The Life of Florence Nightingale Volume I Part 27

said Mr. Sidney Herbert in Willis's Rooms, "cannot be allowed to slumber. So long as she lives, her labours are marked out for her. The diamond has shown itself, and it must not be allowed to return to the mine." Her friend well knew that he was only expressing the feelings of her own mind. What she sought on her return to England was to utilize her reputation and her experience for the furtherance of her ideals. Her experiences during the Crimean War had enlarged the scope of her work.

She had gained an insight into military administration, and had shown a grasp of the subject, which had caused the Queen and Prince to "wish we had her at the War Office." Her first duty, then, was to use her experience, so far as opportunity offered, to improve the medical administration of the Army. But the main desire of her life had been to raise nursing to the rank of a trained calling. Her mission to the East had not accomplished this object. It had only advertised it, and for the rest had shown how urgently the thing needed to be done. The world praised her achievement. She was rather conscious of its shortcoming, and of the obstacles and difficulties with which it had been attended.

She came back from the East more resolved than ever to be a pioneer in the reform of nursing.

But first she needed rest and seclusion. Rest, in which to recuperate from the long strain of labours, hardships, and anxieties. Seclusion, in which to hide herself from publicity and applause. The world praised her self-sacrifice. She felt that she had made none. Rather had she been privileged to attain that harmony between the soul of a human being and its appointed work, in which, according to her philosophy, lay the union of man with the Divine Spirit. She shrank from glory in dread of vain-glory. "'Paid by the world, what dost thou owe Me?' G.o.d might question." "I believe," she had written to her father in 1854, shortly before her Call to the Crimea came, "that there is, within and without human nature, a revelation of eternal existence, eternal progress for human nature. At the same time I believe that to do that part of this world's work which harmonizes, accords with the idiosyncrasy of each of us, is the means by which we may at once render this world the habitation of the Divine Spirit in Man, and prepare for other such work in other of the worlds which surround us. The Kingdom of Heaven is within us. Those words seem to me the most of a revelation, of a New Testament, of a Gospel--of any that are recorded to have been spoken by our Saviour." Her period of rest was to be very short, as we shall learn; but let us leave her communing silently in her chamber with such thoughts, till another Part opens a new chapter of activity in her life.

PART III

FOR THE HEALTH OF THE SOLDIERS

(1856-1861)

We can do no more for those who have suffered and died in their country's service; they need our help no longer; their spirits are with G.o.d who gave them. It remains for us to strive that their sufferings may not have been endured in vain--to endeavour so to learn from experience as to lessen such sufferings in future by forethought and wise management.--FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE (Reply to Address from the Parishioners of East Wellow, Dec. 1856).

CHAPTER I

THE QUEEN, MISS NIGHTINGALE, AND LORD PANMURE

(August-November 1856)

To shape the whisper of a throne.--TENNYSON.

Whenever the British people have muddled through a war, there is a time of repentance and heart-searching. England the Unready turns round uneasily and thinks that she must now mend her ways. The lessons of the war must be learnt. The word "efficiency" is blessed in every mouth.

Radical reforms, with a view to ensuring a better state of preparedness next time, are canva.s.sed, and a few of them are sometimes carried out.

And then to the hot fit, a cold fit succeeds. War and its lessons fade into the past. Economy displaces efficiency as the favourite word. Peace seems to be more likely than another war, and, if war should unhappily come, it is cheerily hoped that England will again "muddle through somehow." The spasm of reform is over, leaving the permanent _vis inertiae_ of ministers and departments once more in undisturbed possession. Reformers, familiar with this succession of flow and ebb, know that they must seize the favourable moment, and more or less is done, according as they are more or less prompt and energetic. In the field of the Army Medical Service, where the Crimean War had exposed deficiencies both glaring and terrible, large and far-reaching reforms were set in motion during the years immediately following the Crimean peace. Indeed it may be said that from this period dates the first serious and sustained movement for the application of sanitary science to the British Army.

That effective use was thus made of the spasm of repentance which followed the Crimean War was due primarily and mainly to the zealous co-operation of two individuals, the same two whose alliance formed a princ.i.p.al subject of the preceding Part of this Memoir--Sidney Herbert and Florence Nightingale. When her friend died in 1861, worn out prematurely by unceasing labours for the British Army, Miss Nightingale devoted to his memory an account of his work during the years 1856-1861.

