The Life of Florence Nightingale Volume II Part 1

The Life of Florence Nightingale.

Vol. 2.

by Edward Tyas Cook.

PART V

FOR THE HEALTH OF THE ARMY IN INDIA

(1862-1865)

The question is no less an one than this: How to create a public health department for India; how to bring a higher civilization into India. What a work, what a n.o.ble task for a Government--no "inglorious period of our dominion" that, but a most glorious one!

That would be creating India anew. For G.o.d places His own power, His own life-giving laws in the hands of man. He permits man to create mankind by those laws, even as He permits man to destroy mankind by neglect of those laws.--FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE: _How People may live and not die in India_, 1864.

CHAPTER I

PRELIMINARY--THE LOSS OF FRIENDS

But tasks in hours of insight will'd Can be through hours of gloom fulfill'd.

MATTHEW ARNOLD.

The years immediately after Sidney Herbert's death were among the busiest and most useful in Miss Nightingale's life. She was engaged during them in carrying their "joint work unfinished" into a new field.

In the previous volume we saw Miss Nightingale using her position as the heroine of the Crimean War in order to become the founder of modern nursing, and to initiate reforms for the welfare of the British soldier.

Among those who know, it is recognized that the services which she rendered to the British army at home were hardly greater than those which she was able to render to British India, and it was this Indian work which after Sidney Herbert's death became one of the main interests of her life. She threw herself into it, as we shall hear, with full fire, and brought to it abundant energy and resource. But first she had the memory of her friend to honour and protect; and then the hours of gloom were to be deepened by the loss of another friend hardly less dear to her.

Having finished her Paper upon Sidney Herbert, Miss Nightingale left the Burlington Hotel, never to return, and took lodgings in Hampstead (Aug.-Oct. 1861). Her mood was of deep despondency. She was inclined to shut herself off from most of her former fellow-workers. Against the outside world she double-barred her shutters. Her uncle was strictly enjoined to give no one her address; she asked that all her letters might be addressed to and from his care in London. The formula was to be that "a great and overwhelming affliction entirely precludes Miss Nightingale" from seeing or writing to anybody. "For her sake it is most earnestly to be wished," wrote her cousin Beatrice to Mr. Chadwick (Sept. 18), "that you may come into some immediate communication with her. It is your faith that her working days are not yet over, that she may work in another field, her own being now closed against her. I cannot find that any of those who have been with her lately would share this hope, less on account of her health, than of her state of extreme discouragement." It was a case not only, perhaps not chiefly, of personal loss, but also of public vexation; it was not only that the Minister had died, it was that his work seemed like to die also. The point of view appears in her letters to Dr. Farr:--

_Sept._ 10. We are grateful to you for the memorial of my dear Master which you have raised to him in the hearts of the nation.[1]

Indeed it is in the hearts of the nation that he will live--not in the hearts of Ministers. There he is dead already, if indeed they have any. And before he was cold in his grave, Gladstone attends his funeral and then writes to me that he cannot pledge himself to give any a.s.sistance in carrying out his friend's reforms. The reign of intelligence at the War Office is over. The reign of m.u.f.fs has begun. The only rule of conduct in the bureaucracy there and in the Horse Guards is to reverse _his_ decision, _his_ judgment, and (if they can do nothing more) _his_ words.

[1] An eloquent address delivered to the British a.s.sociation at Manchester (_Times_, Sept. 9, 1861).

_October_ 2.... My poor Master has been dead two months to-day, too long a time for him not to be forgotten.... The dogs have trampled on his dead body. Alas! seven years this month I have fought the good fight with the War Office _and lost it_!

_November_ 2. My dear Master has been dead three months to-day.

Poor Lady Herbert goes abroad this next week with the children and shuts up Wilton, the eldest boy going to school. It is as if the earth had opened and swallowed up even the Name which filled my whole life these five years.

