“Miss Nightingale cannot but here recall,” she wrote after the war, “with deep gratitude and respect, the letters of support and encouragement which she received from the late Lord Raglan, who invariably acknowledged all that was attempted,[182] for the good of his men, with the deepest feeling, as well as with the high courtesy and true manliness of his character. No tinge of petty jealousy against those entrusted with any commission, public or private, connected with the Army under his command, ever alloyed his generous benevolence.”[94]
The behaviour of some (but not all) of the military officers, and of the men who caught their manners from the officers, was at first different. There was sometimes ill-disguised jealousy, and consequent sulkiness. Outwardly, there was politeness; but difficulties were put into the way of “the Bird,” as some of them called her behind her back, and she was left to shift for herself, when a little help might have eased the burden. “It is the Bird's duty,” they would say. Miss Nightingale, however, kept perfect command of her temper. “She was always calm and self-possessed,” says one of the Roman Catholic Sisters; “she was a perfect lady through everything—never overbearing. I never heard her raise her voice.”
Upon most of the medical men on the spot she made a good impression at once, because she proved herself to be efficient and helpful. She applied the expert's touch. But there were doctors and doctors. Some welcomed her and her staff, and made as much use of them as possible. Others resented their presence, and threw obstacles in their way. There was one ward in which the junior medical officers had been advised by their superior to have as little to do with Miss Nightingale as possible. She showed exemplary patience under this kind of opposition, and gradually won her way into the confidence of most of the doctors.[95] “Miss Nightingale told us,” says one of her staff, “only to attend to patients in the wards of those surgeons who wished for our services, and she charged us never to do anything for the patients without the leave of the doctors.”[96] “The number of nurses admitted into each division of a hospital depended,” Miss Nightingale herself explained, “upon the medical officer of that division, who sometimes accepted them, sometimes refused them, sometimes accepted them after they had been refused; while the duties they were permitted to perform varied according to the will of each individual medical officer.”[97] That this ill-defined state of things called constantly for tact and diplomacy on the part of the Lady Superintendent, and often for severe self-restraint, will readily be perceived.
On the first arrival of Miss Nightingale and her staff, the wounded were pouring in fast, and the nurses were told off to the worst surgical cases:—
“Comfort yourselves,” wrote Mr. Bracebridge to her parents (Nov. 20), “that what the good Flo has done and is doing is priceless, and is felt to be so by the medical men—the cleanliness of the wounds, which were horribly dirty, the general order and arrangement. There has not been half the jealousy I expected from them towards her.”
“As to Miss Nightingale and her companions,” wrote Mr. Osborne to Mr. Herbert (Nov. 15), “nothing can be said too strong in their praise; she works them wonderfully, and they are so useful that I have no hesitation in saying some 20 more of the same sort would be a very great blessing to the establishment. Her nerve is equal to her good sense; she, with one of the nurses and myself, gave efficient aid at an amputation of the thigh yesterday. She was just as cool as if she had had to do it herself.”[98]
A letter from Miss Nightingale herself to her friend of Harley Street, Dr. Bowman, the ophthalmic surgeon, gives a lively account of some of her difficulties, and a vivid picture of the horrors amid which her work was done (Nov. 14):—
“I came out, Ma'am, prepared to submit to everything, to be put upon in every way. But there are some things, Ma'am, one can't submit to. There is the Caps, Ma'am, that suits one face, and some that suits another. And if I'd known, Ma'am, about the Caps, great as was my desire to come out to nurse at Scutari, I wouldn't have come, Ma'am.”—Speech of Mrs. Lawfield.—Time must be at a discount with the man who can adjust the balance of such an important question as the above, and I for one have none: as you will easily suppose when I tell you that on Thursday last we had 1715 sick and wounded in this Hospital (among whom 120 Cholera Patients), and 650 severely wounded in the other Building called the General Hospital, of which we also have charge, when a message came to me to prepare for 510 wounded[184] on our side of the Hospital who were arriving from the dreadful affair of the 5th November from Balaklava, in which battle were 1763 wounded and 442 killed, besides 96 officers wounded and 38 killed. I always expected to end my Days as Hospital Matron, but I never expected to be Barrack Mistress. We had but half an hour's notice before they began landing the wounded. Between one and 9 o'clock we had the mattresses stuffed, sewn up, laid down—alas! only upon matting on the floor—the men washed and put to bed, and all their wounds dressed. I wish I had time. I would write you a letter dear to a surgeon's heart. I am as good as a Medical Times! But oh! you Gentlemen of England who sit at Home in all the well-earned satisfaction of your successful cases, can have little Idea from reading the newspapers of the Horror and Misery (in a Military Hospital) of operating upon these dying, exhausted men. A London Hospital is a Garden of Flowers to it.
We have had such a Sea in the Bosphorus, and the Turks, the very men for whom we are fighting, carry in our Wounded so cruelly, that they arrive in a state of Agony. One amputated Stump died 2 hours after we received him, one compound Fracture just as we were getting him into Bed—in all, twenty-four cases died on the day of landing. The Dysentery Cases have died at the rate of one in two. Then the day of operations which follows.…
We are very lucky in our Medical Heads. Two of them are brutes, and four are angels—for this is a work which makes either angels or devils of men and of women too. As for the assistants, they are all Cubs, and will, while a man is breathing his last breath under the knife, lament the “annoyance of being called up from their dinners by such a fresh influx of wounded”! But unlicked Cubs grow up into good old Bears, tho' I don't know how; for certain it is the old Bears are good. We have now four miles of Beds, and not eighteen inches apart.