CHAPTER IX

TO THE CRIMEA--ILLNESS

(May-August 1855)

For myself, I have done my duty. I have identified my fate with that of the heroic dead.--FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE (private notes, 1855).

In the spring of 1855 Miss Nightingale decided to leave Scutari for a while in order to visit the hospitals in the Crimea. The conditions at Scutari were now greatly improved. Sanitary works had been executed. The hospitals were better supplied. The pressure in the wards, caused by the terrible winter before Sebastopol, was relieved. There were only 1100 cases in the Barrack Hospital, and of those only 100 were in bed. The rate of mortality had fallen from 42 per _cent_ to 22 per _thousand_ of the cases treated. The siege was likely soon to be accompanied by assaults, and the pressure might rather be in the hospitals at Balaclava, where the sick and wounded were if possible to remain, in order to avoid the sufferings of the sea passage to Scutari.

* * * * *

In the Crimea, besides the regimental hospitals, there were four general hospitals. There was the _General Hospital_ at Balaclava, established after the British occupation in September 1854. There was the _Castle Hospital_, consisting of huts on the "Genoese heights" above Balaclava, opened in April 1855. There was the _Hospital of St. George's Monastery_, also consisting of huts, intended for convalescent and ophthalmic cases; and, lastly, there were the _Hospitals of the Land Transport Corps_, again consisting of huts, near Karani. All these hospitals had a complement of female nurses, though the Monastery Hospital not until December 1855, and the Land Transport Hospitals not until 1856. In the spring of 1855, then, there were already female nurses at the General Hospital and the Castle Hospital, under their own superintendents, but all ultimately responsible to Miss Nightingale--as she apprehended, and as the War Office intended. She was now anxious to inspect these hospitals; to increase the efficiency of the female nursing establishments; and, in particular, to introduce those washing and cooking arrangements which had been productive of so much benefit at Scutari. Her visit of inspection was approved by the War Office; and, by instructions dated April 27, she was invested with full authority as Almoner of the Free Gifts in all the British Hospitals in the Crimea. But in other respects her position was somewhat ambiguous. The original instructions, issued by Mr. Herbert, had named her as Superintendent of the female nurses in all the British military hospitals _in Turkey_; and these words gave a standing-ground to her opponents in the Crimea. The intention of the War Office was to give her general superintendence, but to relieve her of direct responsibility for the nurses in the Crimea so long as she was at Scutari. The matter was not, however, cleared up till a later date,[169] and the indefiniteness of her position in the Crimea exposed her to infinite worry and intrigues.

[169] See below, p. 292.

On May 2, Miss Nightingale set forth from Scutari, where Mrs. Bracebridge was left in charge:--

"Poor old Flo," Miss Nightingale wrote from the Black Sea, May 5, 1855, "steaming up the Bosphorus and across the Black Sea with four nurses, two cooks, and a boy to Crim Tartary (to overhaul the Regimental Hospitals) in the _Robert Lowe_ or _Robert Slow_ (for an exceedingly slow boat she is), taking back 420 of her patients, a draught of convalescents returning to their regiments to be shot at again. 'A Mother in Israel,' Pastor Fliedner called me; a Mother in the Coldstreams, is the more appropriate appellation. What suggestions do the above ideas make to you in Embley drawing-room? Stranger ones perhaps than to me, who, on the 5th May, year of disgrace 1855, having been at Scutari six months to-day, am in sympathy with God, fulfilling the purpose I came into the world for. What the disappointments of the conclusion of these six months are no one can tell. But I am not dead, but alive."

Miss Nightingale was accompanied to the Crimea by the faithful Mr. Bracebridge, willing as ever to serve her. Among the nurses was Mrs. Roberts, whose exceptional efficiency and personal devotion to the Lady-in-Chief were soon to be called in need. Of the cooks, the chief was Soyer the Great, from whose cheerfully gossiping and pleasantly egotistical pages[170] some details are drawn in this chapter. The "boy" mentioned in Miss Nightingale's letter was Thomas, a drummer, who, though only twelve years of age, used to call himself "Miss Nightingale's Man." He was a regular _enfant de troupe_, says M. Soyer, full of activity, wit, intelligence, and glee. He would draw himself up to his full height, and explain that he had "forsaken his instruments in order to devote his civil and military career to Miss Nightingale." She was attended also by a soldier invalided from the 68th Light Infantry, whom Mr. Bracebridge had picked out to serve as messenger. In 1860 he wrote a manuscript account of his experiences in the Crimea,[171] and this is another first-hand source from which particulars are drawn in the present chapter. The party arrived at Balaclava on May 5, and the decks of vessels in the harbour were crowded with spectators anxious to catch a glimpse of the famous Lady-in-Chief. There was no accommodation for her ashore; so her headquarters were on board the _Robert Lowe_, and when that vessel left, on the sailing transport _London_.