But there were things to be done in her friend's name, and she turned to do them. The power of the bureaucracy to resist was strong, because the new Secretary of State was a novice at his task, and Lord Herbert, by failing to carry through any radical reorganization of the War Office, had as she said, failed to put in "the mainspring to his works." "The Commander-in-Chief rides over the learned Secretary of State as if he were straw." But there was one hopeful and helpful factor in the case.

Now that the Secretary for War was in the Commons, Lord de Grey was reappointed Under-Secretary. He was a genuine reformer. He knew the mind of his former Chief. He was most sympathetic to Lady Herbert. He was acquainted with Miss Nightingale. The power of an Under-Secretary is very small, but what he could do, he would. A letter which she received from a friend, both of Lord de Grey and of herself, gave her encouragement:--

(_R. Monckton Milnes to Miss Nightingale._) _October_ 21. I knew how irreparable a loss you and your objects in life had in Herbert's death, but I should like you to know how you will find Ld. de Grey willing to do all in his power to forward your great and wise designs. I say "in his power," for that, you know, is extremely limited, but he may do something for you in an indirect way and, without much originality, he has considerable tact and adroitness.

You won't like Sir G. Lewis, but somewhere or other you ought to do so; for in his sincere way of looking at things and in his critical and curious spirit he is by no means unlike yourself. He makes up his mind, no doubt, far better to the d.a.m.nabilities of the work than you would do,--tho' one does not know what you would have been if you had been corrupted by public life. I write this about de Grey because I was staying with him not long ago, and he expressed himself on the subject with much earnestness.

II

So, then, there were some things perhaps which might yet, as she put it, be "saved from the wreck." Lord de Grey had already given earnest both of his good will and of his courage. He had seen Lady Herbert and asked about her husband's intentions. She knew them generally, but referred for details to Miss Nightingale, who was thus able to be of some use in carrying through Lord Herbert's scheme for a Soldiers' Home at Aldershot. Then there was the question of the General Hospital to be built at Woolwich. The Commander-in-Chief was opposed to the scheme, and asked Sir George Lewis to cancel it. Economy was, perhaps, behind the Minister tempting him. But Lord de Grey, who was present at the interview, stood firm. "Sir," he said, "it is impossible. Lord Herbert decided it, and the House of Commons voted it."[2] In the end, the Horse Guards and the War Office accepted the inevitable with a good grace; the order was given for the building to proceed, and Miss Nightingale's suggestion was adopted that it should be christened "The Herbert Hospital."

[2] Miss Nightingale related this incident in two letters--to Dr. Farr (Sept. 10), and to Harriet Martineau (Sept. 24).

Lord de Grey was also influential in securing a redefinition of Captain Galton's duties at the War Office. Lady Herbert told Lord de Grey that this was one of the last official matters on which she had heard her husband speak. Miss Nightingale again supplied the details, and to her ally was committed responsibility (under the Secretary of State) for new barrack works. On some other questions Miss Nightingale had the bitterness of seeing projects abandoned which she and Lord Herbert had almost matured. "It is really melancholy now," wrote Captain Galton to her (Aug. 19), "to see the attempts made on all hands to pull down all that Sidney Herbert laboured to build up." She recounted some of the disappointments in a letter to Harriet Martineau, and that lady, whose genuine sympathy in the cause was perhaps heightened by a journalist's scent for "copy," was eager to go on the war-path. "No harm can come,"

she wrote to Miss Nightingale (Oct. 4), "of an attempt to shame the Horse Guards. I have consulted my editor [of the _Daily News_], and if I can obtain a sufficiency of clear facts, I will gladly hara.s.s the Commander-in-Chief as he was never hara.s.sed before--that is, I will write a leader against him every Sat.u.r.day for as many weeks as there are heads of accusation against him and his Department. We don't want to mince matters." Miss Nightingale was to supply the powder and shot; Miss Martineau was to fire the guns. The partners.h.i.+p was declined by Miss Nightingale. The reason she gave was that she was no longer in the way of obtaining much inside information. But she doubtless had other reasons. There were things which she had just managed to carry through.

