V
One peculiar advantage Miss Nightingale enjoyed in the preparation of her Notes, which, however, added as greatly to her labour as to their effectiveness and authority. Experts of many kinds were willing and eager to help her. There were in all branches of the public service broad-minded men who knew alike the needs and the difficulties of reform, and who recognized in her an invaluable ally. Just as in the East, reformers in difficulty “went to Miss Nightingale,” so now officials and officers—some openly, others with careful secrecy—approached her with hints and offers of assistance, or sometimes with petition that she would come and help them. Thus Sir John Liddell, Director-General of the Navy Medical Department, hearing what was on foot, begged her “to take up the sailors,” and to “introduce female nurses into naval hospitals.” She inspected Haslar Hospital at his request (Jan. 1857), and he consulted her on the plans for a Naval Hospital at Woolwich. “I return with many thanks,” he wrote (Feb. 17), “your very clever Report on the Construction of Hospitals Notes], from which I mean to profit largely in both our new and old buildings; but as you have only allowed me the privilege of reading your Report privately, I trust that when you see your notions carried out in our Hospitals you will not reproach me with being a plagiarist without conscience.” Sir John in return supplied her with facts which she needed about naval stores, dietaries, and statistics. He also escorted her on a visit of inspection to Chatham, a military, as well as a naval, station. She was received on all sides with the utmost consideration, and a Military Medical Officer gave her free access to everything. Dr. Andrew Smith was exceeding wrath when he learnt that she had been prying into his domain there. The Medical Officer wrote to her explaining that he had misunderstood the case, imagining that her visit had official sanction on the military, as well as on the naval side, and begging her, in fear and trembling, to treat everything he had said and shown as strictly secret. The main object of her inspection of Barracks and Hospitals was to collect data for her Report, but sometimes she was able to effect a stroke of reform by the way and at once. She was invited to inspect Chelsea Military Hospital by Dr. McLachlan, the Principal Medical Officer. She went, marked many defects, and wrote to him on the subject. He concurred in what she said, explained that “reform moves slowly in old establishments, obstruction coming from sources least expected,” and hoped that she might be able to exercise “a little pressure from without.” The chairman of the Board was Mr. Robert Lowe, at that time Vice-President of the Board of Trade and Paymaster-General. She sought an introduction to Mr. Lowe, who “had much pleasure in calling upon her.” The sequel is told in a letter from Dr. McLachlan: “If you have not already been made acquainted with it, I am sure you will be glad to learn that all the really important points mentioned in your letter to me some time ago have been conceded. Mr. Lowe's perseverance carried the Treasury. The men are to have flannel vests and drawers, knives, forks, spoons, plates, &c., &c.” And Mr. Lowe himself, who could be soft sometimes, wrote to her with regard to “the improvements which you were good enough to suggest,” that he was “happy to believe that the flannel is a very great comfort to the poor old men.” Many Crimean veterans were afterwards Chelsea pensioners, and I have given some of their recollections of Miss Nightingale in an earlier chapter. They probably did not know that they owed their hospital comforts at home to the same woman's touch that had tended them at Scutari or in the Crimea. Miss Nightingale, during these months, inspected also the leading Civil Hospitals in London. Many of them had appointed her an Honorary Life Governor in recognition of her services during the war.
