It will be a very great satisfaction to me, when you return at last to these shores, to make the acquaintance of one who has set so bright an example to our sex. And with every prayer for the preservation of your valuable health, believe me, always, yours sincerely,Victoria R.

The jewel, which was designed by the Prince Consort, resembles a badge rather than a brooch, bearing a St. George's Cross in red enamel, and the Royal cypher surmounted by a crown in diamonds. The inscription, “Blessed are the Merciful,” encircles the badge, which also bears the word “Crimea.” On the reverse is the inscription: “To Miss Florence Nightingale, as a mark of esteem and gratitude for her devotion towards the Queen's brave soldiers.—From Victoria R., 1855.”

“I hope,” wrote Lady Verney (Dec. 27, 1855), “you will wear your Star to please the soldiers on Sundays and holidays; because, judging from those at home, it will be such a pleasure to them to know that the Queen has done her best to do you honour.” At home, Miss Nightingale never wore the decoration. She wore it in the East, on one occasion certainly (p. [296]); and possibly on other occasions. If so, it would have been for the reason suggested by her sister. She loved the soldiers. Honours and reputation, so far as they were valued by her at all (and that was little), were valued only as a means to the end of further service. With what zeal, and to what good purpose, she was now devoting herself to serve the best interests of the common soldier, we shall learn in the next chapter.

CHAPTER XI
THE SOLDIERS' FRIEND

Human nature is a noble and beautiful thing; not a foul nor a base thing. All the sin of men I esteem as their disease, not their nature; as a folly which can be prevented, not a necessity which must be accepted. And my wonder, even when things are at their worst, is always at the height which this human nature can attain.—Ruskin.

“What the horrors of war are,” wrote Miss Nightingale on her way to the Crimea in May 1855,[189] “no one can imagine. They are not wounds, and blood, and fever, spotted and low, and dysentery, chronic and acute, and cold and heat and famine. They are intoxication, drunken brutality, demoralization and disorder on the part of the inferior; jealousies, meanness, indifference, selfish brutality on the part of the superior.” Then she goes on to deplore the drunkenness she had witnessed at the Depot, and the seeming indifference of the staff to it. And yet, as her experience had shown, the men were quickly susceptible to better influences. “We have established a reading-room for convalescents, which is well attended; and the conduct of the soldiers is uniformly good. I believe that we have been the most efficient means of restoring discipline instead of destroying it, as I have been accused of. They are much more respectful to me than they are to their own officers. But it makes me cry to think that all these 6 months we might have had a trained schoolmaster, and that I was told it was quite impossible; that in the Indian army effectual and successful measures are taken to prevent intoxication and disorganization, and that here the Convalescents are brought in emphatically dead drunk (for they die of it), and officers look on with composure and say to me, ‘You are spoiling the brutes.’ The men are so glad to read, so glad to give their money.” This passage serves to introduce us to a side of Miss Nightingale's work which occupied much of her thoughts and activities during the latter portion of her sojourn in the East. Her work in tending the sick bodies of the soldiers is that which is best known, but her work in appealing to their moral and mental nature was not less admirable, and hardly less novel. A high authority, who had been through the war, said of her at the time, “She has taught officers and officials to treat the soldiers as Christian men.” Not every officer needed thus to be lessoned, but Miss Nightingale's example, and the practical experiments which directly or indirectly she set on foot during the Crimean War, did much to humanize the British Army. She deserves to be remembered as the Soldiers' Friend no less than as the Ministering Angel.

Miss Nightingale, like all moral and social reformers, believed in the nobility of human nature. She had seen in the hospital wards at Scutari, and in the trenches before Sebastopol, the heroism of which the common soldier was capable. She refused to believe that the vices to which he was prone were inherent in his nature. “I have never been able to join,” she wrote to Lady Verney from Scutari (March 1856), “in the popular cry about the recklessness, sensuality, and helplessness of the soldiers. On the contrary I should say (and perhaps few women have ever seen more of the manufacturing and agricultural classes of England than I have before I came out here) that I have never seen so teachable and helpful a class as the Army generally. Give them opportunity promptly and securely to send money home and they will use it. Give them schools and lectures and they will come to them. Give them books and games and amusements and they will leave off drinking. Give them suffering and they will bear it. Give them work and they will do it. I had rather have to do with the Army generally than with any other class I have ever attempted to serve.” It was a common belief of the time that it was in the nature of the British soldier to be drunken. The same idea was entertained of the British nurse.[190] She utterly refused to believe it, and she set herself, in her determined and resourceful way, to put measures of reform into practice.

II

Miss Nightingale, as I have already explained (p. [215]), had the ear of the Court, and she took an opportunity of laying her views before the Queen. The immediate sequel is told in a letter from Lord Granville to Lord Canning:—