There were other possibilities of usefulness before her. She was playing a difficult game. She did not think that her hand would be strengthened by newspaper polemics, for the form of which she would not be responsible, but the information in which would be traced back to her.

Among the points which she had just managed to score was the appointment of the Commission already mentioned,[3] for extending the Barracks Inquiry to the Mediterranean stations. Headquarters tried to stop it.

"And I defeated them," she had told Miss Martineau (Sept. 24), "by a trick which they were too stupid to find out." Her papers do not disclose the nature of the "trick" by which this excellent piece of work was carried through.

[3] See Vol. I. p. 405.

And there was another thing which she did in order to forward Sidney Herbert's work, though in a field outside that of their collaboration: she wrote a stirring letter (Oct. 8) on the Volunteer Movement, which he had organized in 1859. It brought her several "offers," as we have heard already[4]; and, displayed in large print on a card, must have attracted many recruits. She wrote it as one who had experience of war and its lessons; as one, too, who had worked for the Army, "seven years this very month, without the intermission of one single waking hour." She made eloquent appeal to the patriotic spirit of the British people; and she included this piece of personal feeling: "On the saddest night of all my life, two months ago, when my dear chief Sidney Herbert lay dying, and I knew that with him died much of the welfare of the British Army--he was, too, so proud, so justly proud, of his Volunteers--on that night I lay listening to the bands of the Volunteers as they came marching in successively--it had been a review-day--and I said to myself, 'The nation can never go back which is capable of such a movement as this; not the spirit of an hour; these are men who have all something to give up; all men whose time is valuable for money, which is not their G.o.d, as other nations say of us.'" I do not know if the name of Florence Nightingale be still--as it ought to be--a name of power with the people. If it is, then her letter of 1861 might well be reprinted in connection with recruiting for the Territorial Force. She laid stress upon the voluntary spirit, as opposed to compulsion. But she laid stress also on the supreme importance of efficient training: "Garibaldi's Volunteers did excellently in guerilla movements; they failed before a fourth-rate regular army."

[4] Vol. I. p. 496.

III

Presently some old work in a new form came in Miss Nightingale's way.

She had returned to London in November, chiefly in order to be on the spot for consultation and suggestion in connection with the Memorial to Sidney Herbert. It was her suggestion, for one thing, that the Memorial should include a Prize Medal at the Army Medical School. For this sojourn in London, Sir Harry Verney lent his house in South Street[5] to Miss Nightingale. The American Civil War now kept her busy. "Did I tell you," she wrote to Dr. Farr (Oct. 8), "that I had forwarded to the War Secretary at Was.h.i.+ngton, upon application, all our War Office Forms and Reports, statistical and other, taking the occasion to tell them that, as the U.S. had adopted our Registrar-General's nomenclature, it would be easier for them to adopt our Army Statistics Forms. It appears that they, the Northern States, are quite puzzled by their own want of any Army organization. I also took occasion to tell them of our Chinese success in reducing the Army mortality to one-tenth of what it was, and the Constantly Sick to one-seventh of what they were during the first winter of the Crimean War, due to my dear master." When the Civil War broke out, Miss Nightingale's example in the Crimea had produced an immediate effect. A "Woman's Central a.s.sociation of Relief" was formed in New York. In co-operation with other bodies they pet.i.tioned the Secretary of War to appoint a Sanitary Commission, and after some delay this was done. Camps were inspected; female nurses were sent to the hospitals; contrivances for improved cooking were supplied, and in short, much of Miss Nightingale's Crimean work was reproduced.[6]

Presently she became more directly concerned. At the end of the year (1861) England was on the verge of being embroiled in the conflict, and, whilst the agitation over the _Trent_ affair was at its height, the British Government decided to send reinforcements to Canada. Lord de Grey was charged with many of the preparations. He asked Miss Nightingale (Dec. 3) if he might consult her personally "as to sanitary arrangements generally." He wished to profit by her experience and judgment in relation to transports, hospitals, clothing of the troops, supplies, comforts for the sick, and generally upon "the defects and dangers to be feared," and how best to prevent them. He also asked for the names of suitable men for the position of Princ.i.p.al Medical Officer, and he consulted her again before making the appointment. Without a moment's loss of time, she set to work in conjunction with Dr.

