Lord Wolseley had been appointed to command a Gordon Relief Expedition in August 1884. There were already female nurses in Egypt. Some had been retained at Cairo after the Arabi Campaign of 1882. Others had been sent to Suakin during the “military operations” of 1883. More were now sent by the Government, and some were ordered up the Nile to Wady Halfa. Miss Nightingale felt this to be a great event. “Luther says,” she wrote to Miss Pringle (Claydon, Oct. 11, 1884), “that he looks and sees the firmament which God has made without pillars, and we wretched men are always afraid that it will tumble down unless we make our little pillars half a foot high. It is 34 years since I was at Wady Halfa. How little I could ever have thought that there would be trained nurses now there! O faithless me, that think God cannot make His firmament without pillars.” But Miss Nightingale's religion enjoined, as we know, “working with God.” The ultimate issue did not rest upon the little pillars; but they must be set up for what they are worth none the less, and Miss Nightingale threw herself, heart and soul, into forwarding the Egyptian nursing campaign. Presently more nurses were sent out on private initiative—some by the National Aid Society, others by a committee of ladies. On February 20, 1885, Lady Rosebery called at South Street. She and Mrs. Gladstone and Lady Salisbury, and other ladies, with the Princess of Wales, were proposing to establish a Committee of their own to send additional comforts for the sick and wounded, as well as additional nurses. In order to secure unity of administration, and in loyalty to Lord Wantage's Society, Miss Nightingale advised against any separate organization, and the Committee, which she then agreed to join, was reconstituted as “The Princess of Wales's Branch of the National Aid Society.” The Superintendent of the nurses sent out by the Government was one of Miss Nightingale's dearest pupils, Miss Rachel Williams, whose acquaintance we have made already under her pet-name of “The Goddess.” She had been in indifferent health and much worried. She stayed in South Street while arrangements were pending, and Miss Nightingale announced the departure to Miss Pringle (March 4): “Our darling has started this morning by the Navarino with seven nurses for Suez. If you had seen, as I did, how, the moment it was settled that she was to have this work, the cloud and the load were lifted off her, and she became again the Goddess and her youth returned, you would have felt, as she said, that Providential Goodness had opened and guided every step of her way. As soon as her appointment was made she looked as beautiful and bonny as ever.”
The rapidity of Miss Nightingale's decision, her memory for matters of detail, her thoughtfulness for others even in trivial things, her kindliness of heart interlacing the practical instinct, the mingled playfulness and gravity of her manner—these things are all illustrated in the reminiscences of another member of the party which sailed for Egypt in the Navarino:—
I was then Sister of one of the surgical wards at King's[348] College Hospital. It was on a Saturday in February, about midday, just as I was due to attend the operation cases from my ward, that a one-armed commissionaire appeared at the ward door: “A note for Sister Philippa from Miss Nightingale,” he said. The request it contained was characteristic of the writer—decisive, yet kindly. Would I leave in three days' time for service in the Soudan? if so, I must be at her house for instructions on Monday at 8.30 A.M., at Marlborough House to be interviewed by Queen Alexandra (then Princess of Wales) at 11 A.M.; and immediately afterwards at Messrs. Cappers, Gracechurch Street, to be fitted for my war uniform. Would I also breakfast with her on Wednesday, so that she “might check the fit of my uniform, and wish me God-speed.” Months afterwards, when the war was over, and we were quietly chatting over things at Claydon, how she enjoyed hearing the numerous trivial details of that three days' rush! Again and again she would refer to that afternoon when I had to stand by the patient's side in the operating theatre, mechanically waiting on the surgeons, outwardly placid, yet inwardly, as I told her, in a fever of excitement, not so much at the thought of going to the front, as at the fact I had been chosen by her to follow in her footsteps.
On the Monday above referred to, punctually at half-past eight, I arrived at South Street, wondering what my reception would be, but before ten minutes had passed all wonder and speculation had given place to unbounded admiration and (even at that early acquaintanceship) affection for the warm-hearted old lady who counselled me as a nurse, mothered me as an out-put from her Home, and urged me to spare no point—myself specially—where the soldiers were concerned. “Remember;” she said, “when you are far away up-country, possibly the only English woman there, that those men will note and remember your every action, not only as a nurse, but as a woman; your life to them will be as the rings a pebble makes when thrown into a pond—reaching far, reaching wide—each ripple gone beyond your grasp, yet remembered almost to exaggeration by those soldiers lying helpless in their sickness. See that your every word and act is worthy of your profession and your womanhood.” Then she asked me to accept an india-rubber travelling bath as “her parting gift to a one-time probationer who had once reminded her that cleanliness was next to Godliness,”[213] and in[349] spite of the merry twinkle in her eye as she said this, there were tears of anxious kindness as she added, “God guard you in His safe keeping and make you worthy of His trust—our soldiers.”
I saw nothing more of her till Wednesday morning. The troop-ship in which we were to go out left Tilbury Docks at 11 o'clock, and I was to breakfast with Miss Nightingale at half-past seven. It was rather a rush to manage it, but it was well worth any amount of inconvenience to have that last hour with her, and it was a picture that will always remain above all others in my memory. Propped up in bed, the pillows framing her kindly face with its lace-covered silvery hair, and twinkling eyes. I often think her sense of humour must have been as strong a bond between her and the soldiers as her sympathy was. The coffee, toast, eggs, and honey, “a real English breakfast, dear child,” she said, “and it is good to know you will have honestly earned the next one you eat in England.” “And suppose I don't return to eat one at all?” I asked. “Well! you will have earned that too, dear heart,” she answered quietly. Who can be surprised that we worshipped our Chief? Other nurses were going out in the same ship as I, and when we entered our cabins we found a bouquet of flowers for each of us, attached to which was “God-speed from Florence Nightingale.”