In that pamphlet[222]--a model of lucidity and concision--while yet informed with comprehensive insight, and not untouched by emotion--she made no reference of any kind to her own share in the work. She described the reforms, and said that in all that was done "Sidney Herbert was head and centre." And so in many respects he was. He was the Chairman of the Royal Commission and the Sub-Commissions. He was afterwards Minister for War. He was from first to last the official head of the reform movement. And he was much more than the official head. He worked with unfailing zeal, and threw his heart and soul into the work.

Yet if Sidney Herbert had written the account, he might have said that Florence Nightingale was the head and centre of it all. If she could have done little without him, so also might he have done little without her. He was in the foreground, she in the background. His was the public voice; the words which he spoke or wrote were often the words of Florence Nightingale. He was the practical politician who carried out their common schemes. The initiating, the inspiring, the impelling force was hers. And she did much more than give general impetus. Her mastery of detail was ever at Mr. Herbert's elbow. "I never intend to tell you,"

he wrote to her when the first of the Royal Commissions in which they co-operated was nearing its end (August 7, 1857), "how much I owe you for all your help during the last three months, for I should never be able to make you understand how helpless my ignorance would have been among the Medical Philistines. G.o.d bless you!" But between two such loyal allies and understanding friends, it were needless to apportion the relative shares. They spoke and wrote of their working together as "our Cabinet," "our Cabal," or "our Mess." It is the story of this comradeship, rich in human interest, and fraught with lasting benefit to the British Army, that is to form the main subject of this and the following four chapters.

[222] An expansion, issued in 1862, of a memorandum, privately printed in 1861. See below, p. 408.

II

What Miss Nightingale needed on her return from the East, and what, had she thought only of herself, she would have taken, was a long spell of rest. She had been through a campaign of labour and anxiety, under conditions of strain and distress, such as might have undermined the strongest const.i.tution. Mr. Herbert, who was in Ireland when she returned to England, surmised from her letters that she was overwrought, and sent her the prescription of his Carlsbad doctor--_ni lire_, _ni ecrire_, _ni reflechir_. After such severe tension of mind and body, a reaction was inevitable. He sent the prescription, but he did not expect her entirely to adopt it. "I should doubt," he wrote to her uncle, "with a mind const.i.tuted as hers is, whether _entire_ rest, with a total cessation from all active business, would not be a greater trial and less effective for her restoration to health than a life of some, though very limited and moderate, occupation." He seems to have hoped that she might be persuaded to take up comparatively quiet nursing work in a London hospital. Presently they met (Sept.) in the country-house of their mutual friends, the Bracebridges, and Mr. Bracebridge thought that Mr. Herbert was "lukewarm" on the subject of Army Reform. Perhaps it was that he wished to consider Miss Nightingale's health and keep her free from exciting activity. But nothing was further from her thoughts than neutrality or pa.s.sive spectatorship. She was burning for the fray, and flung all consideration of health aside in order to devote herself to rousing the lukewarm and organizing the resolute.

To understand the pa.s.sionate devotion, the self-sacrificing ardour, with which Miss Nightingale set to work immediately upon her return, we must remember what she had seen in the East. She had "identified herself," as we have heard, "with the heroic dead," and she knew that many of her "children," as she called them, had died, not of necessity, but from neglect. "No one," she wrote,[223] "can feel for the Army as I do. These people who talk to us have all fed their children on the fat of the land and dressed them in velvet and silk, while we have been away. I have had to see my children dressed in a dirty blanket and an old pair of regimental trousers, and to see them fed on raw salt meat, and nine thousand of my children are lying, from causes which might have been prevented, in their forgotten graves. But I can never forget. People must have seen that long, long dreadful winter to know what it was."