Sutherland, and sent in her suggestions. The draft instructions to the officers in charge of the expedition were sent to her on December 8. On December 10 Lord de Grey wrote: "I have got all your suggestions inserted in the Instructions, and am greatly obliged to you for them."

"We are s.h.i.+pping off the Expedition to Canada as fast as we can," she wrote to Madame Mohl (Dec. 13). "I have been working just as I did in the times of Sidney Herbert. Alas! he left no organization, my dear master! But the Horse Guards were so terrified at the idea of the national indignation if they lost another army, that they have consented to everything." A few days later another draft of instructions was sent to her through Captain Galton. "We have gone over your draft very carefully," she wrote (Dec. 18), "and find that although it includes almost everything necessary, it does not define with sufficient precision the manner in which the meat is to get from the Commissariat into the soldier's kettle, or the clothing from the Army Medical General store on to the soldier's back. You must define all this. Otherwise you will have men, as you had in the Crimea, s.h.i.+rking the responsibility." Memoranda among Miss Nightingale's papers show the grasp of detail with which she worked out the problems. Her mind envisaged the scene of operations. She calculated the distances which might have to be covered by sledges; she counted the relays and depots; she compared the relative weights and warming capacities of blankets and buffalo robes. A great Commander was lost to her country when Florence Nightingale was born a woman. Her suggestions in the case of the Canadian reinforcements were happily not put to the test of war. The _Trent_ affair was smoothed over, largely, as is now well known, owing to the moderating counsels of the Prince Consort. It was his last service to his adopted country. Miss Nightingale felt his death to be a national loss. "He neither liked," she said of him, "nor was liked. But what he has done for our country no one knows."

[5] No. 32 at that time; now renumbered, No. 4.

[6] See on this subject Bibliography B, No. 23. The Secretary of another body, the United States Christian Communion, in sending reports and papers to Miss Nightingale (July 26, 1865) wrote: "Your influence and our indebtedness to you can never be known. Only this is true that everywhere throughout our broad country during these years of inventive and earnest benevolence in the constant endeavour to succour and sustain our heroic defenders, the name and work of Florence Nightingale have been an encouragement and inspiration." In the same year the plans of an Emigrant Hospital on Ward Island were sent to her. In return she sent engravings of the Departure and the Arrival of the Pilgrim Fathers: "Presented to the Commissioners of Emigration of New York for the new Emigrant Hospital on Ward Island by Florence Nightingale as a slight sign of her deepest reverence and her warmest sympathy for the n.o.ble act by which they have so magnificently provided for--not their own sick, but--those of the Old Country."

IV

Miss Nightingale's work in connection with the Canadian expedition was done in the midst of a personal sorrow of her own, second only in poignancy, if second at all, to that caused by the death of Sidney Herbert. This was the death of Arthur Hugh Clough. He had broken down in health and been ordered abroad in April 1861, and she had urged him to go. He died, however, at Florence on November 12. They had been close friends since her return to England from the Crimea. His sweetness of disposition, his humour, his lofty moral feeling, alike attracted her.

