_The Nightingale Fund—Miss Nightingale remains at her post,
organizing healthy occupations for the men off duty—Sisters of
Mercy—The Queen’s jewel—Its meaning._
Far and wide spread the news of the fall of Sebastopol, and London took
the lead in rejoicings. The Tower guns shouted the victory, the arsenals
fired their salutes, cathedrals and village churches rang out their
welcome to peace. There were sons, husbands, brothers, fathers, for whom
there would be no more home-coming on earth; and some who would come back
broken and maimed: but all had served their country, and heroism lasts
beyond time and death.
All through the empire arose an outcry of thanksgiving to the woman who
still remained at her post among the sick and the dying—the woman who had
saved England’s honour in the day of disgrace and neglect, and had saved
also countless lives among her brave sons.
The Queen and all her people were eager to know what there was that they
might lay at her feet. In one form only would Miss Nightingale accept the
testimony offered—namely, the means of yet further work. The Herberts
knew she had longed to organize a hospital on the lines of unpaid
nursing, but there was a difficulty for the moment, because she could not
bring herself to leave the East until her work there was fully completed,
and such a hospital must, they thought, have her presence from the first.
Just now she was with Sister Aloysius at Balaclava, nursing one of her
staff, and while there an accident on the rough roads, which injured not
only herself, but also the Sister who was walking beside her, led to a
thoughtful kindness from Colonel Macmurdo, who had a little carriage
especially made for her. In this little carriage, through the cutting
cold and snow of a Crimean winter, she would drive about among the camp
hospitals with no escort but her driver, as she returned through the dark
night at the end of her long day of self-imposed duties. Sometimes she
has stood for hours on a cold, shelterless rock, giving her directions,
and when one and another of her friends entreated against such risk and
exposure, she would just smile with a quiet certainty that, for all that
in her eyes was her clear duty, strength and protection would certainly
be given.
She was much occupied in helping and uplifting the convalescent, and not
only these, but also all the soldiers in camp in the army of occupation,
which was for a while to be left in the East until the treaty was signed,
and would necessarily be surrounded by special temptations in time of
peace. Her way of fighting drunkenness—and after Sebastopol you may be
sure there was a good deal of “drinking of healths”—was to provide all
possible means of interest and amusement. Huts were built, clubs were
formed. Stationery was provided for letters home. So effectually was
every one in England interested that, while Queen Victoria herself led
the way in sending newspapers and magazines, all through the country her
example was followed.
And while this was going on, the great testimonial fund in London was
mounting and mounting.
The Duke of Cambridge, Lord Houghton, and the Marquis of Ripon were
members of the committee. The great bankers opened their books. The
churches collected funds, _the rank and file of our impoverished army
sent £4,000_, and taking Mrs. Tooley’s figures, which are doubtless
correct, and including all ranks and all troops throughout the world, the
military contributions alone appear to have risen to about £10,000.
Jenny Lind, then Madame Goldschmidt, gave a concert, of which she
herself bore all the expense, amounting to about £500, and then gave
the entire proceeds, about £2,000, to the fund. This was so warmly
appreciated by some of those interested in the success of the fund that,
by private subscription, they gave a marble bust of Queen Victoria to the
Goldschmidts as a thank-offering.
From the overseas dominions came over £4,000; from provincial cities,
towns, and villages in Britain, between £6,000 and £7,000, and from
British residents abroad also a very handsome sum. Indeed, it may be
truly said that in every quarter of the globe men and women united
to pour forth their gratitude to Miss Nightingale, and to enable her
to complete the work so bravely begun, by transforming the old and
evil methods of nursing under British rule to that ideal art in which
fortitude, tenderness, and skill receive their crowning grace. It has
been said—I know not with what exactitude—that no British subject has
ever received such world-wide honour as was at this time laid at her feet.
At one of the great meetings Mr. Sidney Herbert read the following letter
from one of his friends:—
“I have just heard a pretty account from a soldier describing
the comfort it was even to see Florence pass. ‘She would speak
to one and another,’ he said, ‘and nod and smile to many more,
but she could not do it to all, you know, for we lay there by
hundreds; but we could kiss her shadow[16] as it fell, and lay
our heads on the pillow again content.’”
That letter alone, we are told, brought another £10,000.
The gross amount had reached £44,000, but in 1857 Miss Nightingale
desired that the list should be closed and help be given instead to our
French Allies, who were then suffering from the terrible floods that laid
waste their country in that year.
And whatever she commanded, of course, was done. Alike in England and in
the Crimea, her influence was potent for all good.
She herself was still busy nursing some of the Roman Catholic members
of her staff in the huts on the snowclad heights of Balaclava, and how
heartily she valued them may be judged from these closing sentences of a
letter to their Reverend Mother:—
“You know that I shall do everything I can for the Sisters
whom you have left me. I will care for them as if they were my
own children. But it will not be like you.”
