_AT WORK IN THE BARRACK HOSPITAL_
An Appalling Task--Stories of Florence Nightingale’s interest in
the Soldiers--Lack of Necessaries for the Wounded--Establishes
an Invalids’ Kitchen and a Laundry--Cares for the Soldiers’
Wives--Religious Fanatics--Letter from Queen Victoria--Christmas
at Scutari.
Neglected, dying in despair,
They lay till woman came,
To soothe them with her gentle care,
And feed life’s flickering flame.
When wounded sore, on fever’s rack,
Or cast away as slain,
She called their fluttering spirits back,
And gave them strength again.
FRANCIS BENNOCH.
The events of the war in the autumn of 1854 will convey some idea of
the number of wounded men crowded into the hospitals on the Bosphorus
when Florence Nightingale entered upon her duties at Scutari. Balaclava
was fought on October 25th, four days after she left London; the battle
of Inkerman followed on November 5th, the day after she landed. Before
the average woman would have found time to unpack her boxes, Miss
Nightingale was face to face with a task unparalleled in its magnitude
and appalling in its nature.
The wounded arrived by the shipload until every ward, both in the
General and in the Barrack Hospital, was crowded to excess, and the
men lay in double rows down the long corridors, forming several miles
of suffering humanity. During these terrible days Florence Nightingale
was known to stand for _twenty hours_ at a time, on the arrivals of
fresh detachments of sick, apportioning quarters, directing her nurses
and attending at the most painful operations where her presence might
soothe and support. She would spend hours over men dying of cholera
or fever. “Indeed,” wrote one who watched her work, “the more awful
to every sense any particular case might be, the more certainly might
be seen her slight form bending over him, administering to his ease
by every means in her power and seldom quitting his side until death
released him.”
Her womanly heart prompted her to acts of humanity which at once made
her recognised by the men as the soldier’s friend. When the wounded
were brought by hundreds to Scutari after Inkerman, the first duty of
the surgeons was to separate the hopeful cases from the desperate. On
one occasion Miss Nightingale saw five soldiers set aside in a hopeless
condition. She inquired if nothing could be done for the poor fellows,
and the surgeons replied that their first duty was with those whom
there seemed to be more hope of saving.
“Will you give me these five men?” said the Lady-in-Chief.
“Do as you like with them,” replied the surgeons; “we think their case
is hopeless.”
If life could be saved, Florence Nightingale was determined to save
it, and throughout the night, assisted by one of the nurses, she sat
beside the men, feeding them with a spoon until their senses awakened
and their strength began to return. She washed their wounds, cheered
their hearts with kind words, and in the morning had the satisfaction
of finding that they were in a fit condition to be operated on.
At another time a Highland soldier was about to undergo an amputation.
Miss Nightingale asked that the operation might be delayed, as she
thought that careful nursing might render it unnecessary. Through her
unremitting care the man’s arm was saved; and when asked what he felt
towards his preserver, he said that the only mode he had of giving vent
to his feelings was to kiss her shadow when it fell on his pillow as
she passed through the wards on her nightly rounds.
When cholera and plague cases came in, foaming at the mouth and black
in the face, none were too bad for Florence Nightingale’s patient care.
Her influence over the men was established from the first. She was
their “good angel” and their confidence in her was unbounded.
Still, her task was a heavy one in these first days. There was official
prejudice to overcome, and an overwhelming number of patients to deal
with in a huge building devoid of the commonest hospital accessories
and arrangements. The Barrack “Hospital,” so called, had been designed
only for soldiers’ barracks, so that when suddenly converted into a
hospital it lacked almost everything necessary for the sick, and the
supplies forwarded from England had by a series of misadventures been
delayed. A letter sent home by one of the nurses six days after the
arrival of Miss Nightingale and her band may be quoted as giving a
graphic picture of the state of affairs at this time. She writes:--
“I have come out here as one of the Government nurses, and the position
in which we are placed induces me to write and ask you, at once, to
send out a few dozens of wine, or in short anything which may be useful
for the wounded or dying, hundreds of whom are now around us, under
this roof, filling up even the passages to the very rooms we occupy.
