_Letters from Scutari—Kinglake on Miss Nightingale and her
dynasty—The refusal of a new contingent._
Miss Nightingale’s saving sense of humour gleams forth in her letters
in the most delightful way, even in the darkest days. In the following,
something of the hugeness of her task is dimly seen through the comic
background of the unbecoming cap that “If I’d known, ma’am, I wouldn’t
have come, ma’am.” Here is the letter just as it is given in Lord
Herbert’s life. It begins abruptly, evidently quoting from a conversation
just held with one of the staff nurses:—
“‘I came out, ma’am, prepared to submit to everything, to be
put upon in every way. But there are some things, ma’am, one
can’t submit to. There is the caps, ma’am, that suits one face
and some that suits another; and if I’d known, ma’am, about the
caps, great as was my desire to come out to nurse at Scutari,
I wouldn’t have come, ma’am.’—_Speech of Mrs. L., Barrack
Hospital, Scutari, Asiatic Side, November 14, 1854._
“Time must be at a discount with the man who can adjust the
balance of such an important question as the above, and I for
one have none, as you will easily suppose when I tell you that
on Thursday last we had 1,175 sick and wounded in this hospital
(among whom 120 cholera patients), and 650 severely wounded in
the other building, called the General Hospital, of which we
also have charge, when a message came to me to prepare for 510
wounded on our side of the hospital, who were arriving from the
dreadful affair of November 5, from Balaclava, in which battle
were 1,763 wounded and 442 killed, besides 96 officers wounded
and 38 killed. I always expected to end my days as a hospital
matron, but I never expected to be barrack mistress. We had but
half an hour’s notice before they began landing the wounded.
Between one and nine o’clock we had the mattresses stuffed,
sewn up, laid down (alas! only upon matting on the floor), the
men washed and put to bed, and all their wounds dressed.
“We are very lucky in our medical heads. Two of them are
brutes and four are angels—for this is a work which makes
either angels or devils of men, and of women too. As for
the assistants, they are all cubs, and will, while a man
is breathing his last breath under the knife, lament the
‘annoyance of being called up from their dinners by such a
fresh influx of wounded.’ But unlicked cubs grow up into good
old bears, though I don’t know how; for certain it is, the old
bears are good. We have now four miles of beds and not eighteen
inches apart.
“We have our quarters in one tower of the barracks, and all
this fresh influx has been laid down between us and the main
guard, in two corridors, with a line of beds down each side,
just room for one person to pass between, and four wards. Yet
in the midst of this appalling horror (we are steeped up to our
necks in blood) there is good—and I can truly say, like St.
Peter, ‘It is good for us to be here’—though I doubt whether,
if St. Peter had been there, he would have said so.”
Meanwhile England, stirred to its depths by the accounts given by Mr.
William Howard Russell, of the sufferings of our soldiers, had begged the
_Times_, in whose pages his letters appeared, to receive funds and send
them out by the hand of Mr. Macdonald, a man of vigour, firmness, and
good sense, and “loyally devoted to his duty.” Before leaving England,
he saw the Inspector-General of the army, Dr. Andrew Smith, and also the
Duke of Newcastle, but was assured that Government had already provided
so amply for the sick and wounded that his fund was not likely to be
needed. When he reached the Bosphorus all the official people there
talked to him in the same strain. But there leaked out through an officer
on duty one little fact that showed how much such assurances were worth.
It seemed that the 39th Regiment was actually on its way to the
severities of a Crimean winter with only the light summer clothing that
would be worn in hot countries. Happily, the surgeon of the regiment
appealed to Mr. Macdonald, and, more happily still, Mr. Macdonald dared
to go beyond his exact instructions and give help out of his fund which
might prevent illness, instead of waiting for the moment when death was
already at the door. He went into the markets of Constantinople and
bought then and there a suit of flannels or other woollens for every man
in that regiment.
Mr. Macdonald saw that he must be ready to offer help, or red tape and
loyalty together would seal the lips of men in the service, lest they
should seem to be casting a slur on the army administration.
There is humour of the grimmest kind in what resulted. The chief of the
Scutari hospitals told him “nothing was wanted,” and on pushing his
inquiry with a yet more distinguished personage, he was actually advised
to spend the money on building a church at Pera!
