30 Old Burlington Street, November 26, 1857. Dear Mr. Herbert—(1) I hope you will not regret the manner of my death. I know that you will be kind enough to regret the fact of it. You have sometimes said that you were sorry you had employed me. I assure you that it has kept me alive. I am sorry not to stay alive to do the “Nurses.” But I can't help it. “Lord, here I am, send me” has always been religion to me. I must be willing to go now as I was to go to the East. You know I always thought it the greatest of your kindnesses sending me there. Perhaps He wants a “Sanitary Officer” now for my Crimeans in some other world where they are gone.—(2) I have no fears for the Army now. You have always been our “Cid”—the true chivalrous sort—which is to be the defender of what is weak and ugly and dirty and undefended, rather than of what is beautiful and artistic. You are so now more than ever for us. “Us” means in my language the troops and me.—(3) I hope you will have no chivalrous ideas about what is “due” to my “memory.” The only thing that can be “due” to me is what is good for the troops. I always thought thus while I was alive. And I am not likely to think otherwise now that I am dead. Whatever your own judgment has accepted from me will come with far greater force from yourself. Whatever your own judgment has rejected would come with no force at all.—(4) What remains to be done has, however, already been sanctioned by your judgment:—(i.) as to Army Medical Council, Army Medical School, General Hospital scheme, Gymnastics; (ii.) as to what Dr. Sutherland must needs do for the Sanitary branch; (iii.) as to Colonial Barracks,—Canadian, Mediterranean, W. and E. Indian.—(5) I am very sorry about the Nursing scheme. It seems like leaving it in the lurch. Mrs. Shaw Stewart is the only woman I know who will do for Superintendent of Army Nurses.—Believe[374] me ever, while I can say God bless you, yours gratefully, F. Nightingale.
Then she asked her uncle to assist her in making a will. She was anxious about the Nightingale Fund, to the management of which she had not as yet been able to devote attention. She proposed to leave it to St. Thomas's Hospital. The property to which she would ultimately be entitled upon the death of her father and mother she proposed to apply to the building of a model Barrack according to her ideas; “that is, with day-rooms for the men, separate places to sleep in (like Jebb's Asylum at Fulham), lavatories, gymnastic-places, reading-rooms, etc., not forgetting the wives, but having a kind of Model Lodging-House for the married men.” In a letter of instructions to her uncle, she named Sir John McNeill, Mr. Herbert, and Dr. Sutherland as the men who would best carry out such a plan. She included a few family bequests; but what was nearest to her heart at this time was to leave personal keepsakes to Mrs. Herbert and other friends who had “worked for her long and faithfully.” For this purpose, in order that there might be no question about possession, she begged her sister to send up to London from Embley various goods and chattels which had personal association with herself. And she had one other wish; it related to her “children.” “The associations with our men,” she wrote to her sister (Dec. 11), “amount to me to what I never should have expected to feel—a superstition, which makes me wish to be buried in the Crimea, absurd as I know it to be. For they are not there.”
CHAPTER IV
REAPING THE FRUIT
(1858–1860)
With aching hands, and bleeding feet
We dig and heap, lay stone on stone;
We bear the burden and the heat
Of the long day, and wish 'twere done.
Not till the hours of light return,
All we have built do we discern.
Matthew Arnold.
“You must now feel,” wrote Sir John McNeill to Miss Nightingale (May 13, 1858), when her work for the health of the British soldier at home was beginning to bear fruit, “that you have not laboured in vain, that you have made your talent ten talents, and that to you more than to any other man or woman alive, will henceforth be due the welfare and efficiency of the British Army. Napoleon said that in military affairs the moral are to the physical forces as four to one, but you have shown that he greatly underrated their value. The rapidity with which you have obtained unanimous consent to your principles much exceeds my expectations. I never dared to doubt that truth and justice and mercy would prevail, but I did not hope to live long enough to see their triumph when we first communed here of such things.[272] I thank God that I have lived to see your success.” Sir John's thanksgiving was caused by the tone and the result of a debate which had taken place in the House of Commons upon May 11, 1858. Lord Ebrington, prompted by Mr. Herbert and Miss Nightingale, had moved a series of Resolutions with regard to the Health of the Army, founded upon the Report of the Royal Commission. He had laid special stress upon the figures, due to Miss Nightingale's insight and industry, comparing the mortality in the Army and in civil life respectively; he called attention to the horrible state of the Barracks, and his Resolutions concluded thus: “That in the opinion of this House, improvements are imperatively called for not less by good policy and true economy, than by justice and humanity.” The Government accepted the Resolutions, and Miss Nightingale's campaign had thus obtained the unanimous approval of the House of Commons.
