Whenever the British people have muddled through a war, there is a time of repentance and heart-searching. England the Unready turns round uneasily and thinks that she must now mend her ways. The lessons of the war must be learnt. The word “efficiency” is blessed in every mouth. Radical reforms, with a view to ensuring a better state of preparedness next time, are canvassed, and a few of them are sometimes carried out. And then to the hot fit, a cold fit succeeds. War and its lessons fade into the past. Economy displaces efficiency as the favourite word. Peace seems to be more likely than another war, and, if war should unhappily come, it is cheerily hoped that England will again “muddle through somehow.” The spasm of reform is over, leaving the permanent vis inertiae of ministers and departments once more in undisturbed possession. Reformers, familiar with this succession of flow and ebb, know that they must seize the favourable moment, and more or less is done, according as they are more or less prompt and energetic. In the field of the Army Medical Service, where the Crimean War had exposed deficiencies both glaring and terrible, large and far-reaching reforms were set in motion during the years immediately following the Crimean peace. Indeed it may be said that from this period dates the first serious and sustained movement for the application of sanitary science to the British Army.
That effective use was thus made of the spasm of repentance which followed the Crimean War was due primarily and mainly to the zealous co-operation of two individuals, the same two whose alliance formed a principal subject of the preceding Part of this Memoir—Sidney Herbert and Florence Nightingale. When her friend died in 1861, worn out prematurely by unceasing labours for the British Army, Miss Nightingale devoted to his memory an account of his work during the years 1856–1861. In that pamphlet[222]—a model of lucidity and concision—while yet informed with comprehensive insight, and not untouched by emotion—she made no reference of any kind to her own share in the work. She described the reforms, and said that in all that was done “Sidney Herbert was head and centre.” And so in many respects he was. He was the Chairman of the Royal Commission and the Sub-Commissions. He was afterwards Minister for War. He was from first to last the official head of the reform movement. And he was much more than the official head. He worked with unfailing zeal, and threw his heart and soul into the work. Yet if Sidney Herbert had written the account, he might have said that Florence Nightingale was the head and centre of it all. If she could have done little without him, so also might he have done little without her. He was in the foreground, she in the background. His was the public voice; the words which he spoke or wrote were often the words of Florence Nightingale. He was the practical politician who carried out their common schemes. The initiating, the inspiring, the impelling force was hers. And she did much more than give general impetus. Her mastery of detail was ever at Mr. Herbert's elbow. “I never intend to tell you,” he wrote to her when the first of the Royal Commissions in which they co-operated was nearing its end (August 7, 1857), “how much I owe you for all your help during the last three months, for I should never be able to make you understand how helpless my ignorance would have been among the Medical Philistines. God bless you!” But between two such loyal allies and understanding friends, it were needless to apportion the relative shares. They spoke and wrote of their working together as “our Cabinet,” “our Cabal,” or “our Mess.” It is the story of this comradeship, rich in human interest, and fraught with lasting benefit to the British Army, that is to form the main subject of this and the following four chapters.
II
What Miss Nightingale needed on her return from the East, and what, had she thought only of herself, she would have taken, was a long spell of rest. She had been through a campaign of labour and anxiety, under conditions of strain and distress, such as might have undermined the strongest constitution. Mr. Herbert, who was in Ireland when she returned to England, surmised from her letters that she was overwrought, and sent her the prescription of his Carlsbad doctor—ni lire, ni écrire, ni réfléchir. After such severe tension of mind and body, a reaction was inevitable. He sent the prescription, but he did not expect her entirely to adopt it. “I should doubt,” he wrote to her uncle, “with a mind constituted as hers is, whether entire rest, with a total cessation from all active business, would not be a greater trial and less effective for her restoration to health than a life of some, though very limited and moderate, occupation.” He seems to have hoped that she might be persuaded to take up comparatively quiet nursing work in a London hospital. Presently they met (Sept.) in the country-house of their mutual friends, the Bracebridges, and Mr. Bracebridge thought that Mr. Herbert was “lukewarm” on the subject of Army Reform. Perhaps it was that he wished to consider Miss Nightingale's health and keep her free from exciting activity. But nothing was further from her thoughts than neutrality or passive spectatorship. She was burning for the fray, and flung all consideration of health aside in order to devote herself to rousing the lukewarm and organizing the resolute.
