Lord Panmure delayed his formal reply to Mr. Herbert's letter of conditions, but sent a short note meanwhile of a friendly character. Mr. Herbert at once forwarded it to Miss Nightingale (Nov. 30, '56), and said: “I hope the note augurs well.… All I can promise is to do my best, and to postpone all other business to this one object till it is achieved. I shall require great assistance from and thro' you. I shall like to see all that you are writing as it goes on, if you see no objection. It would probably tell me much, and lead me to question, and so learn more.” Thus, then, three months after her return from the Crimean War, broken in bodily health, was this indomitable woman thrown into the maelstrom of work which will be described in the next chapter. But it was work for the salvation of the British Army. She “stood at the altar of the murdered men”; and she shrank from no self-sacrifice.
CHAPTER II
SOWING THE SEED
(Nov. 1856–Aug. 1857)
You have sown the seed, and the harvest will come. God will give the increase.—Sir John Mcneill (Letter to Florence Nightingale, on her “Notes affecting the Health of the British Army”).
The power of passive resistance wielded by a Department, and the reluctance or the inability of an easy-going Minister to withstand it, are unintelligible to those who are not themselves part of an administrative machine, and they are exasperating to those who are possessed of an impetuous temper and a resolute will. The Royal Commission on the health of the Army had been settled “in principle” between Lord Panmure and Miss Nightingale at their interview on Nov. 16, 1856, and a week later the Minister had received Mr. Herbert's conditional acceptance of the chairmanship. It was not till May 5, 1857, that the Royal Warrant actually setting up the Commission was issued. Throughout the six months of delay, Mr. Herbert and Miss Nightingale were busily employed in endeavours to persuade or coerce the Secretary of State into granting the Commission effective powers; the War Office and the Army Medical Department were as busily counter-working in the hope of so restricting its scope that any recommendations it might make would be of a “harmless” character.[244] There is no reason, I think, to suspect Lord Panmure of insincerity, but he was not the man to force the pace.
There were moments during the months of delay when Miss Nightingale's patience was exhausted, and there was one moment when her spirit for the fight quailed and she thought of taking service in a civil hospital. Lord Panmure from time to time was afflicted by the gout—“in the hands,” Mr. Herbert said to Miss Nightingale, “and this explains his not writing.” “His gout is always handy,” she retorted. Then there was the call of the birds to be shot and the stags to be stalked. “But the Bison himself is bullyable, remember that.” This was the word which she constantly passed round among her allies. At one time she pressed Mr. Herbert to issue an ultimatum. Let him renounce the chairmanship forthwith, unless Lord Panmure put an end peremptorily to the delays and gave a pledge that the recommendations of the Commission should be acted upon. Mr. Herbert and her other friends were for a more cautious policy, and she was overborne. “If you can get us out of the old, miry rut,” wrote Sir John McNeill (Dec. 19, 1856), “and put us fairly on the rail, though the plant may be defective and the speed small, we shall go on improving. Do not allow yourself to be discouraged by delays.” She was not in the end discouraged, but she was not the woman to sit still under the delays. She remembered her own mot d'ordre; and if she did not “bully the Bison,” I imagine that she sometimes administered a feline stroke or two. In December Lord Panmure asked leave to come to her quiet room in Burlington Street for a talk. And the talk was quiet, too, I doubt not, for Miss Nightingale, sometimes biting in private letters, was never vehement in conversation. But she could be quietly emphatic. She was fully conscious of the strength of a weapon which she held in reserve. That weapon was her popularity, and the command, which she could use, if she chose, of the ear of the press and the public. Lord Panmure must have been conscious of this factor in the case also. It had been settled at Balmoral, again “in principle,” that Miss Nightingale was to prepare a Report embodying the results of her experience and thought. If she and the Minister remained on good terms, if she felt assured that the Army in medical and sanitary matters would be reformed from within, her Report would remain confidential. But if she were not so persuaded, there was nothing to prevent her from heading a popular agitation for reform from without. This was her weapon for “bullying the Bison.” In a note of self-communing, written during some moment of disappointment, she reproaches herself with having been “a bad mother” to the heroic dead, but pledges herself to continue the fight to the end. She had “begun at the highest, my Sovereign,” and had proceeded to work through the politicians. If all else failed, she would make a last appeal, “like Cobden with the Corn Law,” to the country. “Three months from this day,” she wrote in one of her letters of incitement to Mr. Herbert, “I publish my experience of the Crimean Campaign, and my suggestions for improvement, unless there has been a fair and tangible pledge by that time for reform.”