“Yet at that very time,” says Kinglake, “wants so dire as
to include want of hospital furniture and of shirts for the
patients, and of the commonest means for obtaining cleanliness,
were afflicting our stricken soldiery in the hospitals.”
The Pera proposal—rightly described as “astounding”—led to an interview
with the Lady-in-Chief. Tears and laughter must have met in her heart
as she heard this absurdity, and away she took him—money as well—to the
very centre of her commissariat, to see for himself the daily demands and
the gaping need—furniture, pillows, sheets, shirts—endless appliances
and drugs—that need seemed truly endless, and many hours daily he spent
with her in the Nurses’ Tower, taking down lists of orders for the
storekeepers in Constantinople. Here was the right help at last—not
pretty mufflers for men in need of shirts, nor fine cambric for stout
bed-linen.
However, from the Lady-in-Chief Mr. Macdonald soon learned the truth,
and the course he then took was one of the simplest kind, but it worked
a mighty change. He bought the things needed, and the authorities,
succumbing at last to this excruciating form of demonstration, had to
witness the supply of wants which before they had refused to confess.
So now, besides using the stores which she had at her own command, the
Lady-in-Chief could impart wants felt in our hospitals to Mr. Macdonald
with the certainty that he would hasten to meet them by applying what was
called the “_Times_ Fund” in purchasing the articles needed.
“It was thus,” adds Kinglake, “that under the sway of motives
superbly exalted, a great lady came to the rescue of our
prostrate soldiery, made good the default of the State, won the
gratitude, the rapt admiration of an enthusiastic people, and
earned for the name she bears a pure, a lasting renown.
“She even did more. By the very power of her fame, but also,
I believe, by the wisdom and the authority of her counsels,
she founded, if so one may speak, a gracious dynasty that
still reigns supreme in the wards where sufferers lie, and
even brings solace, brings guidance, brings hope, into those
dens of misery that, until the blessing has reached them, seem
only to harbour despair. When into the midst of such scenes
the young high-bred lady now glides, she wears that same
sacred armour—the gentle attire of the servitress—which seemed
‘heavenly’ in the eyes of our soldiers at the time of the war,
and finds strength to meet her dire task, because she knows by
tradition what the first of the dynasty proved able to confront
and to vanquish in the wards of the great Barrack Hospital.”
In everything a woman’s hand and brain had been needed. It was, for
instance, of little use to receive in the evening, after barrack fires
were out, food which had been asked for from the supplies for some meal
several hours earlier; yet that, it appears, was the sort of thing that
happened. And too much of the food officially provided, even when it did
reach the patients at last, had been unfit for use.
As for the question of laundry, a washing contract that had only
succeeded in washing seven shirts for two or three thousand men could
not have been permitted to exist under any feminine management. Nor could
any trained or knowledgeable nurse have allowed for a single day the
washing of infectious bed-linen in one common tub with the rest. Yet this
had been the condition of affairs before the Lady-in-Chief came on the
scenes. In speaking of her work among the soldiers’ wives it has already
been noted how she quickly hired and fitted up a house close to the
hospital as a laundry, where under sanitary regulations 500 shirts and
150 other articles were washed every week.
Then there arose the practical question of what could be done for the
poor fellows who had no clothes at all except the grimy and blood-stained
garments in which they arrived, and we are told that in the first three
months, out of her own private funds, she provided the men with ten
thousand shirts.
The drugs had all been in such confusion that once when Mrs. Bracebridge
had asked three times for chloride of lime and been assured that there
was none, Miss Nightingale insisted on a thorough search, and not less
than ninety pounds of it were discovered.
The semi-starvation of many hospital patients before Miss Nightingale’s
arrival, noted on an earlier page, was chiefly the result of
mismanagement—mismanagement on the part of those who meant well—often,
indeed, meant the very best within their power, but among whom there
was, until her coming, no central directing power, with brain and heart
alike capable and energizing and alive to all the vital needs of deathly
illness—alert with large foreseeing outlook, yet shrewd and swift in
detail.
It is at first puzzling to compare Kinglake’s picture of the confusion
and suffering, even while he is defending Lord Raglan, with some of
the letters in Lord Stanmore’s “Life of Lord Herbert,” especially one
from General Estcourt, in which he says “never was an army better fed.”
