TO THE CRIMEA--ILLNESS
(May-August 1855)
For myself, I have done my duty. I have identified my fate with
that of the heroic dead.--FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE (private notes,
1855).
In the spring of 1855 Miss Nightingale decided to leave Scutari for a
while in order to visit the hospitals in the Crimea. The conditions at
Scutari were now greatly improved. Sanitary works had been executed. The
hospitals were better supplied. The pressure in the wards, caused by the
terrible winter before Sebastopol, was relieved. There were only 1100
cases in the Barrack Hospital, and of those only 100 were in bed. The
rate of mortality had fallen from 42 per _cent_ to 22 per _thousand_ of
the cases treated. The siege was likely soon to be accompanied by
assaults, and the pressure might rather be in the hospitals at
Balaclava, where the sick and wounded were if possible to remain, in
order to avoid the sufferings of the sea passage to Scutari.
* * * * *
In the Crimea, besides the regimental hospitals, there were four general
hospitals. There was the _General Hospital_ at Balaclava, established
after the British occupation in September 1854. There was the _Castle
Hospital_, consisting of huts on the "Genoese heights" above Balaclava,
opened in April 1855. There was the _Hospital of St. George's
Monastery_, also consisting of huts, intended for convalescent and
ophthalmic cases; and, lastly, there were the _Hospitals of the Land
Transport Corps_, again consisting of huts, near Karani. All these
hospitals had a complement of female nurses, though the Monastery
Hospital not until December 1855, and the Land Transport Hospitals not
until 1856. In the spring of 1855, then, there were already female
nurses at the General Hospital and the Castle Hospital, under their own
superintendents, but all ultimately responsible to Miss Nightingale--as
she apprehended, and as the War Office intended. She was now anxious to
inspect these hospitals; to increase the efficiency of the female
nursing establishments; and, in particular, to introduce those washing
and cooking arrangements which had been productive of so much benefit at
Scutari. Her visit of inspection was approved by the War Office; and, by
instructions dated April 27, she was invested with full authority as
Almoner of the Free Gifts in all the British Hospitals in the Crimea.
But in other respects her position was somewhat ambiguous. The original
instructions, issued by Mr. Herbert, had named her as Superintendent of
the female nurses in all the British military hospitals _in Turkey_; and
these words gave a standing-ground to her opponents in the Crimea. The
intention of the War Office was to give her general superintendence, but
to relieve her of direct responsibility for the nurses in the Crimea so
long as she was at Scutari. The matter was not, however, cleared up till
a later date,[169] and the indefiniteness of her position in the Crimea
exposed her to infinite worry and intrigues.
[169] See below, p. 292.
On May 2, Miss Nightingale set forth from Scutari, where Mrs.
Bracebridge was left in charge:--
"Poor old Flo," Miss Nightingale wrote from the Black Sea, May 5,
1855, "steaming up the Bosphorus and across the Black Sea with four
nurses, two cooks, and a boy to Crim Tartary (to overhaul the
Regimental Hospitals) in the _Robert Lowe_ or _Robert Slow_ (for an
exceedingly slow boat she is), taking back 420 of her patients, a
draught of convalescents returning to their regiments to be shot at
again. 'A Mother in Israel,' Pastor Fliedner called me; a Mother in
the Coldstreams, is the more appropriate appellation. What
suggestions do the above ideas make to you in Embley drawing-room?
Stranger ones perhaps than to me, who, on the 5th May, year of
disgrace 1855, having been at Scutari six months to-day, am in
sympathy with God, fulfilling the purpose I came into the world
for. What the disappointments of the conclusion of these six
months are no one can tell. But I am not dead, but alive."
Miss Nightingale was accompanied to the Crimea by the faithful Mr.
Bracebridge, willing as ever to serve her. Among the nurses was Mrs.
Roberts, whose exceptional efficiency and personal devotion to the
Lady-in-Chief were soon to be called in need. Of the cooks, the chief
was Soyer the Great, from whose cheerfully gossiping and pleasantly
egotistical pages[170] some details are drawn in this chapter. The "boy"
mentioned in Miss Nightingale's letter was Thomas, a drummer, who,
though only twelve years of age, used to call himself "Miss
Nightingale's Man." He was a regular _enfant de troupe_, says M. Soyer,
full of activity, wit, intelligence, and glee. He would draw himself up
to his full height, and explain that he had "forsaken his instruments in
order to devote his civil and military career to Miss Nightingale." She
was attended also by a soldier invalided from the 68th Light Infantry,
whom Mr. Bracebridge had picked out to serve as messenger. In 1860 he
wrote a manuscript account of his experiences in the Crimea,[171] and
this is another first-hand source from which particulars are drawn in
the present chapter. The party arrived at Balaclava on May 5, and the
decks of vessels in the harbour were crowded with spectators anxious to
catch a glimpse of the famous Lady-in-Chief. There was no accommodation
for her ashore; so her headquarters were on board the _Robert Lowe_, and
when that vessel left, on the sailing transport _London_.