Government is liberal, and for one moment I would not complain of their
desire to meet all our wants, but with such a number of the wounded
coming in from Sebastopol, it does appear absolutely impossible to
meet the wants of those who are dying of dysentery and exhaustion;
out of four wards committed to my care, eleven men have died in the
night, simply from exhaustion, which, humanly speaking, might have been
stopped, could I have laid my hand at once on such nourishment as I
knew they ought to have had.
“It is necessary to be as near the scene of war as we are, to know the
horrors which we have seen and heard of. I know not which sight is
most heartrending--to witness fine strong men and youths worn down by
exhaustion and sinking under it, or others coming in fearfully wounded.
“The whole of yesterday was spent, first in sewing the men’s mattresses
together, and then in washing them, and assisting the surgeons, when we
could, in dressing their ghastly wounds, and seeing the poor fellows
made as easy as their circumstances would admit of, after their five
days’ confinement on board ship, during which space their wounds were
not dressed.
“Miss Nightingale, under whom we work, is well fitted in every way to
fill her arduous post, the whole object of her life having hitherto
been the superintendence of hospitals abroad. Wine and bottles
of chicken broth, preserved meat for soups, etc., will be most
acceptable.
“We have not seen a drop of milk, and the bread is extremely sour. The
butter is most filthy--it is Irish butter in a state of decomposition;
and the meat is more like moist leather than food. Potatoes we are
waiting for until they arrive from France.”
[Illustration: MISS NIGHTINGALE IN THE HOSPITAL AT SCUTARI.
[_To face p. 144._
]
Nursing in a hospital which received soldiers straight from the
battlefield, their wounds aggravated by days of neglect, was a
difficult task under the most favourable circumstances, but when
intensified by the lack even of proper food, such as the above letter
discloses, the task was indeed formidable.
There was an organising brain, however, at work in that dreadful
Barrack Hospital now, and _within ten days_ of her arrival, in spite
of the terrible influx of patients which taxed her powers to the
utmost, Miss Nightingale had fitted up an impromptu kitchen, from
which eight hundred men were daily supplied with well-cooked food and
other comforts. It was largely supplied with the invalid food from the
private stores of the Lady-in-Chief, which fortunately she had brought
out with her in the _Vectis_. Beef-tea, chicken broth, jelly, and
little delicacies unheard of before were now administered to the sick
by the gentle hands of women nurses. Small wonder that the poor fellows
could often only express their gratitude in voices half-choked with
sobs!
One Crimean veteran told the writer that when he received a basin of
arrowroot on his first arrival at the hospital early in the morning, he
said to himself, “Tommy, me boy, that’s all you’ll get into your inside
this blessed day, and think yourself lucky you’ve got that. But two
hours later, if another of them blessed angels didn’t come entreating
of me to have just a little chicken broth! Well, I took that, thinking
maybe it was early dinner, and before I had well done wondering what
would happen next, round the nurse came again with a bit o’ jelly, and
all day long at intervals they kept on bringing me what they called ‘a
little nourishment.’ In the evening, Miss Nightingale she came and had
a look at me, and says she, ‘I hope you’re feeling better.’ I could
have said, ‘Ma’am, I feels as fit as a fightin’ cock,’ but I managed to
git out somethin’ a bit more polite.”
Hitherto, not only had there been a lack of food, but the cooking had
been done by the soldiers themselves in the most free and easy manner.
Meat and vegetables were boiled together in the huge coppers, of which
there were thirteen in the kitchen attached to the barracks. Separate
portions were enclosed in nets, and all plunged together into the
seething coppers, and taken up when occasion demanded. Some things were
served up done to rags, while others were almost raw. This kind of
cooking was bad enough for men in ordinary health, but for the sick it
meant death.
The daily comforts which the nurses’ kitchen afforded received ample
testimony from the witnesses before Mr. Roebuck’s Commission for
inquiry into the conduct of the war. In one day sometimes thirteen
gallons of chicken broth and forty gallons of arrowroot were
distributed amongst the sick. At first nearly all the invalid food had
to come from the private stores brought out by the Lady-in-Chief, which
the charitable at home replenished as the true state of affairs became
known, for not only was there a deficiency in the Government stores,
but the things supplied officially were often not fit for food. It was
the general testimony of witnesses before the Commission that Miss
Nightingale’s services were invaluable in the hospital as well for what
she did herself as for the manner in which she kept the purveyors to
their duties.
