In recounting Mr. Herbert's reforms, Miss Nightingale brought the results of them, after her usual manner, to the statistical test. She prefixed to her Memoir some coloured diagrams showing how Mr. Herbert found the Army and how he left it. In the three years 1859–60–61, just one-half of the Englishmen who entered the Army died (at home stations) per annum as formerly died. The total mortality at home stations from all diseases had become less than was formerly the mortality from consumption and chest diseases alone. The results of comparisons of British armies in the field were equally striking. The China expedition put the reforms to the test. “An expeditionary force was sent to the opposite side of the world, into a hostile country, notorious for its epidemic diseases. Every required arrangement for the preservation of health was made, with the result that the mortality of this force, including wounded, was little more than 3 per cent per annum, while the ‘constantly sick’ in hospital were about the same as at home. During the first months of the Crimean War the mortality was at the rate of 60 per cent, and the ‘constantly sick’ in the hospitals were sevenfold those in the war hospitals in China.” The improvement in the health of the Army has, in peace at any rate, been progressive. In 1857 the annual rate of mortality in the Army at home was 17·5 per 1000. Forty years later it had fallen to 3·42. In 1911 it was 2·47.

Besides all this, Mr. Herbert undertook in 1859 the chairmanship of the Royal Commission on the Sanitary State of the Indian Army. Other work of his in connection with the Army is well known; and some of it—such as his Fortification Scheme—did not endure, but these matters do not concern us here. His measures for the health and well-being of the soldiers were what Miss Nightingale was interested in; and this joint work of theirs has been of lasting benefit. After Sidney Herbert's death there was an arrest in reform; but the main lines laid down by him have been followed to our own day. In 1896 a friend in the War Office went through Miss Nightingale's Memoir of Sidney Herbert for her, and noted the present state of things in relation to it. The Army Sanitary Committee was still in existence. The School of Cookery at Aldershot was in the Queen's Regulations. The General Military Hospitals were maintained. The Army Medical School had been moved to Netley. The Army Medical Statistics were still published annually. The position of Army Medical Officers had been further improved. There was a regularly organized Medical Staff Corps. The recommendations of the Barracks Works Committee of 1861 had been carried out, with the result that the engineer officers had more individual responsibility, and were better acquainted than formerly with the details of healthy barrack and hospital construction. Soldiers' Institutes had been put up on War Office land at several stations. Recreation and reading-rooms were to be found in most barracks, and no new barrack was erected without them. Such changes as have taken place since 1896 have been for the better, as I have indicated in preceding pages; for the better, and more in line with Miss Nightingale's ideas. Her great work, Notes on the Army, contained, as events were to prove, not only the scheme of all Sidney Herbert's reforms (except those relating to defence), but the germ, and often the details, of further reforms (within the same sphere) which have continued to our own day. During the years of her co-operation with Mr. Herbert, Miss Nightingale chafed at obstruction and delay, and after his death she cried out bitterly at the cessation of further progress. But in the end it was as her wise mentor, Sir John McNeill, wrote (March 26, 1859):—“It vexes me greatly to find that you are thwarted and annoyed by such things as you tell me of, but I am not in the least surprised. I did not expect you to accomplish so much in so short a time. Be assured that the progress from a worse to a better system is in almost every department of human affairs a progress slow and interrupted. Do not then be discouraged. If you have not done all that you desired—and who ever did?—you have done more than any one else ever did or could have done, and the good you have done will live after you, growing from generation to generation. I do not remember any instance in which new ideas have made more rapid progress.”

The bearing of the new ideas in relation to the Army was pointed out in Miss Nightingale's summary of Mr. Herbert's services. “He will be remembered chiefly,” she wrote, “as the first War Minister who ever seriously set himself to the task of saving life, who ever took the trouble to master a difficult subject so wisely and so well as to be able to husband the resources of this country, in which human life is more expensive than in any other, more expensive than anything else, and to preserve the efficiency of its defenders.” In this work, during Mr. Herbert's term of office, as in the preceding years, Miss Nightingale was his constant assistant, and often the originator. They conferred personally or by letter almost every day. No move in the sphere of sanitary reform was made by the Minister for War until he had taken her opinion. Every draft was submitted to her criticism and suggestion. When Mr. Herbert took office, his wife wrote (June 16, 1859) to thank Miss Nightingale for her “dear note of congratulations,” adding, “He entirely agrees with your suggestions of this morning, and I am copying your Circular Note for the four pundits.” In the following month (July 26), he sends her the proposed Sanitary Regulations: “I shall be very much obliged if you will go over the papers with Sutherland.” “Sidney is coming to see you to-day (Aug. 13) to talk about the Regulations.” Four days later: “Can Miss Nightingale give me the names of some Governors for our new General Hospitals?” In later months, the scheme for the Medical School and the new Regulations for Purveyors were discussed between them. On one occasion a dispatch from Miss Nightingale, enclosed under cover to Mrs. Herbert, followed the Minister to Windsor: “I gave your letter to your ‘Sovereign’; it's lucky the real one did not see your cover.” The correspondence of 1860 is to like effect. “Here is a dispute which is Hebrew to me; would you look it over with Sutherland?” “I have written in our joint sense,” and so forth. Miss Nightingale supplied, however, more than detail—for one thing, persistent stimulus. At the end it was stimulus to a dying man.