Not very far from the sanatorium on the heights above Balaclava, two new
camp hospitals had been put up, and while superintending the nursing
there, our Lady-in-Chief lived in a three-roomed hut with a medical store
attached to it, where she was quite near to sanatorium and hospitals.
She and the three Sisters who were with her had not very weather-proof
quarters. One of them, whose letters are full of interest, tells of their
waking one morning to find themselves covered with snow, and leading a
life of such adventurous simplicity that when the Protestant chaplain
brought some eggs tied up in a handkerchief the gift was regarded as
princely! Happily, they were able to reward the gentleman by washing his
neckties, and ironing them with an ingenious makeshift for the missing
flat-iron, in the shape of a teapot filled with hot water. Every night
everything in the huts froze, even to the ink. But Miss Nightingale tells
how brave and entirely self-forgetful the Sisters were under every
hardship and privation.
[Illustration: Miss Nightingale’s Medals and Decorations.]
By those who have never had the privilege of knowing such women
intimately, her affection for them may be the better understood from the
following graphic letter written by Lord Napier:—
“At an early period of my life I held a diplomatic position
under Lord Stratford de Redcliffe in Constantinople. During
the distress of the Crimean War the Ambassador called me one
morning and said: ‘Go down to the port; you will find a ship
there loaded with Jewish exiles—Russian subjects from the
Crimea. It is your duty to disembark them. The Turks will give
you a house in which they may be placed. I turn them over
entirely to you.’ I went down to the shore and received about
two hundred persons, the most miserable objects that could be
witnessed, most of them old men, women, and children. I placed
them in the cold, ruinous lodging allocated to them by the
Ottoman authorities. I went back to the Ambassador and said:
‘Your Excellency, these people are cold, and I have no fuel
or blankets. They are hungry, and I have no food. They are
dirty, and I have no soap. Their hair is in an indescribable
condition, and I have no combs. What am I to do with these
people?’ ‘Do?’ said the Ambassador. ‘Get a couple of Sisters
of Mercy; they will put all to right in a moment.’ I went, saw
the Mother Superior, and explained the case. I asked for two
Sisters. She ordered two from her presence to follow me. They
were ladies of refinement and intellect. I was a stranger and
a Protestant, and I invoked their assistance for the benefit
of the Jews. Yet these two women made up their bundles and
followed me through the rain, without a look, a whisper, a
sign of hesitation. From that moment my fugitives were saved.
I witnessed the labours of those Sisters for months, and they
never endeavoured to make a single convert.”
The military men were not less enthusiastic. When Colonel Connolly,
brother-in-law to Mr. Bruin, of Carlow, was travelling, after his
return from the war, near the Bruin estate, a fellow-traveller spoke
disrespectfully of nuns. The colonel, a Protestant, not only made a warm
defence of the ladies who had nursed him in Russia and Ottoman regions,
and for their sakes of all other nuns, but handed the assailant his card,
saying: “If you say another word against these saintly gentlewomen I
shall call you out.” The slanderer subsided very quickly.
Sister Aloysius, one of those very Sisters who were with Miss Nightingale
in the huts, has written in her “Memories of the Crimea”:—
“It was said at one time that the War Office was on the point
of issuing a mandate forbidding us to speak even to the
Catholic soldiers on religion, or to say a prayer for them.
However, that mandate never came; we often thought the guardian
angels of the soldiers prevented it.”
It made no difference to the loyalty of their work together that Miss
Nightingale was not a Roman Catholic; they all obeyed the Master who has
taught that it is not the way in which He is addressed that matters, but
whether we help those whom He gave His life to help, and in loving and
serving whom, we love and serve Him.
So in London and in Balaclava the good of her influence was felt. In
London the funds mounted, and at Balaclava the excellent work among the
soldiers still went on.
Her very presence among the men helped to keep them sober and diligent,
and in every way at their best, in those first months of victory when
heads are only too easily turned. And she had the reward she most
desired, for she was able to speak of these brave fellows—the nameless
heroes of the long campaign—as having been “uniformly quiet and
well-bred.” Those words, it is true, were spoken of the men attending the
reading-huts; but they are quite in line with her more general verdict
with regard to Tommy; though, alas, we cannot stretch them to cover
his behaviour at the canteens, where we are told that much drunkenness
prevailed.
She had advanced money for the building of a coffee-house at Inkermann,
and had helped the chaplain to get maps and slates for his school work,
and the bundles of magazines and illustrated papers, sent out from
England in answer to her appeal, as well as books sent out by the Duchess
of Kent, cheered and brightened many a long hour for the men. She was
always on the alert to help them about sending home their pay, and quick
to care for the interests of their wives and children.
Before she left the Crimea, her hut was beset by fifty or sixty poor
women who had been left behind when their husbands sailed for home with
their regiments. They had followed their husbands to the war without
leave and, having proved themselves useful, had been allowed to remain.