To understand the passionate devotion, the self-sacrificing ardour, with which Miss Nightingale set to work immediately upon her return, we must remember what she had seen in the East. She had “identified herself,” as we have heard, “with the heroic dead,” and she knew that many of her “children,” as she called them, had died, not of necessity, but from neglect. “No one,” she wrote,[223] “can feel for the Army as I do. These people who talk to us have all fed their children on the fat of the land and dressed them in velvet and silk, while we have been away. I have had to see my children dressed in a dirty blanket and an old pair of regimental trousers, and to see them fed on raw salt meat, and nine thousand of my children are lying, from causes which might have been prevented, in their forgotten graves. But I can never forget. People must have seen that long, long dreadful winter to know what it was.” Others might know the facts, but she felt them. The strength of her character and powers lay, however, in the combination of intense feeling with intellectual grasp. She not only felt the neglect which had sacrificed her children's lives, but she tabulated the causes. The facts which had come under her eye, the figures in which she summarized and analysed them, filled her with a passion of resentment. During her residence in the Eastern hospitals she had seen 4600 soldiers die. And as she studied the figures, the conclusion was irresistibly borne in upon her that the greater number need not have died at all. Many of the diseases to which they had succumbed were induced, and others were aggravated, in the hospitals themselves. Her personal observation told her that it was so; statistical inquiry proved it. “We had,” she pointed out, “during the first seven months of the Crimean campaign, a mortality among the troops at the rate of 60 per cent per annum from disease alone, a rate of mortality which exceeds that of the Great Plague in London, and a higher ratio than the mortality in cholera to the attacks.” By a series of reforms, largely the result of Miss Nightingale's own untiring efforts and vehement expostulations, this terrible rate of mortality was reduced. “We had, during the last six months of the war, a mortality among our sick not much more than among our healthy guards at home, and a mortality among our troops, in the last five months, two-thirds only of what it is among our troops at home.” It was obvious from this comparison that the mortality during the first period was largely preventable. Here was “a complete example—history does not afford its equal—of an army, after a great disaster arising from neglects, having been brought into the highest state of health and efficiency.” It was the most complete experiment ever made in army hygiene. And Miss Nightingale was filled with a passionate desire that the lessons of the experiment should be taken to heart by the nation; that such radical reforms should be made as would render a repetition of the disaster and the neglects impossible in the future. She knew that nothing short of radical reform would suffice. “There is nothing,” she wrote in summarizing the neglect of sanitary precautions at Scutari, “in the education of the Medical Officer—nothing in the organization or powers of the Army Medical Department—nothing in the whole Hospital procedure—nothing in the Army Regulations which would have met the case of these Hospitals. And were a similar necessity to arise again, especially after the lapse of a few years of peace, the whole thing would occur over again. This is the frightful consideration which ought to make us recall over and over again this experience—otherwise, let bygones be bygones.”[224]
But this was not the whole case. Miss Nightingale carried further the principle, which in these days is perhaps at last coming to be understood, that success in war depends upon preparation in peace. “You cannot improvise an Army,” says Lord Roberts. “You cannot improvise the sanitary care of an Army in the field,” said Miss Nightingale. If the medical service in the field were deficient, if the lessons of sanitary science were neglected in war hospitals, it was probable, she perceived, that there were like defects at home. She put her thesis to the test of figures, and was appalled at the verification which they supplied. The idea had first occurred to her on meeting Dr. Farr, the statistician in the Registrar-General's office, at dinner with her friends Colonel and Mrs. Tulloch. Dr. Farr had talked of mortality tables in civil life, and Miss Nightingale resolved to compare them with the death-rate in British barracks. She found that in the Army, from the age of twenty to thirty-five, the mortality was nearly double that which it was in civil life. This was the case even in the Guards, who yet were select lives, the pick of the recruits. “With our present amount of sanitary knowledge,” she wrote to Sir John McNeill (March 1, 1857), “it is as criminal to have a mortality of 17, 19, and 20 per 1000 in the Line, Artillery, and Guards in England, when that of Civil life is only 11 per 1000, as it would be to take 1100 men per annum out upon Salisbury Plain and shoot them—no body of men being so much under control, none so dependent upon their employers for health, life, and morality as the Army.” And again (March 28): “This disgraceful state of our Chatham Hospitals, which I have been visiting lately,[225] is only one more symptom of a system which, in the Crimea, put to death 16,000 men—the finest experiment modern history has seen upon a large scale, viz. as to what given number may be put to death at will by the sole agency of bad food and bad air.” She saw the facts and figures with piercing clearness, and personal recollections gave intensity to her convictions. She had deep pity for the victims of preventable disease, and still deeper admiration for the uncomplaining heroism with which such sufferings were borne. Nothing ever effaced from her mind what she had witnessed in this sort at Scutari and in the Crimea. “We hear with horror,” she wrote, “of the loss of 400 men on board the Birkenhead by carelessness at