The method of distributing the Government stores was as erratic as the
cooking. There appeared to be no regulations as to time. Things asked
for in a morning were probably not forthcoming until evening, when
the cooking fires in the barracks kitchen were all but out. Nothing
could be obtained until various “service rules” had been observed. An
official board must inspect and approve all stores before they could
be distributed. One can think of nothing more exasperating to the
Lady-in-Chief, in her responsible duty towards the sick, than to see
exhausted men dying for want of the proper nourishment because the
board of inspection had not completed its arrangements. On one recorded
occasion she took the law into her own hands, and insisted that the
stores should be given out, inspected or not. She could not ask
under-officials to incur the penalty of martial law by fulfilling her
behests, but she could brave the authorities herself and did so. The
storehouse was opened on the responsibility of the Lady-in-Chief, and
the goods procured for the languishing soldiery.
Miss Nightingale’s defiance of red-tape made her some enemies, and
the “groove-going men,” as Kinglake calls them, “uttered touching
complaints, declaring that the Lady-in-Chief did not choose to give
them time, and that the moment a want declared itself, she made haste
to supply it herself.”
“This charge,” says the same authority in an appendix note, “was
so utterly without foundation as to be the opposite of truth. The
Lady-in-Chief used neither to issue her stores, nor allow any others
to do so, until the want of them had been evidenced by a duly signed
requisition. Proof of this is complete, and has been furnished even by
adversaries of the Lady-in-Chief.”
After her improvised kitchen was in working order, Miss Nightingale
next set to work to establish a laundry for the hospital and institute
a system for disinfecting the clothes of fever and cholera patients.
Up to the time of her arrival there was practically little washing
done, the “authorities” had only succeeded in getting _seven_ shirts
washed, and no attempt was made to separate the bed-linen and garments
of infectious patients from those suffering only from wounds. Washing
contracts were in existence, but availed little. At the General
Hospital the work was in the hands of a corps of eight or ten
Armenians. There was no fault to be found with the manner in which they
did the work, only they stole so habitually that when a man sent his
shirt to be washed he was never sure that he would get it back again,
and in consequence the sick were unwilling to part with their garments.
At the Barrack Hospital a Levantine named Uptoni had the washing
contract, but broke it so repeatedly that the sick were practically
without clean linen, except when they were able to get the soldiers’
wives to do a little washing for them. Such was the state of affairs in
a hospital where two to three thousand men lay wounded and sick.
Miss Nightingale hired a house close to the hospital and set up an
efficient laundry, partly out of her private funds, and partly out
of money subscribed to _The Times_ fund started for the relief of
the soldiery. She had it fitted up with coppers and regulated under
sanitary conditions, and there five hundred shirts and one hundred and
fifty other articles were washed each week.
There was a further difficulty to meet, and that was to provide the men
with a change of linen while the soiled went to the wash. Many of the
wounded had been obliged to leave their knapsacks behind and had no
clothing save the dirty and dilapidated garments in which they arrived.
In the course of the first three months Miss Nightingale provided the
men with ten thousand shirts from her own private sources.
There was the same scarcity in surgical dressings, and the nurses had
to employ every minute that could be spared from the bedside of the
sufferers in making lint, bandages, amputation stumps, and in sewing
mattresses and making pillows.
Great confusion existed with regard to the dispensing of drugs.
The apothecaries’ store at Scutari, which supplied the hospitals
and indeed the whole army in the Crimea, was in the same state of
confusion as everything else. The orderlies left to dispense often did
not know what the store contained. On one occasion Mrs. Bracebridge,
Miss Nightingale’s invaluable friend and helper, applied three times
for chloride of lime and was told there was none. Miss Nightingale
insisted on a more thorough search being made, with the result that 90
lbs. were discovered.