Military officers also tendered their assistance. “Ask questions,” says a letter from Wellington Barracks addressed to a friend of Miss Nightingale, “until you arrive at what you want. It is a pleasure to assist that excellent lady in her noble work”: “I was quite charmed,” wrote an officer from Aldershot, “with the opportunity of again communicating with Miss Nightingale. She is the most single-minded and benevolent person I ever met, and is truly the wonder of her sex. Do, pray, convey to her my desire to place my humble services and experience at her disposal whenever and however she may desire.” Within the War Office itself, she had influential friends. Sir Henry Storks was in frequent correspondence with her, and sent for her criticism drafts of new Regulations. Colonel Lefroy had, in accordance with her suggestion,[261] been instructed by Lord Panmure to draft a Scheme for a School of Military Medicine and Surgery. Miss Nightingale's notes on this Draft (Nov. 1856) include suggestions which might have come from some Royal Commission of our own day. She urges that the Board of Examiners should consist of the teachers. She suggests that the teachers in hospitals should not be doctors of eminence; “a man with an eminent practice rarely becomes an eminent teacher; many good men may be found to take the position of teachers at a moderate salary.” She forestalled the idea of Imperial inter-change, of which the War Office of to-day says much. “A most important part of this School,” she writes, would be to afford opportunities for study and comparison to Medical Officers from the Colonies. Like Dr. McLachlan at Chelsea, Colonel Lefroy at the War Office sometimes “came to Miss Nightingale.” He told her of a certain military hospital which was very much overcrowded. The Principal Medical Officer had represented the case to Headquarters and demanded extra accommodation, but in vain: “a letter from Miss Nightingale might lead to better things.” Colonel Lefroy was helpful in another matter. Miss Nightingale was a pioneer, as we have heard during the account of her work in the East, in devising means for encouraging the better employment of the private soldier's leisure, and for promoting his intelligent recreation. And this effort, commenced by her among the soldiers on service during the Crimean War, was continued upon her return to England. To the initiative and generosity of Florence Nightingale, the establishment of soldiers' reading-rooms is due. Her friend, Mr. Sabin, who had been the principal chaplain at Scutari, was now stationed at Aldershot, and Miss Nightingale concerted measures with him for continuing there the experiment which they had made in the East.[262] After much negotiation, permission was obtained from the military authorities to use one of the canteens as a reading-room, and on June 17, 1857, “Divisional Reading-Room, H Canteen, Aldershot Camp” was opened. The funds were provided by Miss Nightingale. The experiment was so much appreciated by the soldiers that she determined to enlarge it. She invoked the good offices of Colonel Lefroy, who wrote to her on August 19 as follows: “A propitious moment offered itself yesterday, and I asked the Chief whether I was at liberty to accept the offer of ‘a private person’ to contribute to the amusement of the Soldiers, and the improvement of their Reading-rooms. He laughed, having probably a shrewd suspicion of the identity of the unknown, and gave leave. I am now therefore quite at your service.… There will be no difficulty in finding means of applying any funds you will supply, and I have but one regret in the matter, viz. that a duty so essential to the moral improvement of the soldier should be left to private benevolence. I should like to print Milton's IXth Sonnet[263] on everything you give us.” Miss Nightingale herself had no taste for publicity or praise. She loved to do good by stealth, and most of her influence was exerted behind the scenes.
Statisticians, sanitary engineers, architects, and other experts were all in correspondence or personal communication with Miss Nightingale during the preparation of her Report. Dr. William Farr, the first authority on the former subject, was at work with her in January and February 1857 upon comparisons of the mortality in the army and in civil life. “It will always give me the greatest pleasure,” he wrote, “to render you any assistance I can in promoting the health of the Army. We shall ask your assistance in return in the attempts that are now being made to improve the health of the civil population. It is in the House and the Home that sound principles will work most salutarily.” Later chapters will show how readily Miss Nightingale lent assistance in that field. When she had finished the statistical section of her Report, she sent the proofs with her illustrative diagrams for Dr. Farr's revision. He found nothing to alter. “This speech,” he wrote, “is the best that ever was written on Diagrams or on the Army. I can only express my Opinion briefly in ‘Demosthenes himself with the facts before him could not have written or thundered better.’ The details appear to me to be quite correct.” He specially commended her diagrams for the clearness with which they explained themselves. She was something of a pioneer in the graphic method of statistical presentation. In every branch of her inquiry she was equally thorough; consulting the best authorities, collecting the essential facts. She was in communication with Sir Robert Rawlinson and Sir Edwin Chadwick, and with Sir John Jebb, the architect of model prisons. She collected plans of all the best hospitals and infirmaries in Great Britain and on the Continent. She consulted Professor Christison on dietetics, and procured dietaries from foreign hospitals. She corresponded with Army Surgeons whom she had met in the East, and with Army chaplains and missionaries. The feeling which fellow-workers had for Miss Nightingale appears characteristically in a note from Sir Robert Rawlinson to her aunt (1858). “To have earned the good word of Miss N. is most gratifying. I trust I may deserve a continuance of it. I learn with sorrow that her health is so doubtful, but I have a full and abiding faith in the providence of God. She has sown seed that will give a full harvest, and mankind will be better for her practical labours to the end of time. Hospitals will be constructed according to her wise arrangements, and they will be managed in conformity with her humane rules. One man in the army will be more useful than two formerly, and reason will preside over comfort and health. So far as my weak means extend I will strive to work in the same field, and do that which in me lies to embody the lessons I have received.” “It is very pretty,” wrote her sister to Madame Mohl (May 2, '57), “to see these wise old men so profoundly convinced of her knowledge as well as of her disinterestedness, and looking up at her with such a mixture of reverence and tenderness, of desire that she should not overwork herself, and of desire that she should do the work which she alone can do so well.” “You cannot think what it is,” wrote her sister to another friend, “to watch a great mind like hers fully at work and fully equal to that great work. To see each emergency as it arises met and conquered, to see in her great plans for reform and improvement, how even each hindrance only seems to give a fresh impetus of power to overcome (if my heart was not in each move of the game it would be like watching a gigantic game of chess, whereof the pawns were men and the result the lives of thousands); how she collects the honey out of each man's information and binds it up into the whole that is to carry on the work.” Miss Nightingale's Notes were her own work in a peculiar degree and, as Sir John McNeill said, no one else could have done it. But it is also true that the book collects from many quarters the best that was known and thought at the time on the subjects with which it deals.