But even in this letter—dated, be it noted, a fortnight after Miss
Nightingale’s arrival—the next sentence, which refers, of course, to the
army in general and not to the hospitals under her management, shows the
same muddling that had pursued the hospitals until she came to their
aid with Mr. Herbert and the War Office at her back; for after saying
that the ration is ample and most liberal, it adds—and the italics are
mine—“_but the men cannot cook for want of camp-kettles and for want of
fuel_.”
Yet even with regard to the hospitals, it is startling to find Mr.
Bracebridge, in his first letter to Mr. Herbert, speaking of the Barrack
Hospital as clean and airy. But people have such odd ideas of what is
“clean and airy,” and it would seem that he thought it “clean and airy”
for the patients to have no proper arrangements for washing, for the
drains to be in such a noisome state as to need engineering, and for six
dead dogs to be rotting under the windows! I suppose he liked the look
of the walls and the height of the ceilings, and wanted, moreover, to
comfort Mr. Herbert’s sad heart at a time when all England was up in arms
at the mistakes made in transport and other arrangements.
The letters of the chaplain to Mr. Herbert are full of interest, and
in reading the following we have to put ourselves back into the mind
of a time that looked anxiously to see whether Miss Nightingale was
really equal to her task—an idea which to us of to-day seems foolish and
timorous, but which was, after all, quite natural, seeing that she was
new and untried in this particular venture of army nursing, and that half
the onlookers had no idea of the long and varied training she had had.
“MY DEAR HERBERT,—I have now had near a week’s opportunity of
closely observing the details of the hospitals at Scutari.
First, as to Miss Nightingale and her company, nothing can be
said too strong in their praise; she works them wonderfully,
and they are so useful that I have no hesitation in saying some
twenty more of the same sort would be a very great blessing
to the establishment. Her nerve is equal to her good sense;
she, with one of her nurses and myself, gave efficient aid at
an amputation of the thigh yesterday. She was just as cool
as if she had had to do it herself. We are close allies, and
through Macdonald and the funds at my own command, I get her
everything for which she asks, and this is saying a great deal.
“My honest view of the matter is this: I found but too great
evidence of the staff and means being unequal to the emergency;
the requirements have almost doubled through the last two
unhappy actions at Balaclava. Still, day by day I see manifest
improvement; no government, no nation could have provided, on
a sudden, staff and appliances for accident wards miles in
length, and for such sickness as that horrid Varna dysentery.
To manage more than three thousand casualties of the worst
nature is indeed a task to be met in an entirely satisfactory
way by nothing short of a miraculous energy with the means
it would require. The men are landed necessarily in a most
pitiable state, and have to be carried up steep ground for
considerable distance, either by those beasts of Turks, who are
as stupid as callous, or by our invalids, who are not equal to
the task. Still, it is done, and as this is war, not peace, and
Scutari is really a battlefield, I am more disposed to lament
than to blame.
“There seems now, so far as I can see, no lack of lint and
plaister; there is a lack of linen,—we have sent home for it.
The surgeons are working their utmost, and serious cases seem
treated with great humanity and skill. There was and is an
awful want of shirts for the men, and socks, and such matters;
we have already let Miss Nightingale have all she applies for,
and this morning I, with Macdonald’s sanction, or, rather, in
concert with him, have sent to the Crimea a large stock of
shirts of warm serge, socks, flannel, tea, etc., etc. I spend
the best part of every day there acting, at one time as priest
to the dying, at another helping the surgeons or the men to
dress their wounds; again, I go to the landing-place and try
to work them into method for an hour or two, etc., etc. One
and all are now most kind and civil to me, meet my wishes in
every way they can. Alas! I fear, with every possible effort
of the existing establishment, the crisis is still too great;
there are wanting hundreds of beds—that is, many hundreds have
only matting between the beds and the stone floor. I slept
here Sunday night, and walked the wards late and early in
the morning; I fear the cold weather in these passages will
produce on men so crippled and so maimed much supplementary
evil in the way of coughs and chest diseases. The wounded do
better than the sick. I scarce pray with one of the latter one
day but I hear he is dead on the morrow.... I am glad to say
the authorities have left off swearing they had everything
and wanted nothing; they are now grateful for the help which,
with the fund at command, we liberally meet. The wounds are,
many of them, of the most fearful character, and yet I have
not heard a murmur, even from those who, from the pressing
urgency of the case, are often left with most obvious grounds
of complaint. Stafford O’Brien is here; he, at my suggestion,
aids my son and self in letter writing for the poor creatures.