[170] See Bibliography B, No. 15.

[171] Robert Robinson, on his return to England, was sent to school and an agricultural college by Miss Nightingale, and obtained employment on Lord Berners's estate in Scotland. Miss Nightingale was constantly befriending him, _e.g._ in paying his expenses for a visit to London to see the Exhibition of 1862, and in sending him illustrated newspapers, and even the _Times_. There was another Crimean lad, besides Tommy, one William Jones, with a wooden leg. See below, p. 304, where account is also given of another protégé, Peter.

II

Miss Nightingale set to work immediately, and with characteristic energy. One of her first duties was a visit of ceremony to Lord Raglan. She was a good horsewoman, and as a girl had been fond of riding. She was now mounted "upon a very pretty mare, which, by its gambols and caracoling, seemed proud to carry its noble charge, and our cavalcade produced an extraordinary effect upon the motley crowd of all nations assembled at Balaclava, who were astonished at seeing a lady so well escorted." Was not the great Soyer himself among the escort? The Commander of the Forces was away, but Miss Nightingale was taken to the Three Mortar Battery, and the soldiers, as she passed, gave her three times three. This visit to the front made a profound and indelible impression upon her.[172] It is first recorded in a letter of May 10, which was forwarded to Windsor Castle.[173] "Fancy," she wrote, "working five nights out of seven in the trenches! Fancy being 36 hours in them at a stretch, as they were all December, lying down, or half lying down, often 48 hours with no food but _raw_ salt pork, sprinkled with sugar, rum, and biscuit; nothing hot, because the exhausted soldier could not collect his own fuel, as he was expected to do, to cook his own ration; and fancy through all this the army preserving their courage and patience as they have done, and being now eager (the old ones more than the young ones) to be led even into the trenches. There was something sublime in the spectacle." "When I see the camp," she wrote to Lady Canning (May 10), "I wonder not that the army suffered so much, but that there is any army left at all; but now all is looking up. Sir John M'Neill has done wonders." With Sir John M'Neill, a doctor who afterwards entered the Political Service in the East, Miss Nightingale formed a great friendship. He, with Colonel Tulloch, had been sent out to the Crimea by Lord Palmerston's Government to report upon the Commissariat system.

[172] See, _e.g._, below, pp. 317, 488, and Vol. II. p. 411.

[173] Found among the Prince Consort's papers, and printed in Sir Theodore Martin's _Life_ of him, vol. iii. p. 214.

Miss Nightingale, on this and her later visits to the Crimea, saw and heard of many deeds of heroism which she loved to tell. "I remember," she wrote, "a sergeant, who was on picket, the rest of the picket killed, and himself battered about the head, stumbled back to camp, and on his way picked up a wounded man, and brought him in on his shoulders to the lines, where he fell down insensible. When, after many hours, he recovered his senses, I believe after trepanning, his first words were to ask after his comrade, 'Is he alive?' 'Comrade, indeed! yes, he's alive, it is the General.' At that moment the General, though badly wounded, appeared at the bedside. 'Oh, General, it's you, is it, I brought in, I'm so glad. I didn't know your honour, but if I'd known it was you, I'd have saved you all the same.' This is the true soldier's spirit."[174]

[174] Letter on the Volunteers, 1861. See Bibliography A, No. 25.