The defective system of orderlies was another evil which the
Lady-in-Chief had to contend with. These men had been taken from the
ranks, most of them were convalescents, and they did not trouble to
understand the duties of an orderly because they were liable to return
and serve in the ranks. The advent of the ladies had an excellent
effect upon the orderlies in arousing their sense of chivalry, and they
soon grew to think it an honour to serve the Lady-in-Chief. During all
that dreadful period, when she had to tax the patience and devotion of
the orderlies and other soldiers attending in the wards to the utmost,
not one of them failed her “in obedience, thoughtful attention, and
considerate delicacy.” For her they toiled and endured a strain and
stress of work which mere officialdom would have failed to obtain. Yet
“never,” Miss Nightingale says, “came from any one of them one word
nor one look which a gentleman would not have used; and while paying
this humble tribute to humble courtesy, the tears come into my eyes as
I think how amidst scenes of loathsome disease and death there arose
above it all the innate dignity, gentleness, and chivalry of the men
(for never surely was chivalry so strikingly exemplified), shining in
the midst of what must be considered as the lowest sinks of human
misery, and preventing instinctively the use of one expression which
could distress a gentlewoman.”
If such was the chivalrous devotion yielded by the orderlies and
convalescent soldiers, it can readily be understood that the prostrate
sufferers worshipped the Lady-in-Chief. Her presence in the operating
room acted like magic. Case after case became amenable to the surgeon
under the calming influence of her presence. It is not surprising that
men prostrate with weakness and agonised with pain often rebelled
against an operation. Anæsthetics were not administered as freely then
as they are to-day, and many brave fellows craved death rather than
meet the surgeon’s knife. But when they felt the pitying eyes of the
Lady-in-Chief fixed upon them, saw her gentle face, heard her soothing
words of comfort and hope for the future, and were conscious that she
had set herself to bear the pain of witnessing pain, the men would obey
her silent command, and submit and endure, strengthened by her presence.
Those who at first were inclined to cavil at the power which the
Government had placed in the hands of the Lady-in-Chief speedily
reversed their judgment, as day by day they witnessed her strength of
character and her amazing fortitude and self-control in the midst of
scenes which tried the strongest men.
The magnitude of Miss Nightingale’s work in the hospital wards has
caused historians to overlook the womanly help and sympathy which she
gave to the soldiers’ wives who had come out with their husbands. Even
Kinglake, who is unsurpassed in his admiration for the Lady-in-Chief,
does not mention this side of her work.
When Miss Nightingale arrived at Scutari she found a number of poor
women, the wives or the widows (may be) of soldiers who had gone to the
front, living in a distressing condition, literally in the holes and
corners of the Barrack Hospital. These women, being detached from their
husbands’ regiments, had no claim for rations and quarters. The colonel
of each regiment had power to allow a certain number of women to
accompany their husbands on foreign service. Each woman belonged to her
regiment, and if separated, even through no choice of her own, there
was no provision for her. No organisation to deal with them existed at
this period, because for forty years there had been no general depôt
of an English army. The widows were by degrees sent home by order of
the Commandant, but the other women, many of them wives of soldiers
in the hospital or of orderlies, refused to return home without their
husbands.
Miss Nightingale found these poor creatures, for the most part
respectable women, without decent clothing--their clothes having worn
out--going about bonnetless and shoeless and living as best they could.
After many changes from one “hole” to another the women were housed by
the authorities in three or four dark rooms in the damp basement of the
hospital. The only privacy to be obtained was by hanging up rags of
clothes on lines. There, by the light of a rushlight, the meals were
taken, the sick attended, and there the babies were born and nourished.
There were twenty-two babies born from November to December, and many
more during the winter.
It needs no words to picture the gratitude of the women to the dear
Lady-in-Chief who sought them out in their abject misery, gave
them decent clothing and food from her own stores in the Nurses’s
Tower, and saw that the little lives ushered into the world amid the
horrors and privations of war had at least tender care. At the end
of January, owing to a broken drain in the basement, fever broke
out, and Miss Nightingale now persuaded the Commandant to remove
the women to healthier quarters. A Turkish house was procured by
requisition and Miss Nightingale had it cleaned and furnished out of
her funds. Throughout the winter the women were assisted with money,
food and clothes, and outfits were provided for widows returning
home. Miss Nightingale also organised a plan to give employment to
all the soldiers’ wives who were willing to work in her laundry at
ten shillings to fourteen shillings a week. The upper part of the
wash-house was divided into a sick ward and a laundry, and offered a
refuge for the more respectable women. She obtained situations for
others in families in Constantinople. A school was also started for
the children. Lady Alicia Blackwood, wife of Dr. Blackwood, an army
chaplain, visited the women and helped to care for them. Through Miss
Nightingale’s initiative about five hundred women were raised from
their wretched condition at Scutari and enabled to earn honest livings.
