_The Crimean muddle—Explanations and excuses._
In our last chapter we ended with a word about those sanitary reforms
which were yet to come. How appalling was the ignorance and confusion in
1854, when the war in the Crimea began, has now become matter of common
knowledge everywhere.
I note later, as a result of my talk with General Evatt, some of the
reasons and excuses for the dire neglect and muddle that reigned. John
Bull was, as usual, so arrogantly sure of himself that he had—also as
usual—taken no sort of care to keep himself fit in time of peace, and
there was no central organizing authority for the equipment of the
army—every one was responsible, and therefore no one. The provisions
bought by contract were many of them rotten and mouldy, so cleverly had
the purchasers been deceived and defrauded. The clothing provided for
the men before Sebastopol, where, in at least one instance, man was
literally frozen to man, were such as would have been better suited to
India or South Africa. Many of the boots sent out were fitter for women
and children playing on green lawns than for the men who must tramp over
rough and icy roads. The very horses were left to starve for want of
proper hay. Proper medical provision there was none. There were doctors,
some of them nobly unselfish, but few of them trained for that particular
work. An army surgeon gets little practice in time of peace, and one
lady, a Red Cross nurse, told me that even in our South African campaign
the doctor with whom she did her first bit of bandaging out there told
her he had not bandaged an arm for fifteen years! But indeed many of the
doctors in the Crimea were not only badly prepared, they were also so
tied up with red-tape details that, though they gave their lives freely,
they quickly fell in with the helpless chaos of a hospital without a head.
England shuddered to the heart when at last she woke up under the lash
of the following letter from William Howard Russell, the _Times_ war
correspondent:—
“The commonest accessories of a hospital are wanting, there is
not the least attention paid to decency or cleanliness, the
stench is appalling ... and, for all I can observe, the men die
without the least effort to save them. There they lie just as
they were let gently down on the ground by the poor fellows,
the comrades, who brought them on their backs from the camp
with the greatest tenderness, but who are not allowed to remain
with them.”
“Are there,” he wrote at a later date, “no devoted women among
us, able and willing to go forth and minister to the sick and
suffering soldiers of the East in the hospitals at Scutari?
Are none of the daughters of England, at this extreme hour of
need, ready for such a work of mercy?... France has sent forth
her Sisters of Mercy unsparingly, and they are even now by the
bedsides of the wounded and the dying, giving what woman’s hand
alone can give of comfort and relief.... Must we fall so far
below the French in self-sacrifice and devotedness, in a work
which Christ so signally blesses as done unto Himself? ‘I was
sick and ye visited me.’”
What the art of nursing had fallen to in England may be guessed from the
fact lately mentioned to me by a great friend of Miss Nightingale’s, that
when Florence Nightingale told her family she would like to devote her
life to nursing, they said with a smile, “Are you sure you would not like
to be a kitchen-maid?”
Yet the Nightingales were, on other questions, such as that of the
education of girls, far in advance of their time.
Possibly nothing short of those letters to the _Times_, touching, as they
did, the very quick of the national pride, could have broken down the
“Chinese wall” of that particular prejudice.
Something may be said at this point as to what had been at the
root of the dreadful condition of things in the hospitals before
Miss Nightingale’s arrival. I have had some instructive talk with
Surgeon-General Evatt, who knows the medical administration of our army
through and through, and whose friendship with Miss Nightingale arose in
a very interesting way, but will be mentioned later on in its due place.
General Evatt has pointed out to me in conversation that what is still
a weakness of our great London hospitals, though lessened there by the
fierce light of public opinion that is ever beating upon them, was the
very source of the evil at Scutari.
Such hospitals as the London, doing such magnificent work that it
deserves a thousand times the support it receives, are, explained General
Evatt, without any central authority. The doctors pay their daily visits
and their code is a high one, but they are as varied in ability and in
character as any other group of doctors, and are responsible to no one
but God and their own conscience. The nursing staff have _their_ duties
and _their_ code, but are under separate management. The committee
secures the funds and manages the finance, but it is again quite distinct
in its powers, and does not control either doctors or nurses.
The Barrack Hospital at Scutari was, said the General, in this respect
just like a London hospital of sixty years ago, set down in the midst of
the Crimea. There was, he said—to adapt a well-known quotation—“knowledge
without authority, and authority without knowledge,” but no power to
unite them in responsible effort. Therefore we must feel deep pity,
not indignation, with regard to any one member of the staff; for each
alone was helpless against the chaos, until Miss Nightingale, who stood
outside the official muddle, yet with the friendship of a great War
Minister behind her, and in her hand all the powers of wealth, hereditary
influence, and personal charm, quietly cut some of the knots of red tape
which were, as she saw clearly, strangling the very lives of our wounded
soldiers. When I spoke of the miracle by which a woman who had been
all her life fitting herself for this work, had suddenly received her
world-wide opportunity, he replied: “Yes, I have often said it was as if
a very perfect machine had through long years been fitted together and
polished to the highest efficiency, and when, at last, it was ready for
service, a hand was put forth to accept and use it.”
Just as he sought to explain the awful condition of the army hospitals
at the beginning of the war; so also he, as a military doctor, pointed
out to me that there were even many excuses for the condition of the
transport service, and the idiotic blunders of a government that sent
soldiers to the freezing winters of the Crimea in clothes that would have
been better suited to the hot climate of India.
The army after the Peninsular War had been split up into battalions, and
had, like the hospitals, lost all _centre_ of authority. England had
been seething with the social troubles of our transition from the feudal
order to the new competitions and miseries of a commercial and mechanical
age. Machinery was causing uproar among the hand-workers. Chartist
riots, bread riots, were upsetting the customary peace. Troops were sent
hither and thither, scattered over the country, and allowed a certain
degree of licence and slackness. The army had no administrative head.
There was no one to consider the question of stores or transit, and,
even when the war broke out, it was treated with John Bull’s too casual
self-satisfaction as a moment of excitement and self-glorification, from
which our troops were to return as victors in October, after displaying
themselves for a few weeks and satisfactorily alarming the enemy. The
moral of it all is ever present and needs no pressing home. Not until
every man has had the training of a man in defence of his own home, and
is himself responsible for the defence of his own hearth, shall we as a
nation learn the humility and caution of the true courage, and realize
how much, at the best, is outside human control, and how great is our
responsibility in every detail for all that lies within it.