If it was so with the orderlies, you can imagine how it was with the poor fellows for whom she was working. Every smile from her was a gift; every word was a precious treasure to be stored away and kept through life. They would do anything she asked, for they knew she would do anything in her power for them. When any specially painful operation was to be performed (there was not always chloroform enough, alas! and in any case it was not given so freely in those days as it is now), the Lady-in-Chief would come quietly into the operating room and take her stand beside the patient; and looking up into that calm, steadfast face, and meeting the tender gaze of those pitying eyes that never flinched from any sight of pain or horror, he would take courage and nerve himself to bear the pain, since she was there to help him bear it.
"We call her the Angel of the Crimea," one soldier wrote home. "Could bad men be bad in the presence of an angel? Impossible!"
Another wrote: "Before she came there was such cussin' and swearin' as you never heard; but after she came it was as holy as a church."
And still another—perhaps our Highland lad of the night vigil, perhaps another—wrote to his people: "She would speak to one and another, and nod and smile to many more; but she could not do it to all, you know, for we lay there by hundreds; but we could kiss her shadow as it fell, and lay our heads on our pillows again content."
Miss Nightingale never wearied of bearing testimony to the many virtues of the British soldier. She loved to tell stories like the following:
"I remember a sergeant who, on picket—the rest of the picket killed, and himself battered about the head—stumbled back to camp (before Sebastopol), and on his way, picked up a wounded man and brought him on his shoulders to the lines, where he fell down insensible. When, after many hours, he recovered his senses, I believe after trepanning, his first words were to ask after his comrade: 'Is he alive?'
"'Comrade indeed! yes, he's alive—it's the General!' At that moment the General, though badly wounded, appeared at the bedside. 'Oh! General, it was you, was it, I brought in? I'm so glad; I didn't know your honor. But if I'd known it was you, I'd have saved you all the same!'"
I must not leave the story of this winter without telling of all that Miss Nightingale did for the soldiers' wives. There were many of these poor women, who had come out to this far country to be near their husbands. There was no proper provision for them, and Miss Nightingale found them in a wretched condition, living in three or four damp, dark rooms in the basement of the hospital. Their clothes were worn out; they were barefooted and bareheaded. We are told that "the only privacy to be obtained was by hanging up rags of clothes on lines. There, by the light of a rushlight, the meals were taken, the sick attended, and there the babies were born and nourished. There were twenty-two babies born from November to December, and many more during the winter."[8]
The Lady-in-Chief soon put an end to this state of things. First she fed and clothed the women from her own stores, and saw that the little babies were made warm and comfortable. In January a fever broke out among the women, owing to a broken drain in the basement, and she found a house near by, had it cleaned and furnished, and persuaded the commandant to move the women into it. All through the winter she helped these poor souls in every way, employing some in the laundry, finding situations for others in Constantinople, sending widows home to England, helping to start a school for the children. Altogether about five hundred women were helped out of the miserable condition in which she found them, and were enabled to earn their own living honestly and respectably. Writing of these times later, Miss Nightingale says: "When the improvements in our system which the war must suggest are discussed, let not the wife and child of the soldier be forgotten."