VI
Miss Nightingale's own Report was more than half finished when the long-promised and long-delayed Royal Commission on the same subject was appointed. The importunity of Mr. Herbert and Miss Nightingale had at last “brought the Bison to bay.” On April 26 she received the welcome intimation that Lord Panmure would call at the Burlington Hotel on the following day with the Official Draft of the Instructions for the Commission. She suggested a few alterations, and these were accepted, and the documents were sent for the Royal approval. Miss Nightingale kept a copy of the manuscript, and sent it to her friend, Dr. Graham Balfour, the secretary of the Commission. “Every one of the members of the Commission,” she explained to him (April 27), “was carried by force of will against Dr. Andrew Smith, and poor Pan has been the shuttlecock”; and with regard to the Instructions, “You will see curious traces of the struggle to exclude and to include all reform in the progress of the MS. I think I am not without merit for labouring at bullying Pan—a petty kind of warfare, very unpleasant.”
It throws an interesting side-light on the relation of Ministers to their subordinates to know, as appears from Miss Nightingale's papers, that Lord Panmure was careful to have the documents initialled by the Queen before submitting them to Dr. Smith. To those who have delved into the history of the Crimean muddle, few things are more curious at first sight than the long ascendancy of Dr. Smith. Perhaps no one was to blame, but only the system; but if any individuals were to blame for the medical defects, then surely the Medical Director-General must have been one. Lord Grey sent to Miss Nightingale a very long and elaborate Memorandum on her Notes. He admired the skill with which she marshalled the facts; but maintained that the true conclusion to be drawn from them was not that radical reform was needed, but that several persons (including Dr. Smith) should have been court-martialled. I doubt if Miss Nightingale differed from the latter proposition. But in fact Dr. Smith was decorated, and when the war was over he was allowed for many months to obstruct the course of reform. The explanation, however, is simple. The permanent head of a Department is a master of its detail, and if he be a man of any ability, this fact often gives him an ascendancy over his political chief. If the Minister be indolent, or incapable of detail, or for any other reason disposed to the line of least resistance, he becomes as clay in the hands of his permanent subordinate, whenever a matter comes down from generals to particulars. So Lord Panmure, at the final stage of this affair, took the precaution of barring out details. Dr. Smith, who was a pertinacious man, had, I dare say, many criticisms to offer when the Instructions for the Commission were shown to him. But, if so, Lord Panmure had a general and a conclusive answer. What the Queen had signed must not be altered.
