(To Florence Nightingale.) [Nov. 16, 1855.] Please, my dear, acknowledge a print which the Queen sends you for the soldiers. She heard thro' Lady Augusta Bruce that you had asked for one of her for the “Inkerman Café”; and she accordingly sends you the one of the Duke of Wellington presenting May flowers to the little Prince Arthur his godson; which is very pretty of her, for it combines so many things. It is sent to you to do what you like with, so I have said you most likely will wish to have it at Balaclava for your Reading Room plans. We have been racking our brains to get together amusing things for your men.… To mitigate the science I have slipped in the Madonna of the Sedia; which, my love, is domestic, if you please, not Popish. The Duchess of Kent sends a capital lot of books; she has been so pleased to be of use.
Both in the Crimea and at Scutari Miss Nightingale carried on, as opportunity offered, what her sister laughingly called “the education of the British Army.” But it was at Scutari, where she principally stayed, that the effort took the largest scope. Outside the Barrack Hospital a building was bought by Sir Henry Storks, on behalf of the Government, to provide a reading-room and a school-room. The reading-room, opened in January 1856, was supplied by Miss Nightingale with books, prints, maps, games, and newspapers. The other room was used as a garrison school; two schoolmasters were sent out; and evening lectures and classes were given. A second school was conducted in a hut between the two large hospitals at Scutari.[194] For the convalescents, Miss Nightingale had at an earlier date established reading-huts in the Barrack Hospital, furnishing them with books, newspapers, writing materials, prints, and games. In all the reading-huts the men attended numerously and constantly, their behaviour when there being, Miss Nightingale added, uniformly quiet and well-bred. The good manners, no less than the uncomplaining heroism of the common soldier, made an indelible impression upon the Lady-in-Chief.
It was out of her experiences in the Crimean War that grew her love for the British soldier, to whose health, care, and comfort, at home and in India, she was to devote many years of her long life. In extreme old age, when failing powers were not equally alert to every call, she would sometimes, I have been told, show listlessness if her companion talked of nurses or nursing, but the old light would ever come into her eye, and the faltering mind would instantly stand at attention, upon the slightest reference to the British soldier.
CHAPTER XII
TO THE CRIMEA AGAIN
(September 1855–July 1856)
I am ready to stand out the War with any man.—Florence Nightingale (Nov. 4, 1855).
On September 8, 1855, Sebastopol fell, after assaults, as every one remembers, which had filled the British cemeteries and hospitals. Miss Nightingale's time from this date to the end of the war was divided between the Crimea and Scutari. On October 9, 1855, she left Scutari for Balaclava, and she remained in the Crimea till the end of November, when she hurried back to Scutari on hearing of a serious outbreak of cholera in the Barrack Hospital at that place. On Good Friday, 1856 (March 21), she again left Scutari for Balaclava, in consequence of an urgent appeal from the hospitals of the Land Transport Corps, and she remained there till the beginning of July. She left Scutari for England on July 28.
Miss Nightingale's work during her second and third visits to the Crimea (of two months in 1855, and of three in 1856) was the most arduous, and in some respects the most worrying, of all her labours in the East. The distances between the several Crimean hospitals, enumerated in an earlier chapter (p. [254]), were great; how bad were the roads is known to every one who has read anything about the Crimean War; and Miss Nightingale experienced much of the rigour of a Crimean winter. “The extraordinary exertions she imposed upon herself would have been perfectly incredible,” wrote M. Soyer, “if they had not been witnessed by many. I can vouch for the fact, having frequently accompanied her to the [Castle] Hospital as well as to the Monastery. The return from these places at night was a very dangerous experience, as the road led across a very uneven country. It was still more perilous when snow was upon the ground. I have seen her stand for hours at the top of a bleak rocky mountain near the Hospital, giving her instructions while the snow was falling heavily.” She had for some years been somewhat subject to rheumatism, and in the Crimea she was at times tortured by sciatica. But she was “acclimatised,” she said, and was strong to endure. Sometimes she spent long days in the saddle. At other times she drove in a rough cart. Her first conveyance was a cart—drawn by a mule and driven, adds the lively Soyer, by a donkey; and she suffered a nasty upset in it. Colonel McMurdo, Commandant of the Land Transport Corps,[195] then kindly gave her the best vehicle procurable. It has been dignified by the name of “Miss Nightingale's Carriage,” but was, in fact, a hooded baggage-car without springs.[196] Some time later M. Soyer identified the vehicle among other “Crimean effects” which were on sale at Southampton. It was shown at the Victorian Era Exhibition forty years later,[197] and is still preserved at Lea Hurst.
In this hooded vehicle, or on horseback, or if the roads were very bad on foot, Miss Nightingale made her rounds in all weathers, her headquarters being sometimes at the General and sometimes at the Castle Hospital. She never presumed on her sex to save herself trouble or fatigue at the expense of others. She was now without Mr. Bracebridge's assistance, but she found that the absence of a civilian go-between was no disadvantage. “A woman,” she said, “obtains from military courtesy (if she does not shock either their habits of business or their caste prejudices) what a man who pitted the civilian against the military effectually hindered.” She superintended the nursing in all the hospitals under her orders. Of the hospital huts on the Genoese Heights, there is a vivid picture in Lady Hornby's Travels. “The first day of our arrival,” she wrote, May 1856, “we took a long ramble on the heights of Balaclava, by the old Genoese castle. On one side is a solitary and magnificent view of sea and cliffs; but pass a sharp and lofty turning, and the crowded port beneath, and all the active military movements, are instantly before your eyes. Higher up we came to Miss Nightingale's hospital huts, built of long planks, and adorned with neatly bordering flowers. The sea was glistening before us, and as we lingered to admire the fine view, one of the nurses, a kind, motherly-looking woman, came into the little porch, and invited us to enter and rest. A wooden stool was kindly offered to us by another and younger Sister. On the large deal table was a simple pot of wild flowers, so beautifully arranged, they instantly struck my eye. How charming the little deal house appeared to me, with its perfect cleanliness, its glorious view, and the health, contentment, and usefulness of its inmates! How respectable their few wants seemed; how suited their simple dress to the stern realities, as well as to the charities of life, and how fearlessly they reposed on the care and love of God in that lonely place, far away from all their friends; how earnestly they admired and tended the few spring flowers of a strange land,[198] these brave, quiet women, who had witnessed and helped to relieve so much suffering! This was the pleasantest visit I ever made. Miss Nightingale had been there but a few days before, and this deal room and stool were hers.”[199] Miss Nightingale established reading-rooms, bored for water to improve the supply near the hospitals, had the huts covered with felt for protection against the winter, and brought her extra-diet kitchens, with M. Soyer's good help, into full efficiency. In her absence the work had met with many difficulties from the supineness or hostility of officials towards what some regarded as her fads, and others as her interference. “In April,” she wrote to Mrs. Herbert from the Castle Hospital (Nov. 17, 1855), “I undertook this Hospital, and from that time to this we cooked all the Extra Diet for 500 to 600 patients, and the whole diet for all the wounded officers by ourselves in a shed; and though I sent up a French cook in July to whom I gave £100 a year, I could not get an Extra Diet Kitchen built, promised me in May, till I came up this time to do it myself in October. During the whole of this time, every egg, every bit of butter, jelly, ale, and Eau de Cologne which the sick officers have had has been provided out of Mrs. Samuel Smith's or my private pocket. On Nov. 4 I opened my Extra Diet Kitchen.”