And now they were left alone in a strange land and, but for Florence
Nightingale, the end of the story might have been bitter sorrow. But she
managed to get them sent home in a British ship.
Many a mother at home must already have blessed her; for reckless boys
who had enlisted, without the sanction of their families, had again and
again been by her persuaded to write home, and in the first months of
the war she had actually undertaken to stamp for the men any letters
home which were sent to her camp. And at Scutari she had arranged a
provisional money-order office where, four afternoons in each week, she
received from the men the pay which she encouraged them to send home.
When we are told that, in small sums, about £1,000 passed through this
office month by month, we realize dimly something of the labour involved,
and thinking of all her other cares and labours, which were nevertheless
not allowed to stand in the way of such practical thoughtfulness as
this, we do not wonder that “the services” loved her with a love that
was akin to worship. The money, as she herself says, “was literally so
much rescued from the canteens and from drunkenness;” and the Government,
following her lead, had themselves established money-order offices later
at Scutari, Balaclava, Constantinople, and the Headquarters, Crimea.
It is not surprising that, in the “Old Country,” songs were dedicated to
her as “the good angel of Derbyshire,” and that her very portrait became
a popular advertisement.
And we have it on good authority that her name was revered alike by
English, French, Turks, and Russians.
The Treaty of Peace was signed at Paris on March 30, 1856, and on July
12 General Codrington formally gave up Sebastopol and Balaclava to the
Russians. When the last remnant of our army was ordered home and the
hospitals were finally closed, Florence Nightingale was for the first
time willing to leave a post which she had held so bravely and so long.
But before she left she wished to leave a memorial to the brave men who
had fallen, and the brave women, her comrades, who had died upon that
other battlefield where disease, and Death himself, must be wrestled with
on behalf of those who are nursed and tended.
And so it comes to pass that among the visible tokens which the war
has left behind, is a gigantic white marble cross erected by Florence
Nightingale upon the sombre heights of Balaclava, where it still opens
wide its arms for every gleam of golden sunlight, every reflected
shimmer, through the dark night, of silvery moon and star, to hearten
the sailors voyaging northward and mark a prayer for the brave men and
women who toiled and suffered there. It is inscribed with the words in
Italian, “Lord, have mercy upon us.” But while she herself asked only
mercy for herself and others, that human shortcomings might be forgiven,
her compatriots were uniting to do her honour.
On December 20, 1855, the _Morning Post_ printed the following
announcement:—
“The country will experience much satisfaction, though no
surprise, on learning, as we believe we are correct in stating,
that Her Majesty the Queen has, in a manner as honourable to
herself as it must be gratifying to her people, been pleased to
mark her warm appreciation of the unparalleled self-devotion
of the good Miss Nightingale. The Queen has transmitted to
that lady a jewelled ornament of great beauty, which may be
worn as a decoration, and has accompanied it with an autograph
letter—such a letter as Queen Victoria has ere now proved she
can write—a letter not merely of graceful acknowledgment, but
full of that deep feeling which speaks from heart to heart, and
at once ennobles the sovereign and the subject.”
Of the symbolic meaning of this jewel the following exposition appeared
in the issue of January 15, 1856, of the same paper:—
“The design of the jewel is admirable, and the effect
no less brilliant than chaste. It is characteristic and
emblematical—being formed of a St. George’s cross in ruby-red
enamel, on a white field—representing England. This is
encircled by a black band, typifying the office of Charity, on
which is inscribed a golden legend, ‘Blessed are the merciful.’
The Royal donor is expressed by the letters ‘V. R.’ surmounted
by a crown in diamonds, impressed upon the centre of the St.
George’s cross, from which also rays of gold emanating upon
the field of white enamel are supposed to represent the glory
of England. While spreading branches of palm, in bright green
enamel, tipped with gold, form a framework for the shield,
their stems at the bottom being banded with a ribbon of blue
enamel (the colour of the ribbon for the Crimean medal), on
which, in golden letters, is inscribed ‘Crimea.’ At the top
of the shield, between the palm branches, and connecting the
whole, three brilliant stars of diamonds illustrate the idea
of the light of heaven shed upon the labours of Mercy, Peace,
and Charity, in connection with the glory of a nation. On the
back of this Royal jewel is an inscription on a golden tablet,
written by Her Majesty ... recording it to be a gift and
testimonial in memory of services rendered to her brave army by
Miss Nightingale. The jewel is about three inches in depth by
two and a half in width. It is to be worn, not as a brooch or
ornament, but rather as the badge of an order. We believe the
credit of the design is due to the illustrious consort of Her
Majesty.”
_Punch_, of course, had always taken the liveliest interest in Miss
Nightingale’s work, and having begun with friendly jesting, he ended
with a tribute so tender in its grave beauty that it would hardly have
been out of place in a church window; for below a sketch of Florence
Nightingale herself, holding a wounded soldier by the hand, and with the
badge of Scutari across her breast, was a vision of the Good Samaritan.