Miss Nightingale's thoughtfulness devised many practical ways of helping the men who were not too ill to think of their worldly affairs. In order to encourage them as much as possible to occupy themselves and to keep up a communication with home, she supplied stationery and postage stamps to those in hospital. If a soldier was illiterate or too ill to write, she or one of her nurses, or some other volunteer, would write at the sick man's dictation. Mr. Augustus Stafford, as mentioned above, spent some portion of the autumn recess (Nov.–Dec. 1854) at Scutari, and he gave his experiences to the Roebuck Committee. He described the pitiable condition of the wounded on their arrival, “their thigh and shoulder bones perfectly red from rubbing against the deck” of the vessel which had brought them from the Crimea; but then Miss Nightingale's nurses came round, “and with a precision and rapidity which you would scarcely believe, would bring the soldiers arrowroot mixed with port wine, which was the greatest comfort; the men expressed themselves very thankfully, and said that they felt themselves in heaven.” But it was in writing letters for the soldiers that this “cherished, yet unspoilt, favourite of English society”[159] spent most of his time at Scutari. Of Miss Nightingale's reading-rooms some account will be found in another chapter ([XI.]).
She was much touched by the men's appreciation of these attentions, and she was no less impressed by the conduct of the orderlies in the hospitals. In describing to the Secretary of State certain sanitary reforms which she carried out in the hospitals of Scutari, she wrote: “I must pay my tribute to the instinctive delicacy, the ready attention of orderlies and patients during all that dreadful period; for my sake they performed offices of this kind (which they neither would for the sake of discipline, nor for that of the importance to their own health, which they did not know), and never was there one word nor one look which a gentleman would not have used; and while paying this humble tribute to humble courtesy, the tears come into my eyes as I think how, amidst scenes of loathsome disease and death, there rose above it all the innate dignity, gentleness, and chivalry of the men (for never, surely, was chivalry so strikingly exemplified), shining in the midst of what must be considered as the lowest sinks of human misery, and preventing instinctively the use of one expression which could distress a gentlewoman.”[160]
Even in the lowest sinks of human misery there are chords which will respond to a sympathetic touch. It was the innate dignity of her bearing that struck every one who saw Florence Nightingale; and, amidst those scenes of loathsome disease and death, she was herself “the sweet presence of a good diffused.”
CHAPTER VIII
THE RELIGIOUS DIFFICULTY
Your sectarians of every species, small and great, Catholic or Protestant, of high church or low, … these are the true fog children.—Ruskin.
Whereof cometh envy, strife, railings, evil surmisings, perverse disputings.—St. Paul.
Every generation has its own “religious difficulty,” by which phrase is meant, not the difficulty which the individual soul or the collective soul of a nation may find in its religious beliefs themselves, but a difficulty which intrudes itself into allied or alien matters from the sphere of religious disputation. In the present day, the religious difficulty with which we are most familiar concerns questions of education. In the days of Miss Nightingale's mission to the East there was a religious difficulty in questions of nursing.
It was not enough that such a mission as hers was conceived in the very spirit of the Founder of Christianity: “I was sick, and ye visited me.” The question was eagerly and angrily canvassed under which of the rival Christian banners the visitation of the sick soldiers should be, and was being, carried on. The country had at the time hardly recovered its mental equilibrium after the shock administered to it by the Tractarian movement, and echoes of the “No Popery” cry of 1850 were still resonant in many quarters. The religious difficulty appeared at the very start of Miss Nightingale's Crimean work, and dogged her footsteps to the end of it. I have dealt already with the difficulties which her experiment encountered from social ideas, military prejudices, official routine; but I am not sure that of all her difficulties the religious one was not the most wearing and worrying, as it was also assuredly the most unnecessary and the least excusable. It enveloped a noble undertaking in a fog of envy, strife, and futile railing.