Others might know the facts, but she _felt_ them. The strength of her character and powers lay, however, in the combination of intense feeling with intellectual grasp. She not only felt the neglect which had sacrificed her children's lives, but she tabulated the causes. The facts which had come under her eye, the figures in which she summarized and a.n.a.lysed them, filled her with a pa.s.sion of resentment. During her residence in the Eastern hospitals she had seen 4600 soldiers die. And as she studied the figures, the conclusion was irresistibly borne in upon her that the greater number need not have died at all. Many of the diseases to which they had succ.u.mbed were induced, and others were aggravated, in the hospitals themselves. Her personal observation told her that it was so; statistical inquiry proved it. "We had," she pointed out, "during the first seven months of the Crimean campaign, a mortality among the troops at the rate of 60 per cent per annum from _disease_ alone, a rate of mortality which exceeds that of the Great Plague in London, and a higher ratio than the mortality in cholera to the attacks." By a series of reforms, largely the result of Miss Nightingale's own untiring efforts and vehement expostulations, this terrible rate of mortality was reduced. "We had, during the last six months of the war, a mortality among our _sick_ not much more than among our _healthy_ guards at home, and a mortality among our troops, in the last five months, two-thirds only of what it is among our troops at home." It was obvious from this comparison that the mortality during the first period was largely preventable. Here was "a complete example--history does not afford its equal--of an army, after a great disaster arising from neglects, having been brought into the highest state of health and efficiency." It was the most complete experiment ever made in army hygiene. And Miss Nightingale was filled with a pa.s.sionate desire that the lessons of the experiment should be taken to heart by the nation; that such radical reforms should be made as would render a repet.i.tion of the disaster and the neglects impossible in the future. She knew that nothing short of radical reform would suffice.

"There is nothing," she wrote in summarizing the neglect of sanitary precautions at Scutari, "in the education of the Medical Officer--nothing in the organization or powers of the Army Medical Department--nothing in the whole Hospital procedure--nothing in the Army Regulations which would have met the case of these Hospitals. And were a similar necessity to arise again, especially after the lapse of a few years of peace, the whole thing would occur over again. This is the frightful consideration which ought to make us recall over and over again this experience--otherwise, let bygones be bygones."[224]

[223] In a letter, dated Feb. 9, 1857, of which she kept a copy. To whom addressed does not appear.

[224] _Notes_, sec. iii. p. viii.

But this was not the whole case. Miss Nightingale carried further the principle, which in these days is perhaps at last coming to be understood, that success in war depends upon preparation in peace. "You cannot improvise an Army," says Lord Roberts. "You cannot improvise the sanitary care of an Army in the field," said Miss Nightingale. If the medical service in the field were deficient, if the lessons of sanitary science were neglected in war hospitals, it was probable, she perceived, that there were like defects at home. She put her thesis to the test of figures, and was appalled at the verification which they supplied. The idea had first occurred to her on meeting Dr. Farr, the statistician in the Registrar-General's office, at dinner with her friends Colonel and Mrs. Tulloch. Dr. Farr had talked of mortality tables in civil life, and Miss Nightingale resolved to compare them with the death-rate in British barracks. She found that in the Army, from the age of twenty to thirty-five, the mortality was nearly double that which it was in civil life. This was the case even in the Guards, who yet were select lives, the pick of the recruits. "With our present amount of sanitary knowledge," she wrote to Sir John McNeill (March 1, 1857), "it is as criminal to have a mortality of 17, 19, and 20 per 1000 in the Line, Artillery, and Guards in England, when that of Civil life is only 11 per 1000, as it would be to take 1100 men per annum out upon Salisbury Plain and shoot them--no body of men being so much under control, none so dependent upon their employers for health, life, and morality as the Army." And again (March 28): "This disgraceful state of our Chatham Hospitals, which I have been visiting lately,[225] is only one more symptom of a system which, in the Crimea, put to death 16,000 men--the finest experiment modern history has seen upon a large scale, viz. as to what given number may be put to death at will by the sole agency of bad food and bad air." She saw the facts and figures with piercing clearness, and personal recollections gave intensity to her convictions.

She had deep pity for the victims of preventable disease, and still deeper admiration for the uncomplaining heroism with which such sufferings were borne. Nothing ever effaced from her mind what she had witnessed in this sort at Scutari and in the Crimea. "We hear with horror," she wrote, "of the loss of 400 men on board the _Birkenhead_ by carelessness at sea; but what should we feel if we were told that 1100 men are annually doomed to death in our Army at home by causes which might be prevented? The men in the _Birkenhead_ went down with a cheer.