sea; but what should we feel if we were told that 1100 men are annually doomed to death in our Army at home by causes which might be prevented? The men in the Birkenhead went down with a cheer. So will our men fight for us to the last with a cheer. The more reason why all the means of health which Sanitary Science has put at our command, all the means of morality which Educational Science has given us, should be given them.” Then she turned to the Crimea, described in the words of Sir John McNeill and Colonel Tulloch[226] the sufferings and the endurance of the troops, and drew her moral: “Upon those who watched, week after week and month after month, this enduring courage, this unalterable patience, simplicity, and good strength, this voiceless strength to suffer and be still, it has made an impression never to be forgotten. The Anglo-Saxon on the Crimean heights has won for himself a greater name than the Spartan at Thermopylae, as the six months' struggle to endure was a greater proof of what man can do than the six hours' struggle to fight. The traces of the name and sacrifice of Iphigeneia may still be seen in Taurus; but a greater sacrifice has been there accomplished by a ‘handful’ of brave men who defended that fatal position, even to the death. And if Inkerman now bears a name like that of Thermopylae, so is the story of those terrible trenches, through which these men patiently and deliberately, and week after week, went, till they returned no more, greater than that of Inkerman. Truly were the Sebastopol trenches, to our men, like the gate of the Infernal Regions—Lasciate ogni speranza, voi ch' entrate. And yet these men would refuse to report themselves sick, lest they should throw more labour on their comrades. They would draw their blankets over their heads and die without a word. Well may it be said that there is hardly an example in history to compare with this long and silent fortitude. But surely the blood of such men is calling to us from the ground, not to avenge them, but to have mercy on their survivors!”[227] To that cry, Florence Nightingale, at least, responded through every fibre of her being. She was resolved to be “a saviour,” and to press home every lesson of the Crimean campaign.
The strength of her resolve was heightened by a sense of the responsibility which her opportunities laid upon her. She had enjoyed peculiar facilities for observing the whole medical history of the campaign. She had been able to take the measure of many of the military and medical officials; she knew which were the men from whom help might be expected in the work of reform, and of most of such men she had the ear and the respect. Her popular fame added to the authority with which her experience and her services invested her. There were others who knew, or might have known, the facts as well as she. There were few who could exercise the same influence, and perhaps there was not one who could judge the facts with the same disinterestedness. She was not a politician. She had no party to defend, no officials to shield, no susceptibilities to consider. She had nothing to gain, nothing to lose, nothing to fear. She stood only for a cause; and, come what might, she was resolved to fling every power of mind and body into it. Among her private notes of 1856 I find this: “I stand at the altar of the murdered men, and, while I live, I fight their cause.”
III
The opportunity was not long in coming. For a week or two at Lea Hurst she was engaged in such laborious, but unexciting, tasks as settling accounts and claims with the nurses; distributing the Sultan's gift among them; answering congratulatory addresses and the like; escaping from public appearances;[228] and dealing with hailstorms, as her sister called them, of miscellaneous letters. She was besieged by Vegetarians, Spiritualists, Sectaries, and other birds of the feather that swoop down upon conspicuous personages. With distressed gentlewomen she was a favourite prey. “Can you find soldiers' orphans for me to educate,” wrote one, “because I don't like leaving my sisters?” “Please find a place for me,” wrote another, “where there will be something to do not derogatory. I am an Irish lady of family.” The begging-letters were innumerable, and the answering of these was taken over by her sister. “I think I can now repeat the formula to perfection,” she said, “and I could write a begging-letter at the shortest notice in the character of every individual, from a staff-officer to a costermonger, and a widow with six children.” But here Lady Verney's lively pen suggests some little injustice. Officers did occasionally write to Miss Nightingale, I find, to beg her “vote and interest,” as it were; but of begging-letters proper, she told Mr. Kinglake that there had never come one to her from a soldier.[229] Mr. Kinglake, I may here say, made her acquaintance in the spring of 1857, when her mind was full of the McNeill-Tulloch affaire. She failed to make him take her view of that controversy,[230] and her first impression of the historian-to-be of the Crimean War was that he would write a book more brilliant than judicial. “Though I have no doubt he is a good counsel,” she wrote,[231] “he strikes me as a very bad historian.” Three years later, she wrote in a similar strain:—
I had two hours' good conversation with Mr. Kinglake. I found him exceedingly courteous and agreeable; looking upon the whole idea as a work of art and emotion, and upon me as one of the colours in the picture; upon the Chelsea Board as a safe (or rather an infallible) authority; upon McNeill and Tulloch as interlopers; upon figures (arithmetical) as worthless; upon assertion as proof. He was utterly and self-sufficiently in the dark as to all the real causes of the Crimean Mortality. And you might as well try to enlighten Sir G. Brown himself. For Lord Raglan he has an enthusiasm which I fully share but which entirely blinds Mr. Kinglake, who besides came home long before the real distress, to the causes of that distress. I put him in possession of some of the materials. But I do not hope that he will, I am quite sure that he will not, make use of them.[232]