My room is a post office; I pay the post of every letter from
every hospital patient, and we write masses every day. They
show one what the British soldier really is; I only wish to God
the people of England, who regard the red coat as a mere guise
of a roystering rake in the private and a dandified exclusive
in the officer, could see the patience, true modesty, and
courageous endurance of all ranks.
“Understand me clearly. I could pick many a hole; I could
show where head has been wanting, truth perverted, duty
neglected, etc.; but I feel that the pressure was such and of
so frightful, so severe (in one way) a character, there is such
an effort at what we desire, that I for one cry out of the past
‘_non mi ricordo_;’ of the present, ‘If the cart is in the
rut, there is every shoulder at the wheel.’ The things wanted
we cannot wait for you to supply, in England; if the slaughter
is to go on as it has done the last fortnight, the need must
be met at once. Macdonald is doing his work most sensibly,
steadily, and I believe not only with no offence to any, but is
earning the goodwill of all.”
Truth is a two-edged sword, and for purposes of rebuke or reform Miss
Nightingale used it at times with keenness and daring. In that sense this
glowing, loving-hearted woman knew how on occasions to be stern. Her
salt never lost its savour. She was swift, efficient, capable to the
last degree, and she was also high-spirited and sometimes sharp-tongued.
Perhaps we love her all the more for being so human. A person outwardly
all perfection, if not altogether divine, is apt to give the idea
that there are faults hidden up somewhere. It was not so with Miss
Nightingale. Her determination to carry at all costs the purpose she had
in hand laid her often open to criticism, for, just as she was ready on
occasion to override her own feelings, so also she was ready sometimes to
override the feelings of others. Mr. Herbert judged from her letters that
an addition to her staff of nurses would be welcome, but we saw that when
the new band of forty-six arrived, under the escort of Miss Nightingale’s
old friend Miss Stanley, they were not admitted to the hospital at
Scutari, and to tell the truth, Miss Nightingale was very angry at their
being thrust upon her, just when she was finding her own staff rather a
“handful.” In point of fact, she not only wrote a very warm letter to her
old friend Mr. Herbert, but she also formally gave in her resignation.
This was not accepted. Mr. Herbert’s generous sweetness of nature, his
love for the writer, and his belief that she was the one person needed
in the hospitals, and was doing wonders there, led him to write a very
noble and humble reply, saying that _he_ had made a mistake—which,
indeed, was true enough—in taking his well-meant step without consulting
her. She yielded her point in so far as to remain at her post, now that
Miss Stanley and her staff had moved on to Therapia and Smyrna, and were
doing real good there, Miss Stanley having given up all her own plans, to
remain and look after the nurses who had come under her escort.
But, apart from the fact that it would have been a great hindrance to
discipline to have forty-six women on her hands who had _not_ promised
obedience to her, as had her own nurses, a little sidelight is thrown
upon it all by these words in one of Miss Stanley’s own letters, speaking
of the nurses under her guardianship:—
“The first night there was great dissatisfaction among them,
and a strong inclination to strike work. ‘We are not come out
to be cooks, housemaids, and washerwomen,’ and they dwelt
considerably on Mr. Herbert’s words about equality. _They are
like troublesome children._”
Though our sympathy goes out to Miss Stanley, it is not impossible that
Miss Nightingale’s decision may have saved Scutari from unavoidable
confusions of authority which would have been very unseemly, and from
more than a possibility of defeat in the experiment she was making, in
the eyes of all Europe, as to how far women could be wisely admitted
into military hospitals. Such confusion might have arisen, not from any
fault in Miss Nightingale or Miss Stanley, but from the special work of
reorganization which had to be done at Scutari, and the special code of
obedience by which Miss Nightingale’s staff had been prepared for it. She
did not want for such work any “troublesome children.”