So will our men fight for us to the last with a cheer. The more reason why all the means of health which Sanitary Science has put at our command, all the means of morality which Educational Science has given us, should be given them." Then she turned to the Crimea, described in the words of Sir John McNeill and Colonel Tulloch[226] the sufferings and the endurance of the troops, and drew her moral: "Upon those who watched, week after week and month after month, this enduring courage, this unalterable patience, simplicity, and good strength, this voiceless strength to suffer and be still, it has made an impression never to be forgotten. The Anglo-Saxon on the Crimean heights has won for himself a greater name than the Spartan at Thermopylae, as the six months'

struggle to endure was a greater proof of what man can do than the six hours' struggle to fight. The traces of the name and sacrifice of Iphigeneia may still be seen in Taurus; but a greater sacrifice has been there accomplished by a 'handful' of brave men who defended that fatal position, even to the death. And if Inkerman now bears a name like that of Thermopylae, so is the story of those terrible trenches, through which these men patiently and deliberately, and week after week, went, till they returned no more, greater than that of Inkerman. Truly were the Sebastopol trenches, to our men, like the gate of the Infernal Regions--_Lasciate ogni speranza, voi ch' entrate_. And yet these men would refuse to report themselves sick, lest they should throw more labour on their comrades. They would draw their blankets over their heads and die without a word. Well may it be said that there is hardly an example in history to compare with this long and silent fort.i.tude.

But surely the blood of such men is calling to us from the ground, not to avenge them, but to have mercy on their survivors![227] To that cry, Florence Nightingale, at least, responded through every fibre of her being. She was resolved to be "a saviour," and to press home every lesson of the Crimean campaign.

[225] See below, p. 349.

[226] _Report of the Commission of Inquiry into the Supplies of the British Army_, pp. 2, 3.

[227] _Notes on the Army_, pp. 249-50, 507-8. The latter pa.s.sage continues with some words which Miss Nightingale had previously written, and which I have quoted as a motto for the present Part (p. 309).

The strength of her resolve was heightened by a sense of the responsibility which her opportunities laid upon her. She had enjoyed peculiar facilities for observing the whole medical history of the campaign. She had been able to take the measure of many of the military and medical officials; she knew which were the men from whom help might be expected in the work of reform, and of most of such men she had the ear and the respect. Her popular fame added to the authority with which her experience and her services invested her. There were others who knew, or might have known, the facts as well as she. There were few who could exercise the same influence, and perhaps there was not one who could judge the facts with the same disinterestedness. She was not a politician. She had no party to defend, no officials to shield, no susceptibilities to consider. She had nothing to gain, nothing to lose, nothing to fear. She stood only for a cause; and, come what might, she was resolved to fling every power of mind and body into it. Among her private notes of 1856 I find this: "I stand at the altar of the murdered men, and, while I live, I fight their cause."

III

The opportunity was not long in coming. For a week or two at Lea Hurst she was engaged in such laborious, but unexciting, tasks as settling accounts and claims with the nurses; distributing the Sultan's gift among them; answering congratulatory addresses and the like; escaping from public appearances;[228] and dealing with hailstorms, as her sister called them, of miscellaneous letters. She was besieged by Vegetarians, Spiritualists, Sectaries, and other birds of the feather that swoop down upon conspicuous personages. With distressed gentlewomen she was a favourite prey. "Can you find soldiers' orphans for me to educate,"

wrote one, "because I don't like leaving my sisters?" "Please find a place for me," wrote another, "where there will be something to do not derogatory. I am an Irish lady of family." The begging-letters were innumerable, and the answering of these was taken over by her sister. "I think I can now repeat the formula to perfection," she said, "and I could write a begging-letter at the shortest notice in the character of every individual, from a staff-officer to a costermonger, and a widow with six children." But here Lady Verney's lively pen suggests some little injustice. Officers did occasionally write to Miss Nightingale, I find, to beg her "vote and interest," as it were; but of begging-letters proper, she told Mr. Kinglake that there had never come one to her from a soldier.[229] Mr. Kinglake, I may here say, made her acquaintance in the spring of 1857, when her mind was full of the McNeill-Tulloch _affaire_. She failed to make him take her view of that controversy,[230] and her first impression of the historian-to-be of the Crimean War was that he would write a book more brilliant than judicial.

"Though I have no doubt he is a good counsel," she wrote,[231] "he strikes me as a very bad historian." Three years later, she wrote in a similar strain:--

I had two hours' good conversation with Mr. Kinglake. I found him exceedingly courteous and agreeable; looking upon the whole idea as a work of art and emotion, and upon me as one of the colours in the picture; upon the Chelsea Board as a safe (or rather an infallible) authority; upon McNeill and Tulloch as interlopers; upon figures (arithmetical) as worthless; upon a.s.sertion as proof. He was utterly and _self-sufficiently_ in the dark as to all the real causes of the Crimean Mortality. And you might as well try to enlighten Sir G. Brown himself. For Lord Raglan he has an enthusiasm which _I fully share_ but which entirely blinds Mr.

