_Home duties and pleasures—The brewing of war._
Florence was very happy as her mother’s almoner, and in her modest and
unobtrusive way was the life and soul of the village festivities that
centred in the church and school and were planned in many instances by
her father and mother. It is one of the happy characteristics of our time
that much innocent grace and merriment have been revived in the teaching
of beautiful old morris dances and other peasant festivities that had
been banished by the rigour of a perverted Puritanism, and the squire of
Lea Hurst and his wife were before their time in such matters. There was
a yearly function of prize-giving and speech-making and dancing, known
as the children’s “Feast Day,” to which the scholars came in procession
to the Hall, with their wreaths and garlands, to the music of a good
marching band provided by the squire, and afterwards they had tea in
the fields below the Hall garden, served by Mrs. Nightingale and her
daughters and the Hall servants, and then ended their day with merry
outdoor dancing. For the little ones Florence planned all kinds of games;
the children, indeed, were her special care, and by the time the evening
sun was making pomp of gold and purple in the sky above the valley of
the Derwent, there came the crowning event of the day when on the garden
terrace the two daughters of the house distributed their gifts to the
happy scholars.
Mrs. Tooley in her biography calls up for us in a line or two a vision
of Florence as she was remembered by one old lady, who had often been
present and recalled her slender charm, herself as sweet as the rose
which she often wore in her neatly braided hair, brown hair with a glint
of gold in it, glossy and smooth and characteristic of youth and health.
We have from one and another a glimpse of the harmonious simplicity also
of her dress—the soft muslin gown, the little silk fichu crossed upon
her breast, the modest Leghorn bonnet with its rose. Or in winter, riding
about in the neighbourhood of Embley and distributing her little personal
gifts at Christmas among the old women—tea and warm petticoats—her
“ermine tippet and muff and beaver hat.”
She helped in the training of young voices in the village, and was
among the entertainers when the carol-singers enjoyed their mince-pies
and annual coins in the hall. The workhouse knew her well, and any
wise enterprise in the neighbourhood for help or healing among the
poor and the sad was sure of her presence and of all the co-operation
in the power of her neighbours, Mr. and Mrs. Sidney Herbert, with whom
for some years before the Crimea she shared much companionship in such
work. This friendship was an important influence in our heroine’s life,
for Mr. Herbert was of those who reveal to the dullest a little of the
divine beauty and love, and his wife was through all their married life
his faithful and devoted friend, so that they made a strong trio of
sympathetic workers; for “Liz,” as her husband usually called her in his
letters to their common friend Florence Nightingale, seemed to have fully
shared his unbounded faith in the noble powers and high aims of the said
Florence, whom she too loved and admired. She was a daughter of General
Charles Ashe à Court, and she and Sidney Herbert had known one another as
children. Indeed, it was in those early days, when she was quite a little
child, that Elizabeth, who grew up to be one of the most beautiful women
of her day, said of Sidney, then, of course, a mere boy, that that was
the boy she was going to marry, and that she would never marry any one
else. Many a long year, however, had rolled between before he rode over
to Amington from Drayton, where he often met her, though no longer such
near neighbours as in the early Wiltshire days, and asked the beautiful
Elizabeth to be his wife. The intimacy between the two families had never
ceased, and General à Court, himself member for Wilton, had worked hard
for Sidney’s first election for the county. We shall hear more of these
dear and early friends of Florence Nightingale as her story unfolds, but
let us turn now for a moment to herself.