“When,” wrote Miss Nightingale later, “the improvements in our system
which the war must suggest are discussed, let not the wife and child of
the soldier be forgotten.”
While Florence Nightingale was thus heroically grappling with
disease, suffering, and death, and bringing order out of chaos in the
hospitals at Scutari, small-minded fanatics at home were attacking
her religious opinions. Some declared that she had gone to the East
for the purpose of spreading Puseyism amongst the British soldiers,
others that she had become a Roman Catholic, some people were certain
that she was a Unitarian, while others whispered the dreadful heresy,
“Supralapsarian.” A clergyman warned his flock against subscribing
money for the soldiers in the East if it was to pass through Popish
hands. Controversy waxed strong in _The Times_ and _The Standard_, and
Mr. and Mrs. Sidney Herbert warmly defended their absent friend.
“It is melancholy to think,” wrote Mrs. Herbert to a lady parishioner
of an attacking clergyman, “that in Christian England no one can
undertake anything without these most uncharitable and sectarian
attacks, and, had you not told me so, I could scarcely believe that a
clergyman of the Established Church could have been the mouthpiece of
such slander. Miss Nightingale is a member of the Established Church
of England, and what is called rather Low Church, but ever since she
went to Scutari her religious opinions and character have been assailed
on all points. It is a cruel return to make towards one to whom all
England owes so much.”
An Irish clergyman, when asked to what sect Miss Nightingale belonged,
made the effective reply: “She belongs to a sect which, unfortunately,
is a very rare one--the sect of the Good Samaritan.”
Queen Victoria and the Prince Consort had from the first taken a
sympathetic interest in Miss Nightingale’s work, and the following
letter from the Queen to Mr. Sidney Herbert did much towards silencing
adverse criticism, as it showed the confidence which her Majesty had in
Miss Nightingale and her nurses:--
“WINDSOR CASTLE.
“_December 6th, 1854._
“Would you tell Mrs. Herbert,” wrote the Queen to Mr. Sidney
Herbert, “that I beg she would let me see frequently the accounts
she receives from Miss Nightingale or Mrs. Bracebridge, as _I hear
no details of the wounded_, though I see so many from officers,
etc., about the battlefield, and naturally the former must interest
_me_ more than any one.
“Let Mrs. Herbert also know that I wish Miss Nightingale and the
ladies would tell these poor, noble wounded and sick men that _no
one_ takes a warmer interest or feels _more_ for their sufferings
or admires their courage and heroism _more_ than their Queen. Day
and night she thinks of her beloved troops. So does the Prince.
“Beg Mrs. Herbert to communicate these my words to those ladies, as
I know that _our_ sympathy is much valued by these noble fellows.
“VICTORIA.”
This kindly letter, coming straight from the good Queen’s heart,
without any official verbiage to smother the personal feeling, was
forwarded to Miss Nightingale, and on its receipt she placed it in the
hands of one of the chaplains, who went from ward to ward reading it to
the men, ending each recital of the letter with “God save the Queen,”
in which the poor sufferers joined with such vigour as they possessed.
Copies of the letter were afterwards posted up on the walls of the
hospital.
Although the Lady-in-Chief’s work and personality had already overcome
much official prejudice, there is no doubt that Queen Victoria’s letter
greatly strengthened her position. It was now evident that it was to
Miss Nightingale that the Sovereign looked for tidings of the wounded
and in her that she trusted for the amelioration of their terrible
sufferings.
When Christmas Day dawned in the great Barrack Hospital in that
terrible war winter of 1854, it at least found its suffering inmates
lying in cleanliness, with comfortable surroundings and supplied with
suitable food. Not a man throughout the huge building but had such
comforts as the willing hands and tender hearts of women could devise.
This change had been brought about in less than two months by the clear
head and managing brain which ruled in the Nurses’ Tower.
The “Merry Christmas” passed from man to man was not a misnomer,
despite the pain and suffering; the men were at least “merry” that the
“nightingales” had come. When the Queen’s health was drunk, in some
cases from medicine glasses, each man in his heart coupled with the
loyal toast the names of the Lady-in-Chief and her devoted band.