[170] See Bibliography B, No. 15.
[171] Robert Robinson, on his return to England, was sent to school and
an agricultural college by Miss Nightingale, and obtained
employment on Lord Berners's estate in Scotland. Miss Nightingale
was constantly befriending him, _e.g._ in paying his expenses for
a visit to London to see the Exhibition of 1862, and in sending him
illustrated newspapers, and even the _Times_. There was another
Crimean lad, besides Tommy, one William Jones, with a wooden leg.
See below, p. 304, where account is also given of another protégé,
Peter.
II
Miss Nightingale set to work immediately, and with characteristic
energy. One of her first duties was a visit of ceremony to Lord Raglan.
She was a good horsewoman, and as a girl had been fond of riding. She
was now mounted "upon a very pretty mare, which, by its gambols and
caracoling, seemed proud to carry its noble charge, and our cavalcade
produced an extraordinary effect upon the motley crowd of all nations
assembled at Balaclava, who were astonished at seeing a lady so well
escorted." Was not the great Soyer himself among the escort? The
Commander of the Forces was away, but Miss Nightingale was taken to the
Three Mortar Battery, and the soldiers, as she passed, gave her three
times three. This visit to the front made a profound and indelible
impression upon her.[172] It is first recorded in a letter of May 10,
which was forwarded to Windsor Castle.[173] "Fancy," she wrote, "working
five nights out of seven in the trenches! Fancy being 36 hours in them
at a stretch, as they were all December, lying down, or half lying down,
often 48 hours with no food but _raw_ salt pork, sprinkled with sugar,
rum, and biscuit; nothing hot, because the exhausted soldier could not
collect his own fuel, as he was expected to do, to cook his own ration;
and fancy through all this the army preserving their courage and
patience as they have done, and being now eager (the old ones more than
the young ones) to be led even into the trenches. There was something
sublime in the spectacle." "When I see the camp," she wrote to Lady
Canning (May 10), "I wonder not that the army suffered so much, but that
there is any army left at all; but now all is looking up. Sir John
M'Neill has done wonders." With Sir John M'Neill, a doctor who
afterwards entered the Political Service in the East, Miss Nightingale
formed a great friendship. He, with Colonel Tulloch, had been sent out
to the Crimea by Lord Palmerston's Government to report upon the
Commissariat system.
[172] See, _e.g._, below, pp. 317, 488, and Vol. II. p. 411.
[173] Found among the Prince Consort's papers, and printed in
Sir Theodore Martin's _Life_ of him, vol. iii. p. 214.
Miss Nightingale, on this and her later visits to the Crimea, saw and
heard of many deeds of heroism which she loved to tell. "I remember,"
she wrote, "a sergeant, who was on picket, the rest of the picket
killed, and himself battered about the head, stumbled back to camp, and
on his way picked up a wounded man, and brought him in on his shoulders
to the lines, where he fell down insensible. When, after many hours, he
recovered his senses, I believe after trepanning, his first words were
to ask after his comrade, 'Is he alive?' 'Comrade, indeed! yes, he's
alive, it is the General.' At that moment the General, though badly
wounded, appeared at the bedside. 'Oh, General, it's you, is it, I
brought in, I'm so glad. I didn't know your honour, but if I'd known it
was you, I'd have saved you all the same.' This is the true soldier's
spirit."[174]
[174] Letter on the Volunteers, 1861. See Bibliography A, No. 25.
III
During the few days immediately after her arrival at Balaclava, Miss
Nightingale carried on an active investigation of the hospitals,
regimental and general; arranged various affairs in connection with the
sisters and nurses; discussed the building of new huts; and, in
conjunction with M. Soyer, planned the erection of several kitchens for
extra diet. Here, as at Scutari, she was fearless of contagion, and
tended patients stricken with fever. On return to her ship one evening
she complained of great fatigue; and on the following morning, feeling
no better, she sent for Dr. Anderson, Chief Medical Officer at the
General Hospital. He called others of the medical staff into
consultation, and a joint bulletin was issued to the effect that Miss
Nightingale was suffering from Crimean fever. They advised that she
should be removed from the ship, and she was carried on a stretcher by
relays of soldiers to the Castle Hospital on the Genoese Heights. The
hut in which she lay was immediately behind those of the wounded
soldiers. The attack of fever was sharp, and she was, as she afterwards
admitted to her friends, "very near to death." There are scraps of
manuscript among her papers (for even in illness she could not be kept
from the use of her pen) which show a wandering mind.
