“We have not seen a drop of milk, and the bread is extremely sour. The butter is most filthy—it is Irish butter in a state of decomposition; and the meat is more like moist leather than food. Potatoes we are waiting for until they arrive from France.”
MISS NIGHTINGALE IN THE HOSPITAL AT SCUTARI.
[To face p. 144.
Nursing in a hospital which received soldiers straight from the battlefield, their wounds aggravated by days of neglect, was a difficult task under the most favourable circumstances, but when intensified by the lack even of proper food, such as the above letter discloses, the task was indeed formidable.
There was an organising brain, however, at work in that dreadful Barrack Hospital now, and within ten days of her arrival, in spite of the terrible influx of patients which taxed her powers to the utmost, Miss Nightingale had fitted up an impromptu kitchen, from which eight hundred men were daily supplied with well-cooked food and other comforts. It was largely supplied with the invalid food from the private stores of the Lady-in-Chief, which fortunately she had brought out with her in the Vectis. Beef-tea, chicken broth, jelly, and little delicacies unheard of before were now administered to the sick by the gentle hands of women nurses. Small wonder that the poor fellows could often only express their gratitude in voices half-choked with sobs!
One Crimean veteran told the writer that when he received a basin of arrowroot on his first arrival at the hospital early in the morning, he said to himself, “Tommy, me boy, that’s all you’ll get into your inside this blessed day, and think yourself lucky you’ve got that. But two hours later, if another of them blessed angels didn’t come entreating of me to have just a little chicken broth! Well, I took that, thinking maybe it was early dinner, and before I had well done wondering what would happen next, round the nurse came again with a bit o’ jelly, and all day long at intervals they kept on bringing me what they called ‘a little nourishment.’ In the evening, Miss Nightingale she came and had a look at me, and says she, ‘I hope you’re feeling better.’ I could have said, ‘Ma’am, I feels as fit as a fightin’ cock,’ but I managed to git out somethin’ a bit more polite.”
Hitherto, not only had there been a lack of food, but the cooking had been done by the soldiers themselves in the most free and easy manner. Meat and vegetables were boiled together in the huge coppers, of which there were thirteen in the kitchen attached to the barracks. Separate portions were enclosed in nets, and all plunged together into the seething coppers, and taken up when occasion demanded. Some things were served up done to rags, while others were almost raw. This kind of cooking was bad enough for men in ordinary health, but for the sick it meant death.
The daily comforts which the nurses’ kitchen afforded received ample testimony from the witnesses before Mr. Roebuck’s Commission for inquiry into the conduct of the war. In one day sometimes thirteen gallons of chicken broth and forty gallons of arrowroot were distributed amongst the sick. At first nearly all the invalid food had to come from the private stores brought out by the Lady-in-Chief, which the charitable at home replenished as the true state of affairs became known, for not only was there a deficiency in the Government stores, but the things supplied officially were often not fit for food. It was the general testimony of witnesses before the Commission that Miss Nightingale’s services were invaluable in the hospital as well for what she did herself as for the manner in which she kept the purveyors to their duties.
The method of distributing the Government stores was as erratic as the cooking. There appeared to be no regulations as to time. Things asked for in a morning were probably not forthcoming until evening, when the cooking fires in the barracks kitchen were all but out. Nothing could be obtained until various “service rules” had been observed. An official board must inspect and approve all stores before they could be distributed. One can think of nothing more exasperating to the Lady-in-Chief, in her responsible duty towards the sick, than to see exhausted men dying for want of the proper nourishment because the board of inspection had not completed its arrangements. On one recorded occasion she took the law into her own hands, and insisted that the stores should be given out, inspected or not. She could not ask under-officials to incur the penalty of martial law by fulfilling her behests, but she could brave the authorities herself and did so. The storehouse was opened on the responsibility of the Lady-in-Chief, and the goods procured for the languishing soldiery.