III

During the few days immediately after her arrival at Balaclava, Miss Nightingale carried on an active investigation of the hospitals, regimental and general; arranged various affairs in connection with the sisters and nurses; discussed the building of new huts; and, in conjunction with M. Soyer, planned the erection of several kitchens for extra diet. Here, as at Scutari, she was fearless of contagion, and tended patients stricken with fever. On return to her ship one evening she complained of great fatigue; and on the following morning, feeling no better, she sent for Dr. Anderson, Chief Medical Officer at the General Hospital. He called others of the medical staff into consultation, and a joint bulletin was issued to the effect that Miss Nightingale was suffering from Crimean fever. They advised that she should be removed from the ship, and she was carried on a stretcher by relays of soldiers to the Castle Hospital on the Genoese Heights. The hut in which she lay was immediately behind those of the wounded soldiers. The attack of fever was sharp, and she was, as she afterwards admitted to her friends, "very near to death." There are scraps of manuscript among her papers (for even in illness she could not be kept from the use of her pen) which show a wandering mind.

The news of Miss Nightingale's illness was received with consternation in England, and the anxiety of her friends was intense, though Lord Raglan had thoughtfully arranged that a telegraphic dispatch from him should not reach them till, after two or three days of the fever, the doctors were able to hold out hopes of recovery. "Sitting to-day," wrote her sister to a friend, from Embley (May 27), "in the little Vicarage woodhouse, waiting for the people to come out from church (for we were not up to the whole service), in order to go in to the Communion which she loves so well, and which we always take with her and God, and which she is taking in spirit or reality to-day if she is alive, and if not is taking in a higher and happier sense--Mama said, 'I thank God she is ready for life or for death'; and in that, dear, we truly strive to rest, though the spirit would quail, I am afraid, if there were not hope at the bottom." The anxiety in the War Hospitals was scarcely less. "The soldiers turned their faces to the wall," said one, "and cried." The crisis passed, and on May 24 Lord Raglan was able to telegraph home that the patient was out of danger, and three days later that she was going on favourably. The bulletins were forwarded to the Queen, and on May 28 Her Majesty, in writing to Lord Panmure, was "truly thankful to learn that excellent and valuable person, Miss Nightingale, is safe."[175] At this time a horseman rode up to her hut, and the nurse, Mrs. Roberts, who had been enjoined to keep the patient quiet, refused to let him in. He said that he most particularly desired to see Miss Nightingale. "And pray," said Mrs. Roberts, "who are you?" "Ah, only a soldier," replied the visitor, "but I have ridden a long way, and your patient knows me very well." He was admitted, and a month later was himself laid low and died. It was Lord Raglan.

[175] _Panmure Papers_, vol. i. p. 215.

IV

Miss Nightingale, on becoming convalescent, was strongly advised by the doctors to take a voyage to England. She would not listen to such advice. Her work at the front had but just begun, and she was resolved to return to it after the shortest possible delay. The voyage to the Bosphorus was the longest that she could be induced to take. Her good Mrs. Bracebridge had arrived from Scutari just in time to accompany her friend on the return voyage. Lord Ward, whose steam-yacht was in harbour at the time, pressed the use of it upon her, and in it she was taken to Scutari. When the yacht reached Scutari, all the high officials were present to meet it. One of the large barges, used to remove the sick and wounded, was brought alongside, and Miss Nightingale, in a state of extreme weakness and exhaustion, was lowered into it. At the pier soldiers were in readiness, who carried her on a stretcher to the chaplain's house, followed by a large and sympathetic crowd. "I do not remember anything during the campaign," wrote the good-hearted Soyer, "so gratifying to the feelings as that simple though grand procession." "Ah," said a soldier, "there was no sadder sight than to see that dear lady carried up from the pier on a stretcher just like we men, and perhaps by some of the fellows she nursed herself."[176] It was the same when she was presently moved from Scutari to the shore in order to go to Therapia, where the Ambassador had placed his summer residence at her disposal. She was carried in a litter by four guardsmen, but, though it was only five minutes' walk to the shore, there were two relays, and her baggage was divided among twelve soldiers, though two could easily have carried the whole,[177] so great was the desire of the men to share in the honour of helping the Lady-in-Chief.

[176] _Blackwood_, p. 115.

[177] _Memoirs of Lady Eastlake_, vol. ii. p. 44.