Six months after, in the glare and heat of an August afternoon, when the Egyptian campaign was a thing of the past, a shipload of sick and wounded soldiers glided slowly into the docks at Southampton. While I was helping to transfer some of the most serious cases to Netley, a telegram was handed to me. It was from Miss Nightingale: “Am staying at Claydon, cleaners and painters in possession of 10 South Street, but two rooms, Mrs. Neild [the Housekeeper], and a warm welcome are awaiting your arrival there. Use them as long as you wish.” On arriving at South Street I found it all just as she had said, and by the first post next day came a letter from Claydon, such a home welcome! It was well worth all the heat and glare of a Soudan summer, all the absence of water, and presence of insects, and the hundred and one other uncomfortable things that flesh is heir to during similar circumstances, to get such a letter of welcome as that. It ended up with “make South Street your headquarters till your work is finished” (there was much detail to complete in connection with the National Aid Society before I could leave London), “and then come to me at Claydon.” So after a couple of weeks' work in London, I went to Claydon, and there, during a month's rest in one of the most beautiful of England's country homes, I learned to know and understand Miss Nightingale, to realize what the friendship of a character like hers means. “The essence of Friendship,” says Emerson,[350] “is tenderness and trust.” No words better describe our Chief than these.
Sister Philippa was only one of the many war-nurses to whom their Chief showed this tender friendship. During their service abroad, she was constant in letters of encouragement and advice:—
(To Miss Williams, at Suez.) 10 South Street, July 3.… The Orderlies are not hopeless but untrained. Government are now doing all they can. In my day they were hopeless. They place them now under the Sisters. The great business of the Sisters is to train them. It is the more aggravating when there are so few Sisters that they can't give time to train these men who are essential in the Field. O how I wish I could send you several Sisters at once! But I am altogether puzzled. Your telegrams, which I suspect were not dictated by you, say “Sufficient.” Would that I could help you to nurse the Typhoids! I am sure you are doing great good among the Orderlies, even tho' you do not know it. The very fact that they see you think neglect a crime does good. How well I know their fatal neglects with Typhoid cases! But 30 years ago women Nurses were just as bad. See the difference now. There is a Miss Williams. Cheer up: fight the good fight of faith. I need not say this to my dear, for she is fighting it. God bless her! When I am gone, she will see the fruit of her labours. Three cheers for her! A Dieu. To God I commend you. Would I were His servant as you are. I wonder whether you have had my letters. I have written by every mail.[214]
(To the same.) 10 South Street, July 17 [1885]. Yesterday the Guards Camel Corps and the Heavies marched into London, after having been reviewed by the Queen at Osborne. Sir Harry went to see them inspected by the Commander-in-Chief at Wellington Barracks. (I would have given anything to have seen the Meeting with their comrades if I had been well enough to go.) And he said it was the most affecting thing he ever saw. These were the men who marched across the Bayuda Desert—a handful of men taking tender care of their handful of wounded, attacked by twelve times their number—and reached the Nile below Khartoum; but when the steamer reached Khartoum, Khartoum had fallen and Gordon was dead. There is a picture of Gordon called “The Last Watch,” where he is watching on the ramparts, the last night. It is very fine. He is unseen and[351] alone; there is the far-off look in his eyes of solemn happiness at his reunion with God, so near, of deep grief for the poor black populations whom he has to leave to their misery, and whom he has failed to extricate; and yet of abiding, faithful trust in God that He will do all things for the best. It was his constant prayer—first for God's glory, then for these people's welfare, and his own humiliation—that is, that he should feel the more, himself being humbled, the indwelling God in himself. Have the little Lives of Gordon reached your men yet?[215]
Florence Nightingale was living her Crimean life again in the life of her pupils. Many a little incident recalled the old days to her. One of the nurses wrote that in her hospital the supply of soap had given out. “Send to Cairo,” Miss Nightingale answered, “for any quantity you like, and I'll pay, but only if you can do it without embroiling yourself with the authorities.” Another of her pupils was nursing in the Citadel Hospital at Cairo. “I am on night duty now,” she wrote, “and I don't dislike it at all: in fact I enjoy trotting about this weird old place all by myself in the solemnity of the night! and now and then hearing a low voice saying, ‘Sister, would you mind doing so and so,’ ‘Sister, can you give me something to ease my face,’ etc., etc., and then feeding the hungry enteric patients at stated times who open their mouths in turn like so many little birds!” The picture drawn in this letter, and the zest which it showed, pleased Miss Nightingale greatly, and she passed it on to old pupils at home. They were thrilled. Lucky Sybil! they said; she is doing work like the Chief's at Scutari! another Lady with the Lamp amid the glimmering gloom! And Miss Nightingale, who received from the medical authorities of the Army most satisfactory reports on the services rendered by her nurses, rejoiced in their successes and usefulness. She would have smiled upon any pupil “at the first stroke which passed what she could do.”