CHAPTER V
THE DEATH OF SIDNEY HERBERT
(1861)

Cavour's last words: La cosa va. That is the life I should like to have lived. That is the death I should like to die.—Sidney Herbert (as recorded by Florence Nightingale).

The progress of the reforms, sketched in the foregoing chapter, was somewhat impeded, and an extension of them to a further point was altogether arrested, by a cause against which neither Mr. Herbert's courageous spirit nor Miss Nightingale's resolute will could avail. The Minister's health broke down under the long strain; he was stricken by disease; and, with failing health, his grasp of affairs was necessarily relaxed.

The beginning of the end came early in December 1860. “A sad change,” wrote Miss Nightingale from Hampstead (Dec. 6) to her uncle, “has come over the spirit of my (not dreams, but) too strong realities. Mr. Herbert is said to have a fatal disease. You know I don't believe in fatal diseases, but fatal to his work I believe this will be. He came over himself to tell me and to discuss what part of the work had better be given up. I shall always respect the man for having seen him so. He was not low, but awe-struck. It was settled that he should give up the House of Commons, but keep on office at least till some of the things are done which want doing. It is another reason for my wishing to go to town soon, as he is particularly forbidden damp, and to see him here always entails a night-ride.” To their meeting on this occasion, early in December, Miss Nightingale often referred in letters of a later date. Mr. Herbert had put before her the three alternatives between which he had to choose. He might retire from public life altogether. He might retire from office, retaining his seat in the House of Commons. Or he might retain his office, and leave the House of Commons for the House of Lords. The first alternative, though it might seem to promise the best hope of recovery, was soon put away: it offered small temptation to a man of Herbert's buoyancy of spirit and high sense of public duty. The second alternative was that to which he at first inclined. He was essentially a politician, and a “House of Commons man.” He had sat for twenty-eight years in that House, where his fine appearance, his personal charm, and his considerable gift of eloquence made him a commanding and popular figure. To go to the House of Lords was, as he thought and said, to be “shelved.”[291] Miss Nightingale urged him with all her formidable powers of persuasion, to make the sacrifice for the sake of their unfinished work. And so it was agreed; at the cost of many a pang on his part, as he confessed, but to the relief of his wife. “A thousand thanks,” she wrote to Miss Nightingale, “for all you have said and done,” and “God bless you for all your love and sympathy.” Mr. Herbert retained office, resigned his seat in the Commons, and was created Lord Herbert of Lea.

Miss Nightingale did not fully realize how ill Lord Herbert was. She did not remember that a life entirely laid out, as hers was, for work, and freed from all distraction, involves less strain than one in which social ties, general conversation, family responsibilities and journeyings to and fro fill up the time between hours of work. And she was passionately set upon the accomplishment of the work in which they were engaged; she longed to see it crowned and made secure. Every step already taken by Mr. Herbert in the War Office had been an administrative improvement. “The great principle involved in his reforms” was, she wrote, “to simplify procedure, to abolish divided responsibility, to define clearly the duties of each head of a department, and of each class of office; to hold heads responsible for their respective departments, with direct communication with the Secretary of State.”[292] The cause of Army Reform would not be completed, the permanence of the improvements already made would not be secured, unless every department of the War Office was similarly reorganized under a general and coherent scheme. So Miss Nightingale urged her friend forward to “one fight more, the best and the last.” The War Office, she had written to him (Nov. 18, 1859), “is a very slow office, an enormously expensive office, and one in which the Minister's intentions can be entirely negatived by all his sub-departments and those of each of the sub-departments by every other.” Mr. Herbert had agreed. A departmental committee had been appointed to report upon reorganization, and Lord de Grey[293] (who was Under-Secretary until Mr. Herbert went to the Lords) had drafted a scheme. This was the scheme which in substance Miss Nightingale now urged Lord Herbert to carry through. But the Horse Guards was on the alert to mark the least infringement of its privileges, and Sir Benjamin Hawes, the Permanent Under-Secretary at the War Office, was copious with objections. There are amongst Miss Nightingale's papers many drafts in which she and Dr. Sutherland reorganized the War Office from top to bottom. Sir Benjamin might have smiled rather grimly, and then set himself with the greater determination to keep things as they were, had he seen how near the bottom was the place into which Miss Nightingale proposed to reorganize him. She was quite frank about it. “The scheme will probably result in Hawes's resignation,” she wrote; “that is another of its advantages.” To reorganize the War Office on paper is an occupation which, during fifty following years, was to beguile the leisure of amateurs, and to fill with disappointed hopes the laborious days of many a Minister. To carry out any such scheme into practice is a task which only a Minister, in full fighting force, could hope to accomplish. It was beyond the power of a dying man.

Miss Nightingale had her fears from the first. “Our scheme of reorganization,” she wrote to Sir John McNeill (Jan. 17, 1861), “is at last launched at the War Office; but I feel that Hawes may make it fail: there is no strong hand over him.” Lord Herbert struggled on manfully with his many tasks (including, it should be remembered, constant dispute with Mr. Gladstone over the Army Estimates), but his strength grew constantly less. At last he had to confess that, on the matter which Miss Nightingale had urged him to carry through, he was beaten:—