Her recovery was gradual, and her weakness great. Mrs. Bracebridge described her as unable to feed herself or speak above a whisper. The extreme exhaustion was more from the previous overstrain on mind and body than from the fever, the doctors said, and they recommended complete change and rest. Mr. Sidney Herbert wrote, imploring her to come home for two months: "We are delighted," wrote her mother (July 9), "to think of you at Therapia. Oh, my love, how I trust that you will, among the numerous lessons which your life has been spent in learning, be able to perfect that most difficult one of standing and waiting." She was to be lessoned in that form of service, but not till after many more years of arduous labour, and for the present she would not hear of any return to England. The feeling of the soldiers for her touched her so deeply that she could not bear, she said, to leave them. Gradually she recovered strength. "We have a charming account," wrote her sister (Aug. 21), "from Lothian Nicholson just ordered out to Crimea, who is quite enthusiastic, dear old boy, about her good looks, which, as all her hair has been cut off, is good testimony--'her own smile,' he talks of, and says he can hardly believe she has gone through such a winter. The dear Bracebridges say that her improvement in the last week was delightful and wonderful." Already, in July, her business letters were resumed. In August she was in the full rush of work again. The doctors and her friends still besought her to take rest. But her indomitable spirit would listen to no counsels of retreat. The end of the war was not yet in sight. Even Sebastopol had not yet fallen. So long as there remained sick and wounded in the Levant to be cared for, she was resolved to remain also. A soldier was told that the Lady-in-Chief would probably be sent home. "But how will they _pairt_ with her," he said, "what'll they do without her? they set all their hopes on she." There were nurses, too, naturally anxious to rejoin their families or friends at home, who said that, if she went, they would go. The presence of Miss Nightingale, with her lofty ideals and inspiring self-devotion, was the attraction which kept many of these women at their posts. Some had already died. Mrs. Elizabeth Drake, one of the nurses whom Miss Nightingale had taken with her to the Crimea, died on August 9 of low fever at Balaclava. "I cannot tell you," wrote Miss Nightingale to the Master of St. John's House (Aug. 16, 1855), "what I felt when I heard of her death, unexpected alike by all. Her two physicians thought her going on well, and I expected her in every convoy that came down from Balaclava, as she was coming to me to recruit. I have lost in her the best of all the women here. Once I proposed to her to go home, but she scouted the idea entirely and said her health was better here than in England. I feel like a criminal in having robbed you of one so truly to be loved and honoured. It seemed as if it pleased God to remove from the work those who have been most useful to it. His will be done!" Nurse Drake's body was brought to Scutari, and Miss Nightingale erected a small marble cross over it in the cemetery. It was no time, when members of the rank-and-file were falling at the post of duty, for the chief to listen to counsels of medical prudence. Nor, indeed, at any time did Miss Nightingale harbour even a passing thought of what would have seemed to her an act of military desertion. She remained till the end of the war came, and till the last transport had sailed; working indefatigably as ever, and in some respects in new spheres of usefulness, both in the Crimea and at Scutari; to what good effect we shall hear in later chapters, but at great cost to her own comfort and bodily strength. She had been appointed, as she used to say, to a subsidiary post in the Queen's Army[178]; the humblest post, it might be, but still a post of duty. The men had dared and suffered; and Florence Nightingale was resolved to show that a woman too had strength to suffer and endure.

[178] She was especially pleased when in March 1856 her name appeared for the first time in General Orders; see below, p. 293.

During the weeks of convalescence at Scutari, Miss Nightingale used sometimes to walk at evening on the shore, in full sight of that view which, when she had first come there, they told her was the finest in the world, but which, in the crush of work, she had no time to enjoy.[179] She sent a letter to her people at home describing one such evening walk, and it was read out in the family circle. Lady Byron, who was staying with them at the time, heard it read, and said that it was "like a hymn--simple and deep-toned." She described how, on the opposite side, the city of Constantinople was defined against the burning sky of the setting sun, but the outline was changed by the fall of some mounds in an earthquake. Near her were the graves of the heroic dead, the thousands with whom, she said, she felt identified. "It went into my heart," wrote Lady Byron, "as the poetry of fact--for she has made poetry fact." The letter went on to speak of the British burying-ground at Scutari, and Miss Nightingale added these lines:--

"They are not here!" No, not beneath that sod, And yet not far away, For they can mingle their new life from God With living souls, not clay.

And they, "the heroic dead," will softly pour Into thy spirit's ear A music human still, but sad no more, To tell thee they are near--

Near thee with higher ministering aid Thy heart-work to return, So that each sacrifice that love has made A victory shall earn![180]

[179] Above, p. 173.

[180] The words in inverted commas were quotations from Miss Nightingale's letters. These had been shown to a friend, who thereupon wrote the lines, above quoted, and sent them to her.