To the poet’s vision, Florence Nightingale was the modern Santa Filomena, the beautiful saint pictured by Sabatelli descending from heaven with attendant angels to minister to the sick and maimed.
CHAPTER XV
TIMELY HELP
Lavish Gifts for the Soldiers—The Times Fund—The Times Commissioner Visits Scutari—His Description of Miss Nightingale—Arrival of M. Soyer, the Famous Chef—He Describes Miss Nightingale.
This is true philanthropy, that buries not its gold in ostentatious charity, but builds its hospital in the human heart.—G. D. Harley.
Miss Nightingale’s personal efforts for the sick and wounded soldiery were nobly and most generously seconded by sympathisers at home. Ladies were continually arriving at the Admiralty Office in carriages piled with huge boxes and chests labelled “Miss Nightingale,” and such large cargoes reached Scutari that it was said at the time the officials might fancy that the Indian mail had been landed by mistake.
The Queen in her palace, assisted by the young princesses, in common with women of all degrees throughout the land, were making lint and bandages, sewing shirts and knitting socks, for the poor soldiers. Nothing indeed was deemed too good for the suffering heroes. Sister Mary Aloysius relates that when she first began to sort the stores in the sheds at Scutari, she thought that the “English nobility must have emptied their wardrobes and linen stores to send out bandages for the wounded. There was the most beautiful underclothing, and the finest cambric sheets, with merely a scissors run here and there through them, to ensure their being used for no other purpose, some from the Queen’s palace, with the Royal monogram beautifully worked.” Amongst these delicate things the rats had a fine time, and on the woollen goods they feasted sumptuously ere the sisters could get them sorted and distributed from their temporary resting-place in the sheds outside the hospitals.
While private charity was sending its promiscuous bales of goods, The Times, to which belonged the honour of having first aroused public interest in the suffering soldiery, had organised a fund for the relief of the wounded which met with the most generous support. The great journal undertook to distribute the fund, and for this purpose appointed Mr. Macdonald, a man of high character and endowed with good sense and discrimination, to proceed to the East and ascertain on the spot the manner in which the money could be best applied for the relief of the distressed army.
Before setting forth Mr. Macdonald called on the Duke of Newcastle, Secretary of State for War, also on Dr. Andrew Smith, the Inspector-General, and was assured by both that such ample measures had been taken by Government that The Times fund was really scarcely needed for the relief of the sick and wounded. However, Mr. Macdonald proceeded on his way, for there was at least one man connected with the War Office—Sidney Herbert—who knew from Florence Nightingale’s letters what the true state of affairs was.
When The Times commissioner reached the Bosphorus, he again had cold water thrown on his mission. Officialdom laughed amiably over “bringing coals to Newcastle.” Mr. Macdonald found, however, that the men of the 39th Regiment on their way to the seat of war were going to face the rigours of a Crimean winter in the trenches before Sebastopol in the light and airy garments which they had been wearing at Gibraltar, and he got rid of some of his Times gold by going into the markets of Constantinople and purchasing suits of flannels for the men.
When Mr. Macdonald at length reached the hospitals at Scutari—those hospitals the deficient and insanitary state of which had moved the heart of the country to its core—he must have felt dumfounded when Dr. Menzies, the chief medical officer, in answer to his offer of help, told him that “nothing was wanted.” It seemed that officialdom was leagued together to deny the existence of wants which the Government ought to have met. In a higher quarter still, Kinglake relates that The Times commissioner was met with the astounding proposal that as the fund was wholly unneeded, he might disembarrass himself of it by building an Episcopal Church at Pera!