The news of Miss Nightingale's illness was received with consternation
in England, and the anxiety of her friends was intense, though Lord
Raglan had thoughtfully arranged that a telegraphic dispatch from him
should not reach them till, after two or three days of the fever, the
doctors were able to hold out hopes of recovery. "Sitting to-day," wrote
her sister to a friend, from Embley (May 27), "in the little Vicarage
woodhouse, waiting for the people to come out from church (for we were
not up to the whole service), in order to go in to the Communion which
she loves so well, and which we always take with her and God, and which
she is taking in spirit or reality to-day if she is alive, and if not is
taking in a higher and happier sense--Mama said, 'I thank God she is
ready for life or for death'; and in that, dear, we truly strive to
rest, though the spirit would quail, I am afraid, if there were not hope
at the bottom." The anxiety in the War Hospitals was scarcely less. "The
soldiers turned their faces to the wall," said one, "and cried." The
crisis passed, and on May 24 Lord Raglan was able to telegraph home that
the patient was out of danger, and three days later that she was going
on favourably. The bulletins were forwarded to the Queen, and on May 28
Her Majesty, in writing to Lord Panmure, was "truly thankful to learn
that excellent and valuable person, Miss Nightingale, is safe."[175] At
this time a horseman rode up to her hut, and the nurse, Mrs. Roberts,
who had been enjoined to keep the patient quiet, refused to let him in.
He said that he most particularly desired to see Miss Nightingale. "And
pray," said Mrs. Roberts, "who are you?" "Ah, only a soldier," replied
the visitor, "but I have ridden a long way, and your patient knows me
very well." He was admitted, and a month later was himself laid low and
died. It was Lord Raglan.
[175] _Panmure Papers_, vol. i. p. 215.
IV
Miss Nightingale, on becoming convalescent, was strongly advised by the
doctors to take a voyage to England. She would not listen to such
advice. Her work at the front had but just begun, and she was resolved
to return to it after the shortest possible delay. The voyage to the
Bosphorus was the longest that she could be induced to take. Her good
Mrs. Bracebridge had arrived from Scutari just in time to accompany her
friend on the return voyage. Lord Ward, whose steam-yacht was in harbour
at the time, pressed the use of it upon her, and in it she was taken to
Scutari. When the yacht reached Scutari, all the high officials were
present to meet it. One of the large barges, used to remove the sick and
wounded, was brought alongside, and Miss Nightingale, in a state of
extreme weakness and exhaustion, was lowered into it. At the pier
soldiers were in readiness, who carried her on a stretcher to the
chaplain's house, followed by a large and sympathetic crowd. "I do not
remember anything during the campaign," wrote the good-hearted Soyer,
"so gratifying to the feelings as that simple though grand procession."
"Ah," said a soldier, "there was no sadder sight than to see that dear
lady carried up from the pier on a stretcher just like we men, and
perhaps by some of the fellows she nursed herself."[176] It was the same
when she was presently moved from Scutari to the shore in order to go to
Therapia, where the Ambassador had placed his summer residence at her
disposal. She was carried in a litter by four guardsmen, but, though it
was only five minutes' walk to the shore, there were two relays, and her
baggage was divided among twelve soldiers, though two could easily have
carried the whole,[177] so great was the desire of the men to share in
the honour of helping the Lady-in-Chief.
[176] _Blackwood_, p. 115.
[177] _Memoirs of Lady Eastlake_, vol. ii. p. 44.
