Those who at first were inclined to cavil at the power which the Government had placed in the hands of the Lady-in-Chief speedily reversed their judgment, as day by day they witnessed her strength of character and her amazing fortitude and self-control in the midst of scenes which tried the strongest men.
The magnitude of Miss Nightingale’s work in the hospital wards has caused historians to overlook the womanly help and sympathy which she gave to the soldiers’ wives who had come out with their husbands. Even Kinglake, who is unsurpassed in his admiration for the Lady-in-Chief, does not mention this side of her work.
When Miss Nightingale arrived at Scutari she found a number of poor women, the wives or the widows (may be) of soldiers who had gone to the front, living in a distressing condition, literally in the holes and corners of the Barrack Hospital. These women, being detached from their husbands’ regiments, had no claim for rations and quarters. The colonel of each regiment had power to allow a certain number of women to accompany their husbands on foreign service. Each woman belonged to her regiment, and if separated, even through no choice of her own, there was no provision for her. No organisation to deal with them existed at this period, because for forty years there had been no general depôt of an English army. The widows were by degrees sent home by order of the Commandant, but the other women, many of them wives of soldiers in the hospital or of orderlies, refused to return home without their husbands.
Miss Nightingale found these poor creatures, for the most part respectable women, without decent clothing—their clothes having worn out—going about bonnetless and shoeless and living as best they could. After many changes from one “hole” to another the women were housed by the authorities in three or four dark rooms in the damp basement of the hospital. 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.
It needs no words to picture the gratitude of the women to the dear Lady-in-Chief who sought them out in their abject misery, gave them decent clothing and food from her own stores in the Nurses’s Tower, and saw that the little lives ushered into the world amid the horrors and privations of war had at least tender care. At the end of January, owing to a broken drain in the basement, fever broke out, and Miss Nightingale now persuaded the Commandant to remove the women to healthier quarters. A Turkish house was procured by requisition and Miss Nightingale had it cleaned and furnished out of her funds. Throughout the winter the women were assisted with money, food and clothes, and outfits were provided for widows returning home. Miss Nightingale also organised a plan to give employment to all the soldiers’ wives who were willing to work in her laundry at ten shillings to fourteen shillings a week. The upper part of the wash-house was divided into a sick ward and a laundry, and offered a refuge for the more respectable women. She obtained situations for others in families in Constantinople. A school was also started for the children. Lady Alicia Blackwood, wife of Dr. Blackwood, an army chaplain, visited the women and helped to care for them. Through Miss Nightingale’s initiative about five hundred women were raised from their wretched condition at Scutari and enabled to earn honest livings. “When,” wrote Miss Nightingale later, “the improvements in our system which the war must suggest are discussed, let not the wife and child of the soldier be forgotten.”
While Florence Nightingale was thus heroically grappling with disease, suffering, and death, and bringing order out of chaos in the hospitals at Scutari, small-minded fanatics at home were attacking her religious opinions. Some declared that she had gone to the East for the purpose of spreading Puseyism amongst the British soldiers, others that she had become a Roman Catholic, some people were certain that she was a Unitarian, while others whispered the dreadful heresy, “Supralapsarian.” A clergyman warned his flock against subscribing money for the soldiers in the East if it was to pass through Popish hands. Controversy waxed strong in The Times and The Standard, and Mr. and Mrs. Sidney Herbert warmly defended their absent friend.
“It is melancholy to think,” wrote Mrs. Herbert to a lady parishioner of an attacking clergyman, “that in Christian England no one can undertake anything without these most uncharitable and sectarian attacks, and, had you not told me so, I could scarcely believe that a clergyman of the Established Church could have been the mouthpiece of such slander. Miss Nightingale is a member of the Established Church of England, and what is called rather Low Church, but ever since she went to Scutari her religious opinions and character have been assailed on all points. It is a cruel return to make towards one to whom all England owes so much.”
An Irish clergyman, when asked to what sect Miss Nightingale belonged, made the effective reply: “She belongs to a sect which, unfortunately, is a very rare one—the sect of the Good Samaritan.”
Queen Victoria and the Prince Consort had from the first taken a sympathetic interest in Miss Nightingale’s work, and the following letter from the Queen to Mr. Sidney Herbert did much towards silencing adverse criticism, as it showed the confidence which her Majesty had in Miss Nightingale and her nurses:—
“Windsor Castle.
“December 6th, 1854.