Ten years she had been serving apprenticeship for the great work of her life, and now she was thirty-four years old. In 1854 a war broke out between England and Russia. It is known as the Crimean War. England sent her soldiers to the Black Sea in many thousands. These soldiers were sadly clad and fed. Bad management seems to have prevailed, and the service for carrying supplies was inadequate. Warm clothing, blankets, tents and other protection failed to reach the troops. "What a mockery," says one writer, "it must have seemed to the poor fellows, who with scanty rations and in threadbare and tattered clothes, were enduring the most cruel fatigues aggravated by wind and rain and snow and cold upon the bleak heights of the Tauric Chersonese," to hear comforts had been sent them. "When men of courageous mould have been seen 'to weep,' as on night after night, succeeding days of starvation and toil, they were ordered to their work in freezing trenches, who can estimate the exhausting misery they had at first endured?"
"It is now pouring rain," wrote another who was there, "the skies are black as ink—the wind is howling over the staggering tents—the trenches are turned into dykes—in the tents the water is sometimes a foot deep—our men have not either warm or waterproof clothing—they are out for twelve hours at a time in the trenches—they are plunged into the inevitable miseries of a winter campaign—and not a soul seems to care for their comfort, or even for their lives. The wretched beggar who wanders about the streets of London in the rain, leads the life of a prince, compared with the British soldiers who are fighting out here for their country.
"The commonest accessories of a hospital are wanting; there is not the least attention paid to decency or cleanliness; the fetid air can barely struggle out to taint the atmosphere, save through the chinks in the walls and roofs, and, for all I can observe, these men die without the least effort being made to save them. There they lie, just as they were let gently down on the ground by the poor fellows, their comrades, who brought them on their backs from the camp with the greatest tenderness, but who are not allowed to remain with them. The sick appear to be tended by the sick, and the dying by the dying."
During that winter of 1854, many were frozen in their tents. Of nearly forty-five thousand, over eighteen thousand were reported in the hospitals. The English people at last saw their disaster, and certain women volunteered services of helpfulness. The head of the War Department of the Government who knew of Miss Nightingale's interest in nursing, asked her to superintend and organise a staff of nurses. By a strange coincidence Florence Nightingale had written and offered her aid to the sick and wounded soldiers, and her letter passed the letter from the Government.
It was an undertaking wholly new to English habits—a band of devoted women going to soften the horrors of war and save lives the war had endeavoured to end. As the nurses landed at Boulogne in France, the poor fisherwomen seized and carried their baggage in token of their admiration for the work they were starting out to do. And in their journey through France the innkeepers would not take pay for their lodgings and food. They sailed across the Mediterranean and in November, 1854, reached Scutari, a town in Turkey in Asia, opposite Constantinople.
Four thousand sick and wounded soldiers lay in the hospitals awaiting their ministrations. And still others from a great battle were coming in. These hospitals were so filled that even in the corridors were two rows of mattresses and so close together that two persons could barely walk between the rows. The beds reeked with infection. There was no thought, seemingly, of sanitation. Rather than curers the hospitals were breeders of pestilence.
"The whole of yesterday one could only forget one's own existence," wrote one of the nurses, "for it was spent first in sewing the men's mattresses, and then in washing them, and assisting the surgeons, when we could, in dressing their ghastly wounds after their five days' confinement on board ship, during which space hundreds of wounds had not been dressed. Hundreds of men with fever, dysentery and cholera (the wounded were the smaller portion) filled the wards in succession from the overcrowded transports." Such were the conditions this band of women found.
The head of the band, Miss Nightingale, began her work of organisation. She laboured with tireless energy and indomitable will. But not without opposition. The military and medical officials, says one who was there, "were in the uttermost confusion among themselves, and they generally regarded these gentle missionaries as a new element of anarchy."
As soon as the wounded soldiers had had treatment, Miss Nightingale set in active operations a kitchen where food fit for the sick might be prepared. Many hundreds of the invalids could not eat of ordinary food without serious evil results. In this kitchen the nurses cooked nourishing delicacies for the poor fellows. The following is a little snapshot by one who was there: "In the outer room we caught a glimpse of the justly celebrated Miss Nightingale, an amiable and highly intelligent-looking lady, delicate in form and prepossessing in appearance. Her energies were concentrated for the instant in the careful preparation of a dish of delectable food for an enfeebled patient—one of her homely ministrations to the wan victims of relentless war."
After the kitchen the master—or mistress—mind planned a laundry where the clothing and beds of the sick men might be cleansed. Miss Nightingale, you see, merely organised and conducted housekeeping upon a giant scale. Then in addition she set on foot evening lectures for the men able to listen, and a library and a schoolroom.