Kinglake, who besides came home long before the real distress, to the causes of that distress. I put him in possession of some of the materials. But I do not hope that he will, I am quite sure that he will not, make use of them.[232]

[228] Her sister used to describe the disappointment of herself and her mother when Florence refused to accompany them to a garden-party at Chatsworth. The Duke of Devonshire was a great admirer of Miss Nightingale's work, and formed a collection of newspaper cuttings about it, which he presented to the Derby Free Library. He presented Miss Nightingale with a silver owl, in recognition of her wisdom, and in memory of her pet (see above, p. 160).

[229] _Invasion of the Crimea_, vol. vi. p. 426 _n._

[230] See below, p. 336.

[231] In a letter to Sir John McNeill, May 3, 1857.

[232] Letter to Edwin Chadwick, Oct. 17, 1860. He had urged her to see Mr. Kinglake with a view to indoctrinating him with the true moral of the Crimean muddles.

Miss Nightingale here was wrong. Mr. Kinglake made considerable use of her materials, and drew from them and from his personal impressions an excellent picture of the Lady-in-Chief; though on the point about which she was concerned, the McNeill-Tulloch _affaire_, he remained of the same opinion still.

Of Miss Nightingale's demeanour during her short holiday at home in August 1856, there is a pleasant account in a letter from her sister[233]:--

She is better, I think, but I quite hate the sight of the post with its long official envelopes. She will go on as long as she has strength doing everything which cannot be left without detriment to the work to which she has devoted her life. I cannot conceive anything more beautiful than her frame of mind. It is so calm, so cheerful, so simple. The physical hardships one does not wonder at her forgetting to speak of; but the marvel to me is how the mental ones,--the indifference, the ignorance, the cruelty, the falsehood she has had to encounter--never seem to ruffle her for an instant (and never have done, Aunt Mai says). It is as if she dwelt in another atmosphere of peace and trust in Him which nothing wicked can dim. She speaks of these things sadly and quietly as some one from another world might do, seeing so plainly the excuses for the wrong-doers, while the personal part never seems to come in, and there is such a charm about her perfect simplicity. There is not the smallest particle of the martyr about her; she is as merry about little things as ever, in the intervals of her great thought, and with as much interest about the little things of home as if she had not been wielding the management and organization of the material and spiritual comfort of the 50,000 men pa.s.sing through hospital and out. If you heard all the evidence we have had lately from doctors, chaplains and officers, you would not think I am exaggerating in saying that these depended mainly upon her during the whole of these 21 months. As to her indifference to praise, it is most extraordinary; she just pa.s.ses on and does not heed it, as it comes in every morning in its flood--papers, music, poetry, friends, letters, addresses.

[233] To Miss Ellen Tollet from Lea Hurst.

The addresses and presentations which she most valued came from working-men. A case of Sheffield cutlery, presented by artisans in that city, was always treasured, and was the subject of a specific bequest in her will. She was much touched by an address from 1800 working-men at Newcastle-on-Tyne. "My dear friends," she wrote in the course of her reply (August 1856), "the things that are deepest in our hearts are perhaps what it is most difficult to express. 'She hath done what she could.' These words I inscribed on the tomb of one of my best helpers when I left Scutari. It has been my endeavour, in the sight of G.o.d, to do as she has done."

Presently there came to Lea Hurst a letter of much importance in Miss Nightingale's life. Her friend, Sir James Clark, the Queen's physician, wrote from Osborne (August 23, 1856) begging her to stay during the following month at his home, Birk Hall, near Ballater. The air of Scotland would be beneficial, he said, to her health; and there were other reasons. The Court would shortly be moved to Balmoral. The Queen would doubtless invite Miss Nightingale there. Meanwhile Her Majesty knew of the present invitation; and there would be opportunity at Birk Hall for quiet and informal talk in addition to any "command" visit at Balmoral. Miss Nightingale heard in this letter a call hardly less important than that to the Crimea, two years before. She had served with the Queen's army in the East. Her services had received sympathetic support and approbation from the Queen and the Prince. She was now to have full opportunities for bringing to their knowledge, in personal intercourse, what she had seen of the soldiers' sufferings, and for enlisting their support, if she could, in what she knew to be necessary for the prevention of such sufferings in the future. She succeeded, as will presently appear; and she deserved her success by the thoroughness with which she prepared herself to make the best use of her opportunity.