Her life was many-sided, and her devotion to good works did not arise
from any lack of knowledge of the world. She was presented, of course,
like other girls of her order, and had her “seasons” in London as well
as her share in country society. A young and lovely girl, whose father
had been wise enough to give her all the education and advantages of
a promising boy, and who excelled also in every distinctive feminine
accomplishment and “pure womanliness,” had her earthly kingdom at her
feet. But her soul was more and more deeply bent on a life spent in
service and consecrated to the good of others. Her Sunday class, in the
old building known as the “Chapel” at Lea Hurst, was but one of her many
efforts in her father’s special domain in Derbyshire, and girls of every
faith came to her there without distinction of creed. They were mostly
workers in the hosiery mills owned by John Smedley, and many of them,
like their master, were Methodists. She sang to them, and they still
remember the sweetness of her voice and “how beautifully Miss Florence
used to talk,” as they sat together through many a sunny afternoon in the
tiny stone building overlooking Lea Hurst gardens. Cromford Church, built
by Sir Richard Arkwright, was then comparatively new, and time had not
made of it the pretty picture that it is now, in its bosoming trees above
the river; but it played a considerable part in Florence Nightingale’s
youth, when the vicar and the Arkwright of her day—old Sir Richard’s
tomb in the chancel bears the earlier date of 1792—organized many a kind
scheme for the good of the parish, in which the squire’s two daughters
gave their help.
But Miss Nightingale was not of a type to consider these amateur
pleasures a sufficient training for her life-work, and that life-work was
already taking a more or less definite shape in her mind.
She herself has written:—
“I would say to all young ladies who are called to any
particular vocation, qualify yourselves for it as a man does
for his work. Don’t think you can undertake it otherwise.
Submit yourselves to the rules of business as men do, by which
alone you can make God’s business succeed, for He has never
said that He will give His success and His blessing to sketchy
and unfinished work.” And on another occasion she wrote that
“three-fourths of the whole mischief in women’s lives arises
from their excepting themselves from the rules of training
considered needful for men.”
It has already been said that her thought was more and more directed
towards nursing, and in various ways she was quietly preparing herself to
that end.
Her interview with the Quaker-saint, Elizabeth Fry, though deliberately
sought and of abiding effect, was but a brief episode. It was about
this time that they met in London. The serene old Quakeress, through
whose countenance looked forth such a heavenly soul, was no doubt keenly
interested in the ardent, witty, beautiful girl who came to her for
inspiration and counsel. They had much in common, and who knows but the
older woman, with all her weight of experience, her saintly character,
and ripened harvest, may yet in some ways have felt herself the younger
of the two; for she had come to that quiet threshold of the life beyond,
where a soul like hers has part in the simple joys of the Divine Child,
and looks tenderly on those who are still in the fires of battle through
which they have passed.
Her own girlhood had defied in innocent ways the strictness of the Quaker
rule. Imagine a young Quakeress of those days wearing, as she had done on
occasion, a red riding habit!
She had been fond of dancing, and would have, I suspect, a very healthy
human interest in the activities of a girl in Society, though she would
enter into Florence Nightingale’s resolve that her life should not be
frittered away in a self-centred round, while men and women, for whom her
Master died, were themselves suffering a slow death in workhouses and
prisons and hospitals, with none to tend their wounds of soul and body.
Be this as it may—and without a record of their conversation it is easy
to go astray in imagining—we do know that like all the greatest saints
they were both very practical in their Christianity, and did not care
too much what was thought of their actions, so long as they were right
in the sight of God. In their common sense, their humility, their warm,
quick-beating heart of humanity, they were kindred spirits.
The interview bore fruit even outwardly afterwards in a very important
way. For it was from Elizabeth Fry that Florence Nightingale first heard
of Pastor Fliedner and his institute for training nurses at Kaiserswerth,
as well as of Elizabeth Fry’s own institute for a like purpose in London,
which first suggested the Kaiserswerth training home, thus returning in
ever-widening blessing the harvest of its seed.
Her desire was for definite preparatory knowledge and discipline, and
we of this generation can hardly realize how much searching must have
been necessary before the adequate training could be found. Certificated
nursing is now a commonplace, and we forget that it dates from Miss
Nightingale’s efforts after her return from the Crimea. We have only
to turn to the life of Felicia Skene and her lonely labour of love at
the time when the cholera visited Oxford—some twelve years later than
Florence Nightingale’s seventeenth birthday, that is to say, in 1849-51,
and again in 1854—to gain some idea of the bareness of the field. Sir
Henry Acland, whose intimate friendship with Felicia dates from their
common labours among the cholera patients, has described one among the
terrible cases for which there would, it seems, have been no human aid,
but for their discovery of the patient’s neglected helplessness.