II
Miss Nightingale's exasperation was increased by the attitude of the Government towards the report of the “Chelsea Board.” The McNeill-Tulloch affaire, which filled a large space in public attention at the time, requires only a brief notice here; the dramatic aspect of the now forgotten scene at Chelsea is admirably presented by Kinglake who, however, is not to be accepted as an unbiased authority on the merits of the dispute.[245] Sir John McNeill and Colonel Tulloch, it will be remembered,[246] had been sent out to the East in 1855 to inquire into the transport and commissariat arrangements of the campaign. Their Report, issued in January 1856, was the one official document among the pile produced by the Crimean War which brought responsibility directly home to specified individuals. Every one remembers the story of Lord Melbourne's protest when he had accidentally heard a rousing evangelical sermon with a direct “application”: “Things have come to a pretty pass,” he said, “when religion is allowed to invade the sphere of private life.” Something of the same indignant remonstrance was rife when a Report on the Crimean muddle presumed to invade the sphere of personal responsibility. The impugned officers raised an outcry, and the Government appointed an examining Board of other officers to report on the Report which had reported them. This Board—called after the “Chelsea” Hospital where it sat—removed all blame from individuals, and found in July 1856 that the true cause of the Crimean muddle was the failure of the Treasury to send out, at the proper moment, a particular consignment of pressed hay. Miss Nightingale had many a gibe at this ridiculous mouse; and, many years later, Sir John McNeill rebuked “the levity” which referred “the fatal privations so heroically endured by the troops to so ludicrously inadequate a cause.”[247] Some months were next occupied in the drafting, by the Treasury officials, of an explanation of the regrettable incident of the hay. The Government acquiesced, and the affair seemed to be over. And so it would have been, but for two factors—the press and public opinion. The Times led a spirited attack upon the Chelsea Board, and public opinion espoused the cause of Sir John McNeill and Colonel Tulloch. Their Report had been set aside, and Lord Panmure had omitted even to thank them for their labours. Sir John remained contemptuously silent, but Colonel Tulloch, who was of a warmer temper, was vigorous in self-defence and rejoinder. In several large towns sympathy was expressed with the slighted Commissioners—a movement which Miss Nightingale and her family, through friends in various places, did something to advance. Complimentary addresses were sent to the Commissioners from the Mayor and Citizens of Bath, of Birmingham, of Liverpool, of Manchester and of Preston, as also from the Company of Merchants of the City of Edinburgh.[248] Noting this movement of public opinion, which was beginning to be reflected in the House of Commons, Lord Panmure bethought himself of doing something. His expedient was signally ill-judged. He had “the honour to acquaint” the Commissioners “that Her Majesty's Government have decided to mark the services rendered by you in the discharge of your duties in the Crimea, by tendering to each of you the sum of £1000.” This pecuniary estimate of their services was promptly refused by each of them. “To accept it,” wrote Mrs. Tulloch, “is almost the only thing I could not pardon in my husband, but, thank God, he feels as I do on the subject.” Miss Nightingale was equally indignant, but her political instinct was not at fault. “I am glad,” she wrote in reply to Mrs. Tulloch (Feb. 20), “that they have been such fools! I am sure the British Lion will sympathise in this insult, and if it does not, then it is a degraded beast.” She proceeded to rouse the beast. She told Mr. Herbert about the Government's offer, and he concurred in her view. It was decided to raise the whole subject in the House of Commons. On March 12, 1857, Mr. Herbert moved a Humble Address to the Crown praying that Her Majesty might be pleased to confer some signal mark of favour upon Sir John McNeill and Colonel Tulloch. The Prime Minister, noting the course of the debate, accepted the motion, which was agreed to without a division. “Victory!” wrote Miss Nightingale in her diary; “Milnes came in to tell us.” She thought she had lost in her round with Lord Panmure about Colonel Tulloch (above, p. [331]); but she won after all. He was created K.C.B., and Sir John, who was already G.C.B., was sworn of the Privy Council. This episode, which in its initial stages exasperated Miss Nightingale so much that she was half inclined to throw up the fight, ended by giving her fresh spirit and encouragement. Her mot d'ordre had come true: the “Bison” had proved bullyable—by parliamentary pressure. “I direct my letter,” she wrote to the now Right Honourable Sir John McNeill (May 12), “with a great deal of pleasure. I consider that you and Sir Alexander Tulloch have been borne on the arms of the people—a much higher triumph than a mere gift of honours by the Crown. The poor Crown has been worsted. I am sorry for it. But it was not our fault.”[249]