The Royal Warrant, instructing the Commission, was in very wide and comprehensive terms, and Mr. Herbert and his colleagues set to work without a day's delay. Six months had elapsed between his acceptance of the Chairmanship and the issue of the Royal Warrant. The Report of the Commission was prepared in precisely three months. To appreciate fully the industry which such a result involved, one must have looked into the mountainous mass of detail which the Commission accumulated and sifted. No praise can be too high for the unremitting attention, the incessant hard work which Mr. Herbert, as Chairman, threw into the task. But even so, such speed in the preparation of the Commission's Report would have been impossible, but that much of the ground had been already explored, and most of it exhaustively covered, by Miss Nightingale. In all Royal Commissions, as also in more august bodies, there is an Inner Cabinet, and sometimes an Innermost Cabinet as well. In the present case there was an Innermost Cabinet of three, and one of the three was not a member of the Commission—Mr. Herbert, Dr. Sutherland, and Miss Nightingale. There was no man so closely associated with Miss Nightingale's work for so many years, and in so many different directions, as Dr. John Sutherland. He was recognized as one of the leading sanitarians of the day. He had been an Inspector under the first Board of Health (1848), and had been employed by the Government in many special inquiries. As head of the Sanitary Commission sent to the Crimea in 1855, he had, as already stated, made Miss Nightingale's acquaintance, and from that time forth they were close colleagues. He served on almost every Commission, Sub-Commission, and Committee with which she had anything to do. If he was not nominated in the first list, she always insisted on his inclusion. He sometimes exasperated her, as we shall hear in later chapters, but they worked together in constant comradeship. He was, as it were, her Chief-of-the-Staff; and also in large measure her Private Secretary for official matters. Upon Dr. Sutherland and Miss Nightingale the Chairman of the Royal Commission mainly relied. I have already quoted Mr. Herbert's general tribute to her assistance (p. [312]). It is fully borne out by the evidence contained in her papers.
Throughout the proceedings of the Commission, Miss Nightingale was in daily communication—personal, or by letter—with Mr. Herbert or Dr. Sutherland, or with both. I have before me, of this date, fifty letters from each of them to her. She was an unremitting task-master. “My dear Lady,” wrote Dr. Sutherland one Friday (May 22), “do not be unreasonable. I fear your sex is much given to being so. I would have been with you yesterday, had I been able, but alas! my will was stronger than my legs. I have been at the Commission to-day, and as yet there is nothing to fear. I was too much fatigued and too stupid to see you afterwards, but I intend coming to-morrow about 12 o'clock, and we can then prepare for the campaign of the coming week. There won't be much to do, as the Commission is going to the Derby, except your humble servant and Alexander, who, for the sake of example, are going to see Portsmouth and Haslar to give evidence on both. We shall meet on Monday and Friday only. The Sanitary arguing goes on on both these days, and I hope to-morrow to be able to perform the coaching operation you desiderate, and as you don't go to church you can coach Mr. Herbert on Sunday. I have now sent you a Roland for your Oliver, and am ever yours faithfully.” Of the letters from Mr. Herbert, written after the Commission was appointed, the first defines the position: “We must meet and agree our course.” A few other brief extracts will fill in the sketch. “I am getting up the examinations; does anything occur to you?” “I send you Hall's correspondence. You know the matters treated with all the dates which I do not, and will see in them what I should not.” He consults her about the order in which to call the witnesses, “or we shall seem to be always examining one another.” He asks her to look into a comparison of the mortality among marines and sailors respectively. She secured on another subject some damning documents. “I return your stolen goods,” he writes. “Pray keep them carefully. If ever we have to besiege the Army Medical Department, no Lancaster gun could be more formidable than this document; it is really almost unbelievable.” “I should very much like to have a Cabinet Council with you to-day. Shall I come to you at 5 o'c., or would you come here?” And so forth, and so forth, almost daily. But I can perhaps best convey an idea of the co-operation in terms of legal procedure. Miss Nightingale was the solicitor who gave instructions in the case to Mr. Herbert. As each branch of the inquiry came up, she sent him a memorandum upon it; often, no doubt, a copy of her own Report on the same subject. She suggested the witnesses, and often saw them before they gave their evidence, in order, as it were, to take their proof. In the case of some important witnesses, she prepared the briefs for cross-examination, as well as examination. In June, Sir John Hall, whom the reader will remember as Principal Medical Officer in the Crimea, was to be in the box. “I have been asked,” she wrote to Sir John McNeill (June 12), “to request you to give us some hints as to his examination, founded upon what you saw of him when in your hands. My own belief is that Hall is a much cleverer fellow than they take him for, almost as clever as Airey,[264] and that he will consult his reputation in like manner, and perhaps give us very useful evidence, no thanks to him.