“She had no blanket,” he says, “or any covering but the ragged
cotton clothes she had on. She rolled screaming. One woman,
scarcely sober, sat by; she sat with a pipe in her mouth,
looking on. To treat her in this state was hopeless. She was
to be removed. There was a press of work at the hospital, and
a delay. When the carriers came, her saturated garments were
stripped off, and in the finer linen and in the blankets of a
wealthier woman she was borne away, and in the hospital she
died.”
This is given, it would seem, as but one case among hundreds.
Three old cattle-sheds were turned into a sort of impromptu hospital, to
which some of the smallpox and cholera patients were carried, and the
clergy, especially Mr. Charles Marriott and Mr. Venables, did all they
could for old and young alike, seconding the doctors, with Sir Henry
at their head, in cheering and helping every one in the stricken town;
and Miss Skene’s friend, Miss Hughes, Sister Marion, directed the women
called in to help, who there received a kind of rough-and-ready training.
But more overwhelming still was Miss Skene’s own work of home nursing
in the cottages, at first single-handed, and afterwards at the head of
a band of women engaged by the deputy chairman as her servants in the
work, of whom many were ignorant and needed training. “By day and by
night she visited,” writes Sir Henry. “She plied this task, and when she
rested—or where as long at least as she knew of a house where disease had
entered—is known to herself alone.”
Meanwhile a critical moment had arisen in the affairs of Europe. Our
own Premier, Lord Aberdeen, had long been regarded as the very head and
front of the Peace Movement in England, and when he succeeded the wary
Lord Palmerston, it is said that Nicholas, the Czar of Russia, made no
secret of his pleasure in the event, for he saw tokens in England of
what might at least leave him a chance of pulling Turkey to pieces.
He seems also to have had a great personal liking for our ambassador,
Sir Hamilton Seymour, who was fortunately a man of honour as well as a
man of discretion and ready wit. The account given by Kinglake of the
conversations in which the Emperor Nicholas disclosed his views, and
was not permitted to hint them merely, makes very dramatic reading. The
Czar persisted in speaking of Turkey as a very sick man, whose affairs
had better be taken out of his hands by his friends before his final
dissolution. Sir Hamilton courteously intimated that England did not
treat her allies in that manner; but Nicholas was not to be put off, and
at a party given by the Grand Duchess Hereditary on February 20, 1853, he
again took Sir Hamilton apart, and in a very gracious and confidential
manner closed his conversation with the words, “I repeat to you that the
sick man is dying, and we can never allow such an event to take us by
surprise. We must come to some understanding.”
The next day he explained how the partition should in his opinion
be made. Servia and Bulgaria should be independent states under his
protection. England should have Egypt and Candia. He had already made
it clear that he should expect us to pledge ourselves not to occupy
Constantinople, though he could not himself give us a like undertaking.
“As I did not wish,” writes Sir Hamilton Seymour, “that the Emperor
should imagine that an English public servant was caught by this sort
of overture, I simply answered that I had always understood that the
English views upon Egypt did not go beyond the point of securing a safe
and ready communication between British India and the mother country.
‘Well,’ said the Emperor, ‘induce your Government to write again upon
these subjects, to write more fully, and to do so without hesitation. I
have confidence in the English Government. It is not an engagement, a
convention, which I ask of them; it is a free interchange of ideas, and
in case of need the word of a “gentleman”—that is enough between us.’”
In reply, our Government disclaimed all idea of aiming at any of the
Sultan’s possessions, or considering the Ottoman Empire ready to fall to
bits; and while accepting the Emperor’s word that he would not himself
grab any part of it, refused most decisively to enter on any secret
understanding.
All through 1853 these parleyings were kept secret, and in the meantime
the Czar had failed in his rôle of tempter. In the interval the Sultan,
who perhaps had gained some inkling of what was going on, suddenly
yielded to Austria’s demand that he should withdraw certain troops that
had been harassing Montenegro, and thereby rousing the Czar’s religious
zeal on behalf of his co-religionists in that province. Everything for
the moment lulled his previous intention of a war against Turkey.
