The disposition of Florence Nightingale lacked much of being angelic. When she encountered the stupidity of official red-tape or the brutality and indifference of army surgeons, her words blistered. She hurled invectives and she employed sarcastic nicknames, and she denounced everything and everybody who opposed her. But when she arrived in Scutari forty-two wounded men out of every hundred were dying, and when she left them her hospitals showed a death-rate of twenty-two out of every thousand. Clara Barton had a tongue less sharp than Florence Nightingale’s, but she had a will no less inflexible. Both women had soft voices, which they never raised. Men fled from the soft tones and vitriolic words of Florence Nightingale. When Clara Barton grew angry, she lowered her voice. Instead of a woman’s shrill falsetto, men heard a deep and determined tone quietly affirming that the thing was to be done in this way and in no other. Few men withstood that tone.
Some readers of this book, I am sure, have been shocked to read the opinion of Dr. Bellows of the Sanitary Commission concerning the uselessness and worse of the ordinary woman nurse in war hospitals. That opinion was shared by Dorothea Dix, by Clara Barton, and to an even greater degree by Florence Nightingale.
Not very long after Florence Nightingale had reached Scutari with her thirty-eight nurses, and about the time when she was having to ship some of them back, her official friends in England thought to win her eternal gratitude by sending to her forty-six additional nurses, under the personal direction of her old friend, Miss Stanley. But she refused to accept them, and sent in her resignation. She would not have these “women scampering through the wards” and upsetting all her regulations. “They are like troublesome children,” she said. Even the religious ones were given to what she called “spiritual flirtations” with the soldiers; and, as for those who had not the fear of God or the dread of hell-fire, there were drunken orderlies and dissolute officers and unmarried chaplains to be considered.
I have wondered what Dorothea Dix would have said if forty-six nurses not of her selection had been suddenly dumped upon her; I think she would have gone into hysterics and shipped them all back. Clara Barton, I believe, would have set them to emptying slops and scrubbing floors till she found the few out of whom she could make nurses. She would not have written the kind of letters about them which Florence Nightingale wrote. She would have scolded a little in her diary, and have written the committee who had sent them a letter of thanks, requesting them not to send any more until she asked for them, and meantime to send her some bandages and some lemons. But she would have felt much as Florence Nightingale felt. They were both self-willed women. They needed all their will-power. It was well they had it.
Many interesting parallels suggest themselves between the work of Clara Barton and that of Florence Nightingale.
They were contemporary in a remarkable degree. Florence Nightingale was a few months the older and died a few months sooner than Clara Barton, but both lived to be more than ninety years of age. Miss Nightingale was born May 12, 1820, and died August 13, 1910; Clara Barton was born December 25, 1821, and died April 12, 1912. They faced the question of marriage in much the same fashion, and each one gave herself in much the same spirit to her life-task. They were not unlike in their religious faith and in its practical expression. The long, confidential letters of Florence Nightingale, written painfully when she ought to have been in bed, remind us of the detailed epistles which Clara Barton found time to write, mostly late at night. Each had a love of humor which stood her in good stead; Miss Barton’s had less sting in it than that of Miss Nightingale, but otherwise it was not unlike, and it was a great help to both of them. Each had a gentle voice, and each knew how to use it effectively without raising it. Each protested to the end of her life that her real work was not that of the popular imagination, that of personally ministering to any considerable number of sick or wounded soldiers, but a work of direction and organization; and neither succeeded in making the public believe it. Not long before her death, Clara Barton relieved her mind in her diary concerning the sort of newspaper article which invented fairy-tales of this sort: “Oh, these women reporters!” she said in her diary. “They never get anything right. They are forever telling and inventing the same old kind of gush!” Florence Nightingale also had a profound distrust of the limitations of members of her own sex; but also she knew, as did Clara Barton, the brutality, the stupidity, and the inefficiency of men. Miss Nightingale often wondered if there were in all the army enough officers of sympathy and conscience to have saved Sodom. Sometimes she doubted if there was one.
All the women who went to the battle-front and were worth their carfare were women of strong will. Mother Bickerdyke, in her rough and great-hearted way, was a lady; but when she faced an incompetent surgeon and drove him out of the hospital and he appealed to General Sherman, the General confessed himself powerless: “She ranks me,” he said. Dorothea Dix was a lady to the very depth of her sensitive soul, a devoted, consecrated Christian lady; but she could be very properly disagreeable on occasion, and she brooked no interference with her authority. Florence Nightingale was a lady, born and bred; but vitriol was mild compared to some of her outbursts. Clara Barton was a lady to her very finger-tips; and she had had enough of experience in Washington among officials and men of influence so that she knew how on occasion to be much more diplomatic and gracious than most other women with her responsibilities. Moreover, she shrank from giving pain, and was careful of her words. But she had as strong a will as had Florence Nightingale, and, while she was as a rule more amiable than that lady in her more violent moods, she got things done. People sometimes found her arbitrary, impatient, and obstinate; had she been less so, it had gone hard with the interests which she cherished. She was capable of being arbitrary, impatient, and obstinate, and the same is true of each of the other women whom her name calls to mind. But among them she was not the least gentle, considerate, and self-forgetful. She required that things should move, and move in the direction of her decision; but she was at heart, and on most occasions in her demeanor, quiet, gentle, affectionate, and calm.
Clara Barton had many devoted and loyal friends. They were held by her in warm and enduring affection; and some of them, for her sake and her work’s sake, made generous sacrifices. She had other friends who came to her in bursts of generous enthusiasm. These also were in good part sincere, and if some of them found her habits so simple and her task so heavy as to afford them smaller share than they had hoped in personal association with her, they were none the less generally firm in their friendship. It was not to be expected that every one could live permanently on her high plane of single-mindedness. Some of her friends were a trial to her, for it was not easy for her to understand why, when they once knew the task she was working at, they did not manifest stability of purpose and perseverance in well-doing. But these she counted her friends. When one of these left her roof because the fare was too plain, Clara Barton said, “She is not willing to wash herself seven times in Jordan.”
There were others—and in the course of her long life there were a number of them—who came to her with ardent protestations of affection and of devotion to her cause, who in time wearied of the strain, or resented her strong hand in management, or who came to believe that they themselves could do better the work which she had undertaken. Some of them betrayed her most sacred confidences, and returned her evil for good.
Few women were so ill-fitted by nature to bear this kind of disappointment as Clara Barton. She was morbidly sensitive, and given to self-accusation. How unworthy she must be, she thought, if these persons did not continue to love her. The wounds of their defection went unhealed. Yet here was one of the finest triumphs of her nature. She never cherished permanent resentment.