Her recovery was gradual, and her weakness great. Mrs. Bracebridge
described her as unable to feed herself or speak above a whisper. The
extreme exhaustion was more from the previous overstrain on mind and
body than from the fever, the doctors said, and they recommended
complete change and rest. Mr. Sidney Herbert wrote, imploring her to
come home for two months: "We are delighted," wrote her mother (July 9),
"to think of you at Therapia. Oh, my love, how I trust that you will,
among the numerous lessons which your life has been spent in learning,
be able to perfect that most difficult one of standing and waiting." She
was to be lessoned in that form of service, but not till after many
more years of arduous labour, and for the present she would not hear of
any return to England. The feeling of the soldiers for her touched her
so deeply that she could not bear, she said, to leave them. Gradually
she recovered strength. "We have a charming account," wrote her sister
(Aug. 21), "from Lothian Nicholson just ordered out to Crimea, who is
quite enthusiastic, dear old boy, about her good looks, which, as all
her hair has been cut off, is good testimony--'her own smile,' he talks
of, and says he can hardly believe she has gone through such a winter.
The dear Bracebridges say that her improvement in the last week was
delightful and wonderful." Already, in July, her business letters were
resumed. In August she was in the full rush of work again. The doctors
and her friends still besought her to take rest. But her indomitable
spirit would listen to no counsels of retreat. The end of the war was
not yet in sight. Even Sebastopol had not yet fallen. So long as there
remained sick and wounded in the Levant to be cared for, she was
resolved to remain also. A soldier was told that the Lady-in-Chief would
probably be sent home. "But how will they _pairt_ with her," he said,
"what'll they do without her? they set all their hopes on she." There
were nurses, too, naturally anxious to rejoin their families or friends
at home, who said that, if she went, they would go. The presence of Miss
Nightingale, with her lofty ideals and inspiring self-devotion, was the
attraction which kept many of these women at their posts. Some had
already died. Mrs. Elizabeth Drake, one of the nurses whom Miss
Nightingale had taken with her to the Crimea, died on August 9 of low
fever at Balaclava. "I cannot tell you," wrote Miss Nightingale to the
Master of St. John's House (Aug. 16, 1855), "what I felt when I heard of
her death, unexpected alike by all. Her two physicians thought her going
on well, and I expected her in every convoy that came down from
Balaclava, as she was coming to me to recruit. I have lost in her the
best of all the women here. Once I proposed to her to go home, but she
scouted the idea entirely and said her health was better here than in
England. I feel like a criminal in having robbed you of one so truly to
be loved and honoured. It seemed as if it pleased God to remove from
the work those who have been most useful to it. His will be done!" Nurse
Drake's body was brought to Scutari, and Miss Nightingale erected a
small marble cross over it in the cemetery. It was no time, when members
of the rank-and-file were falling at the post of duty, for the chief to
listen to counsels of medical prudence. Nor, indeed, at any time did
Miss Nightingale harbour even a passing thought of what would have
seemed to her an act of military desertion. She remained till the end of
the war came, and till the last transport had sailed; working
indefatigably as ever, and in some respects in new spheres of
usefulness, both in the Crimea and at Scutari; to what good effect we
shall hear in later chapters, but at great cost to her own comfort and
bodily strength. She had been appointed, as she used to say, to a
subsidiary post in the Queen's Army[178]; the humblest post, it might
be, but still a post of duty. The men had dared and suffered; and
Florence Nightingale was resolved to show that a woman too had strength
to suffer and endure.
[178] She was especially pleased when in March 1856 her name appeared
for the first time in General Orders; see below, p. 293.
During the weeks of convalescence at Scutari, Miss Nightingale used
sometimes to walk at evening on the shore, in full sight of that view
which, when she had first come there, they told her was the finest in
the world, but which, in the crush of work, she had no time to
enjoy.[179] She sent a letter to her people at home describing one such
evening walk, and it was read out in the family circle. Lady Byron, who
was staying with them at the time, heard it read, and said that it was
"like a hymn--simple and deep-toned." She described how, on the opposite
side, the city of Constantinople was defined against the burning sky of
the setting sun, but the outline was changed by the fall of some mounds
in an earthquake. Near her were the graves of the heroic dead, the
thousands with whom, she said, she felt identified. "It went into my
heart," wrote Lady Byron, "as the poetry of fact--for she has made
poetry fact." The letter went on to speak of the British burying-ground
at Scutari, and Miss Nightingale added these lines:--
"They are not here!" No, not beneath that sod,
And yet not far away,
For they can mingle their new life from God
With living souls, not clay.
And they, "the heroic dead," will softly pour
Into thy spirit's ear
A music human still, but sad no more,
To tell thee they are near--
Near thee with higher ministering aid
Thy heart-work to return,
So that each sacrifice that love has made
A victory shall earn![180]
[179] Above, p. 173.
[180] The words in inverted commas were quotations from Miss
Nightingale's letters. These had been shown to a friend, who
thereupon wrote the lines, above quoted, and sent them to her.