But the Emperor Louis Napoleon had in cold blood been driving a wedge
into the peace of the world by reviving a treaty of 1740, which had given
to Latin monks a key to the chief door of the Church of Bethlehem, as
well as the keys to the two doors of the Sacred Manger, and also the
right to place a silver star adorned with the arms of France in the
Sanctuary of the Nativity. That the Churches should fight for the key to
the supposed birthplace of the Prince of Peace is indeed grotesque. But
the old temple had in His day become a den of thieves; and even the new
temple, built through His own loving sacrifice, is ever being put to uses
that are childish and greedy.
It is not difficult to understand that, by means of this treaty,
awakening the vanity and greed that cloak themselves under more decent
feelings in such rivalries, Louis Napoleon made his profit for the
moment out of the powers of evil.
The Czar’s jealousy for his own empire’s Greek version of the faith made
the triumph of this treaty wormwood to him and to his people. “To the
indignation,” Count Nesselrode writes, “of the whole people following the
Greek ritual, the key of the Church of Bethlehem has been made over to
the Latins, so as publicly to demonstrate their religious supremacy in
the East.” ...
“A crowd of monks with bare foreheads,” says Kinglake, “stood
quarrelling for a key at the sunny gates of a church in
Palestine, but beyond and above, towering high in the misty
North, men saw the ambition of the Czars.”
The Czars did not stand alone: “some fifty millions of men in Russia held
one creed, and they held it too with the earnestness of which Western
Europe used to have experience in earlier times.... They knew that in the
Turkish dominions there were ten or fourteen millions of men holding
exactly the same faith as themselves ... they had heard tales of the
sufferings of these their brethren which seemed,” they blindly thought,
“to call for vengeance.”
Nicholas himself was a fanatic on such questions, and the end of it
was that his rage hoodwinked his conscience, and he stole a march upon
England and France, which destroyed their trust in his honour. He had
already gathered troops in the south, to say nothing of a fleet in the
Euxine; and having determined on an embassy to Constantinople, he chose
Mentschikoff as his messenger, a man who was said to hate the Turks and
dislike the English, and who, according to Kinglake, was a wit rather
than a diplomat or a soldier. Advancing with much of the pomp of war, and
disregarding much of the etiquette of peace, his arrival and behaviour
caused such a panic in the Turkish capital that Colonel Rose was besought
to take an English fleet to the protection of the Ottoman Empire.
Colonel Rose’s friendly willingness, though afterwards cancelled by our
Home Government, at once quieted the terror in Constantinople; but the
Emperor of the French cast oil upon the smouldering flame by sending a
fleet to Salamis. This greatly angered Nicholas, and, although he was
pleased to find England disapproved of what France had done, Mentschikoff
offered a secret treaty to Turkey, with ships and men, if she ever needed
help, and asked in return for complete control of the Greek Church. This
broke all his promises to the Western Powers, and England at once was
made aware of it by the Turkish minister.
Prince Mentschikoff meanwhile drew to himself an army, and the English
Vice-consul at Galatz reported that in Bessarabia preparations were
already made for the passage of 120,000 men, while battalions from all
directions were making southward—the fleet was even then at Sebastopol.
[Illustration: Florence Nightingale.
(_From the painting in the National Portrait Gallery by Augustus Egg,
R.A._)]
The double-dealing of Russia was met by a gradual and tacit alliance
between England and the Sultan; and Lord Aberdeen, whose love of peace
has been described by one historian as “passionate” and “fanatical,” was
unknowingly tying his own hands by the advice he gave in his despatches
when consulted by Turkey. Moreover, in Turkey, our ambassador, Lord
Stratford de Redcliffe, stiffened the back of Ottoman resistance against
the Czar’s wily handling of “the sick man.” Lord Stratford’s tact and
force of character had moulded all to his will, and our admiral at Malta
was told to obey any directions he received from him. Our fleets were
ordered into the neighbourhood of the Dardanelles, and Lord Stratford
held his watch at Therapia against the gathering wrath of the Czar. Only
a very little kindling touch was needed to light the fires of a terrible
conflict in Europe.