He on his side had deep admiration for her, and he devoted such strength--alas! but little--as remained to him from work in the Privy Council Office to her service. He fetched and carried for her. He made arrangements for her journeys, as we have heard, and escorted her. He saw her printers, he corrected her proofs. He became, at a modest salary, secretary to the Nightingale Fund. It was poor work to set a poet to, but he did it with cheerful modesty. He was intent, he told Miss Nightingale, upon "doing plain work"; he had "studied and taught,"

he said, "too much for a man's own moral good." In 1860 his health began to fail. Miss Nightingale was sometimes a little impatient. His loyalty and zeal she could never have doubted; but she was inclined to think him lacking in initiative and energy. She was always inclined to drive willing horses a little hardly. In the case of Clough, as in that of Sidney Herbert, she sometimes attributed to infirmity of will what was in fact due to infirmity of body. And in each case her grief, when the end came, was not free, I think, from some element of self-reproach. "I have always felt," she had written to her uncle (Dec. 7, 1860), "that I have been a great drag on Arthur's health and spirits, a much greater one than I should have chosen to be, if I had not promised him to die sooner." "She saw my father," wrote her cousin Beatrice to Mr. Nightingale (Dec. 4), "to speak only of Arthur, as only she can speak. She was quite natural, very affectionate, very, very much moved."

But in her state of loneliness and nervous exhaustion her feeling for lost friends was sometimes morbid. She said that for months after the death of Sidney Herbert, and again after that of Clough, she could not bear to open a newspaper for dread of seeing some mention of a beloved name. Some years later she was sent a book by Mrs. Clough. "I like very much," she replied (Nov. 13, 1865)--"how much I cannot say--to receive that book from you. But it would be impossible to me to read it or look at it, not from want of time or strength, but from too much of both spent on his memory, from thinking, not too little, but too much on him.

But I don't say this for others. I believe it is a morbid peculiarity of long illness, of the loss of power of resistance to morbid thoughts. I cannot bear to see a portrait of those who are gone." The depth of her grief at the death of Mr. Clough is expressed or reflected in letters which she wrote or received at the time:--

(_Benjamin Jowett to Miss Nightingale._) BALLIOL, _Nov._ 19 [1861].

Thank you for writing to me. I am very much grieved at the tidings which your letter brought me. I agree entirely in your estimate of our dear friend's character. It was in 1836 (the anniversary is next week) that I first saw him when he was elected to the Balliol Scholars.h.i.+p. No one who only knew him in later life would imagine what a n.o.ble, striking-looking youth he was before he got worried with false views of religion and the world. I never met with any one who was more thoroughly high-minded: I believe he acted all through life simply from the feeling of what was right. He certainly had great genius, but some want of will or some want of harmony with things around him prevented his creating anything worthy of himself. I am glad he was married: life was dark to him, and his wife and children made him as happy as he was capable of being made. He was naturally very religious, and I think that he never recovered the rude shock which his religion received during his first years at Oxford. He did not see and yet he believed in the great belief of all--to do rightly. Did I quote to you ever an expression which Neander used to me of Blanco White: _einer Christ mehr in Unbewusstseyn als in Bewusstseyn_? It grieves me that you should have lost so invaluable a friend. No earthly trial can be greater than to pursue without friends the work that you began with them. And yet it is the more needed because it rests on one only.

If there be any way in this world to be like Christ it must be by pursuing in solitude and illness, without the support of sympathy or public opinion, works for the good of mankind. I hope you will sometimes let me hear from you. Let me a.s.sure you that I shall never cease to take an interest in your objects and writings.--Ever yours sincerely, B. JOWETT.

(_Miss Nightingale to Sir John McNeill._) SOUTH STREET, _Nov._ 18....

He was a man of rare mind and temper. The more so because he would gladly do "plain work." To me, seeing the blundering hara.s.ses which were the uses to which we put him, he seemed like a race-horse harnessed to a coal truck. This not because he did "plain work" and did it so well. For the best of us can be put to no better use than that. He helped me immensely, though not officially, by his sound judgment and constant sympathy. "Oh, Jonathan, my brother Jonathan, my love to thee was very great, pa.s.sing the love of woman." Now, not one man remains (that I can call a man) of all those whom these five years I have worked with.

But, as you say, "we are all dying."