense. But mind who we go to for our orders. Go to headquarters. True discipline is to uphold authority, and not to mind trouble. We come into the work to do the work....
We Nurses are taught the “reason why,” as soldiers cannot be, of much of what we have to do. But it would be making a poor use of this “reason why” if we were to turn round in any part of our training and say, or not say, but feel—We know better than you.
Would we be of less use than the Elephant? The Elephant who could kill a hundred men, but who alike pushes the artillery train with his head when the horses cannot move it, and who minds the children and carefully nurses them, and who threads a needle with his trunk. Why? Because he has been taught to obey. He would be of no use but to destroy, unless he had learnt that. Sometimes he has a strong will, and it is not easy for him to get his lesson perfect. We can feel for him. We know a little about it ourselves. But he does learn in time to go our way and not his own, to carry a heavy load, which of course he would rather not do, to turn to which ever side we wish, and to stop when we want him to stop.
So God teaches each one of us in time to go His way and not our own. And one of the best things I can wish each one of us is that we may learn the Elephant’s lesson, that is to obey, in good time and not too late.
Pray for me, my dear friends, that I may learn it, even in my old age.
Florence Nightingale.