Miss Finzi gives a graphic account of the troubles that had to be surmounted, owing to insufficiency of hospital requisites, beds, medicines, doctors and nurses; but this was inseparable from the nature of things, and has long since been righted. We may indeed be proud of our services of mercy; nothing can exceed their value and efficiency, namely the R.A.M.C and our nurses. If our gallant soldiers and sailors engaged, through political blunder, in the "Gallipoli gamble" and Kut disaster had been as well tended and supplied as those in France, how many lives, thrown away through political ineptitude, would now have been spared to us!
Miss Finzi writes most modestly of her own work, but we know that she and all the genuine nurses and helpers worked devotedly and well, and that the deepest debt of gratitude is due from the nation to them, who softened the horrors of war to our soldiers, who ministered aid to them when they were sore stricken by wounds or diseases, and mitigated their tortures. It must not be forgotten that for many months the capture of Calais seemed not improbable; the Huns had no doubts upon the subject, and time after time, as in the case of Paris and Verdun, the bloodthirsty Kaiser gave his vain and arrogant orders: "To be taken at all cost, no matter at what sacrifice!" A truly beneficent ruler and father of his people! The R.A.M.C. and nurses, therefore, were working at terrible disadvantage, with no certainty that the bestial and brutish enemy would not shortly appear, to wreak upon them his savage instincts of murder and lust, signs of which were constantly brought in to them: terrible wounds caused by expanding bullets, and, worst of all, accounts by eye-witnesses and victims of the perpetual and designed firing upon hospitals, dressing stations, stretcher-bearers, it being, apparently, a craze of the Germans to kill and ill-treat what is helpless and cannot resist them. Tales also were related of civil population—men, women and children—being butchered, and Red Cross nurses outraged in the most fiendish manner, and then mutilated and murdered. With such possible prospects and fate at the hands of men compared to whom the Huns of Attila, the Goths of Alaric, the Tartars of Timur and the Mongols of Genghis Khan deserved a crown of mercy. Imagine what our nurses are and what blessings they have brought to our soldiers and sailors. At the commencement of the Crimean War there were no Army nurses and no civil nurses, except those dreadful creatures described by Charles Dickens in "Martin Chuzzlewit," such as Sairey Gamp and Betsy Prig—fat, waddling, coarse, ignorant, unclean and unkempt, and usually smelling of gin; they attended births, sick-beds, and laying out of corpses, in which they took great pride, as it brought them in touch with the undertaker, to their mutual advantage. Contrast such so-called nurses, in their poke bonnets, smelly robes and clogs, with their huge, bulging umbrellas, their noisiness and heavy hands, with those of to-day, with their neat and serviceable uniform, their gentleness, their light hands, their kindness and sympathy with their suffering patients. As the late Dean Hole wrote in his "Now and Then," they might be compared to a beautiful yacht scudding along in a light breeze, under a blue sky and shining sun, while the ancient apologies for nurses rolled along, a water-(or gin and water) logged barge in the Thames in a thick, yellow November fog. (Dean Hole.)
It was to Florence Nightingale, of ever-blessed memory, that we owe the foundation of our Army nursing system in 1854. When the news of the battle of the Alma came, and of many thousands of wounded men with no nurses and a totally insufficient medical staff, and not a single ambulance, she volunteered to take out a number of nurses. For a wonder her offer was accepted, for in those days every sort of change in Army matters was considered a pernicious innovation. She took out thirty-four nurses to the Crimea, and before long had 10,000 wounded in her charge. The work which she and her nurses did was marvellous, and they stuck to it till their health broke down, as our present nurses have done. After the war £50,000 was subscribed for the purpose of founding an institution for the training of nurses in connection with St. Thomas's and King's College Hospitals. From that time the Army nursing system has steadily developed under the practical and ever-ready patronage of Royalty, till it reached its present perfection. In the Soudan and South African Wars the services of the nurses were invaluable. When the present war showed itself to be one of such gigantic dimensions, and when our Army, due to the genius of Lord Kitchener, swelled to the size of millions, it was feared that a sufficient number of Army nurses could not be forthcoming; but then the women of England showed what they were made of. Hundreds and thousands devoted themselves at once to training as nurses, others to the less-skilled work required in hospitals for the victims of war; and now, owing to them and the admirable chiefs and subordinate officers of the R.A.M.C, and to the patriotic and self-sacrificing manner in which private medical practitioners have come forward with their services, little or nothing is wanted, considering the gigantic nature and scope of this terrible war.
Miss Finzi is to be congratulated upon having written a most interesting and readable book, full of facts and personal experiences, such experiences as, please God, no one will again have to relate; and this will be so when once the Hohenzollerns, the cause of all trouble in Europe and elsewhere for many decades, are exterminated or driven into obscurity.
The work shows forth in bright colours the universal devotion of our nurses—heroic women who face all dangers and hardships for the sake of doing good to others. Among these must ever stand forth the name of Edith Cavell, who spent her whole life in mitigating the sufferings of others, who nursed even German officers in her hospital who had probably committed unspeakable crimes and atrocities in Belgium. This weighed as nothing, as might have been expected, in the eyes of the barbarous Teutons, to whom mercy, justice and gratitude are unknown. She was done to death vilely and brutally, but her martyrdom will never be forgotten or forgiven; it will be one of the foulest of the many foul stains on the fame of the Kaiser and his accomplices, while it will ever shed a ray of glory upon the noble record of our British Nurses.
Alfred E. Turner.