To soothe them with her gentle care,
And feed life’s flickering flame.
When wounded sore, on fever’s rack,
Or cast away as slain,
She called their fluttering spirits back,
And gave them strength again.
Francis Bennoch.
The events of the war in the autumn of 1854 will convey some idea of the number of wounded men crowded into the hospitals on the Bosphorus when Florence Nightingale entered upon her duties at Scutari. Balaclava was fought on October 25th, four days after she left London; the battle of Inkerman followed on November 5th, the day after she landed. Before the average woman would have found time to unpack her boxes, Miss Nightingale was face to face with a task unparalleled in its magnitude and appalling in its nature.
The wounded arrived by the shipload until every ward, both in the General and in the Barrack Hospital, was crowded to excess, and the men lay in double rows down the long corridors, forming several miles of suffering humanity. During these terrible days Florence Nightingale was known to stand for twenty hours at a time, on the arrivals of fresh detachments of sick, apportioning quarters, directing her nurses and attending at the most painful operations where her presence might soothe and support. She would spend hours over men dying of cholera or fever. “Indeed,” wrote one who watched her work, “the more awful to every sense any particular case might be, the more certainly might be seen her slight form bending over him, administering to his ease by every means in her power and seldom quitting his side until death released him.”
Her womanly heart prompted her to acts of humanity which at once made her recognised by the men as the soldier’s friend. When the wounded were brought by hundreds to Scutari after Inkerman, the first duty of the surgeons was to separate the hopeful cases from the desperate. On one occasion Miss Nightingale saw five soldiers set aside in a hopeless condition. She inquired if nothing could be done for the poor fellows, and the surgeons replied that their first duty was with those whom there seemed to be more hope of saving.