… I would only recall to your memory the long series of proofs of his incredible apathy, beginning with the fatal letter approving of Scutari, Oct. '54,[265] continuing with all the negative errors of non-obtaining of Lime Juice, Fresh Bread, Quinine, etc., up to his not denouncing the effects of salt meat before you.… We do not want to badger the old man in his examination, which would do us no good and him harm. But we want to make the best out of him for our case. Please help us. I understand that Dr. Smith says he was much afraid of ‘the Commission’ at first, and ‘thought it would do harm.’ But now ‘thinks it is taking a good turn.’ Is this for us or against us?” Sir John McNeill thought “for us,” and advised that Dr. Hall should “not be put too much on the defensive,” but should be led in examination “to slip quietly into the current of reform as Dr. A. Smith seems from what you say to have done.” Still, if he proved obdurate he must of course “be put in a corner”; and so Sir John McNeill assisted the lady-solicitor to prepare posers for a possibly refractory witness. It was difficult, however, to be refractory with Mr. Herbert. “He was a man of the quickest and most accurate perception,” she wrote of him in later years, “that I have ever known. Also he was the most sympathetic. His very manner engaged the most sulky and the most recalcitrant of witnesses. He never made an enemy or a quarrel in the Commission. He used to say, ‘There takes two to be a quarrel, and I won't be one.’” Then, again, Miss Nightingale was always at Mr. Herbert's call to supply details, missing dates, and references. Every one familiar with the courts knows how even the ablest counsel will sometimes stumble over a date or fumble among his papers for a particular document, till a junior behind him or the solicitor in front of him comes to his rescue. That was another rôle played by Miss Nightingale, though behind the scenes. “Sidney is again in despair for you,” wrote Mrs. Herbert; “can you come? You will say, Bless that man, why can't he leave me in peace? But I am only obeying orders in begging for you.”
A difficulty arose upon the question whether Miss Nightingale should or should not give evidence herself. She was averse from doing so, and Sir John McNeill strongly supported her. In his paternal way he did not like the idea of her exposing herself to such a strain, and indeed her physical weakness at the time was great. In the present day she would of course, in like circumstances, have been made a member of the Royal Commission. In those days the idea of calling a woman as a witness caused some qualms. Her own objection was founded rather on regard for Mr. Herbert's susceptibilities. She could not tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth without going into the past, and such evidence might seem to cast reflections on the conduct of her friend as Minister during the earlier part of the war. Mr. Herbert, however, brushed this point aside, and urged her to come and tell the whole truth. Her friend Mr. Stafford was yet more emphatic. “Let me entreat you,” he wrote (June 11, “to reconsider your determination. You have done so much, you ought to do all. This is our last effort for the soldier. No one can aid us so well as you, and you can aid us so well in no other manner; even if your opinions should offend some few individuals, the fault is theirs, not yours. The absence of your name from our list of witnesses will diminish the weight of our Report, and will give rise to unfounded rumours; it will be said either that we were afraid of your evidence, and did not invite you to tender it, or that you made suggestions, the responsibility of which you were reluctant to incur in public.” There was obvious force in Mr. Stafford's arguments, and it was decided that Miss Nightingale should give evidence in the form of written answers to written questions. Her evidence, which occupies thirty-three pages of the Blue-book, is in effect a condensed summary of her confidential Report. None of the evidence given to the Commission was more direct and cogent. “It may surprise many persons,” wrote an army doctor at the time, “to find, from Miss Nightingale's evidence that, added to feminine graces, she possesses, not only the gift of acute perception, but that, on all the points submitted to her, she reasons with a strong, acute, most logical, and, if we may say so, masculine intellect, that may well shame some of the other witnesses. They maunder through their subjects as if they had by no means made up their minds on any one point—they would and they would not; and they seem almost to think that two parallel roads may sometimes be made to meet, by dint of courtesy and good feeling, amiable motives that should never be trusted to in matters of duty. When you have to encounter uncouth, hydra-headed monsters of officialism and ineptitude, straight hitting is the best mode of attack. Miss Nightingale shows that she not only knows her subject, but feels it thoroughly. There is, in all that she says, a clearness, a logical coherence, a pungency and abruptness, a ring as of true metal, that is altogether admirable.”[266] “I have perused with the greatest interest,” wrote a member of the Commission (Sir J. R. Martin) to her, “your most conclusive evidence now in circulation for the perusal of the Commissioners. It contains an assemblage of facts and circumstances which, taken throughout their entire extent, must prove of the most vital importance to the British soldier for ages to come.”