She had worked indefatigably, and through many channels, and she continued so to work, in order to focus and stimulate public opinion in the sense of Lord Ebrington's Resolutions. By the end of 1857 the Sub-Commissions on Army Medical Reform were making good progress, and the Report of the Royal Commission was about to be published. She devised an effective means of forcing its salient feature upon the attention of every person most concerned in the evils or most influential towards securing the necessary remedies. I have referred already (p. [352]) to her diagrams illustrative of the mortality in the British Army. As finally prepared with Dr. Farr's assistance, they showed most effectively at a glance, by means of shaded or coloured squares, circles and wedges, (1) the deaths due to preventable causes in the Hospitals during the Crimean War, and (2) the rate of mortality in the British Army at home: “our soldiers enlist,” as she put it, “to Death in the Barracks.” She now wrote a memorandum, explaining the diagrams and pointing their moral, and had 2000 copies printed. This anonymous publication—entitled Mortality of the British Army—is called in her correspondence Coxcombs, primarily from the shape and colours of her diagrams. She had proposed, and Mr. Herbert agreed, that the memorandum and diagrams should be included as an appendix in his Report, in order that her pamphlet might appear as “Reprinted from the Report of the Royal Commission,” and thus be given the greater authority. So soon as the Report was issued, she distributed her Coxcombs to the Queen and other members of the Royal Family, to Ministers, to leading members of both Houses of Parliament, and to Medical and Commanding Officers throughout the country, in India and in the colonies. She had a few copies of the diagrams glazed and framed, and three of these she sent to the War Office, the Horse Guards, and the Army Medical Department. I do not know whether these Departments hung up the present. “It is our flank march upon the enemy,” she wrote in sending an early copy to Sir John McNeill, “and we might give it the old name of God's Revenge upon Murder.”
The Report of the Royal Commission appeared at the beginning of February (1858), and the Secretary sent one of the earliest copies to Miss Nightingale. “I like him very much,” she replied (Feb. 5); “I think he looks very handsome. Lady Tulloch says I make my pillow of Blue-books. It certainly has been the case with this.” She did not sleep over it, however. She was immediately up and doing. Among her papers there is a curious collection of letters and memoranda, partly in her handwriting, partly in that of Mr. and Mrs. Herbert, showing how industriously they set to work to pull wires in the press. The monthly and quarterly Reviews were in those days deemed of great importance in influencing public opinion, and Miss Nightingale drew up and sent for Mr. Herbert's criticism a list of the principal among them, entering against each magazine or review the name of the writer whom she designated as the ideal contributor of an article upon the Report. They had as much trouble in adjusting the parts as a theatrical manager finds in settling his cast. Lord Stanley, for example, promised to write, but he was particular about his place of appearance. It must be the Westminster Review or nowhere, and Miss Nightingale had already allotted that place to the principal star, Mr. Herbert himself.[273] And, moreover, the managers in this instance were drawing up a cast for other people's houses, and the editors did not in all cases prove amenable. Mr. Elwin, the editor of the Quarterly, rejected the article submitted to him. But Mr. Reeve, of the Edinburgh, was an old friend of Miss Nightingale, and he accepted her nominee, though he displeased her by mangling the article in the Ministerial interest. However, in the dailies, the monthlies and the quarterlies, the Report had, on the whole, “a good press,” and, what is no less important for influencing public opinion, a prompt press.