The fleets of the allied powers gathered in the Black Sea, forming one great armada; surrounded the peninsula of the Crimea, and landed their armies. In September, 1854, was fought the first great battle, by the Alma River. The allies were victorious, and a great shout of joy went up all over England. "Victory! victory!" cried old and young. There were bells and bonfires and illuminations; the whole country went mad with joy, and for a short time no one thought of anything except glory, waving banners and sounding trumpets. But banners and trumpets, though a real part of war, are only a very small part. After a little time, through the shouting and rejoicing a different sound was heard; the sound of weeping and lamentation, not only for the hundreds of brave men who were lying dead beside the fatal river, but for the other hundreds of sick and wounded soldiers, dying for want of care.
There had been gross neglect and terrible mismanagement in the carrying on of the war. Nobody knew just whose fault it was, but everything seemed to be lacking that was most needed on that desolate shore of the Crimea. The English troops were in an enemy's country, and a poor country at that; whatever supplies there were had been taken by the Russian armies for their own needs. Food and clothing had been sent out from England in great quantities, but somehow, no one could find them. Some supplies had been stowed in the hold of vessels, and other things piled on top so that they could not be got at; some were stored in warehouses which no one had authority to open; some were actually rotting at the wharves, for want of precise orders as to their disposal. The surgeons had no bandages, the doctors no medicines; it was a state of things that to-day we can hardly imagine. Indeed, it seemed as if the need were so great and terrible that it paralyzed those who saw it.
"It is now pouring rain," wrote William Howard Russell to the London Times, "the skies are black as ink, the wind is howling over the staggering tents, the trenches are turned into dykes; in the tents the water is sometimes a foot deep; our men have not either warm or waterproof clothing; they are out for twelve hours at a time in the trenches; they are plunged into the inevitable miseries of a winter campaign—and not a soul seems to care for their comfort, or even for their lives. These are hard truths, but the people of England must hear them. They must know that the wretched beggar who wanders about the streets of London in the rain, leads the life of a prince compared with the British soldiers who are fighting out here for their country.
"The commonest accessories of a hospital are wanting; there is not the least attention paid to decency or clean linen; the stench is appalling; the fetid air can hardly struggle out to taint the atmosphere, save through the chinks in the walls and roofs; and for all I can observe, these men die without the least effort being made to save them. There they lie, just as they were let gently down on the ground by the poor fellows, their comrades, who brought them on their backs from the camp with the greatest tenderness, but who are not allowed to remain with them. The sick appear to be tended by the sick, and the dying by the dying."
He added that the snow was three feet deep on a level, and the cold so intense that many soldiers were frozen in their tents.
No one meant to be cruel or neglectful; but there were not half enough doctors, and—think of it, children! there were no nurses.
How did this happen? Well, when the war broke out the military authorities did not want female nurses. The matter was talked over, and it was decided that things would go better without them. This was put on the ground that the class of nurses, as I have told you, was at that time in England a very poor one. They were often drunken, generally unfeeling, and always ignorant. The War Department decided that this kind of nurse would do more harm than good; they did not realize that "The old order changeth, yielding place to new," and that the time was come when the new nurse must replace the old.
But now the need was come, immediate and terrible, and there was no one to meet it. When the people of England realized this; when they learned that the hospital at Scutari was filled with sick and wounded and dying men, and no one to care for them save a few male orderlies, wholly untrained for the task; when they heard that in the hospitals of the French army the Sisters of Mercy were doing their blessed work, tending the wounded, healing the sick and comforting the dying, and realized that the English soldiers, their own sons, brothers and husbands, had no such help and no such comfort, the sound of bell and trumpet was lost in a great cry of anger and sorrow that went up from the whole country.
And matters grew worse and worse, as one great battle after another sent its dreadful fruits to the already overflowing hospital at Scutari. On October 25th came Balaklava; on November 5th, Inkerman.