Eminent Victorians - Lytton Strachey (essential books to read TXT) 📗

official “Purveyor” intervened; “he could not unpack them,” he said, “without a Board.” Miss Nightingale pleaded in vain; the sick and wounded lay half-naked shivering for want of clothing; and three weeks elapsed before the Board released the shirts. A little later, however, on a similar occasion, Miss Nightingale felt that she could assert her own authority. She ordered a government consignment to be forcibly opened while the miserable Purveyor stood by, wringing his hands in departmental agony.

Vast quantities of valuable stores sent from England lay, she found, engulfed in the bottomless abyss of the Turkish Customs House. Other shiploads, buried beneath munitions of war destined for Balaclava, passed Scutari without a sign, and thus hospital materials were sometimes carried to and fro three times over the Black Sea, before they reached their destination. The whole system was clearly at fault, and Miss Nightingale suggested to the home authorities that a Government Store House should be instituted at Scutari for the reception and distribution of the consignments. Six months after her arrival this was done.

In the meantime, she had reorganised the kitchens and the laundries in the hospitals. The ill-cooked hunks of meat, vilely served at irregular intervals, which had hitherto been the only diet for the sick men, were replaced by punctual meals, well-prepared and appetising, while strengthening extra foods⁠—soups and wines and jellies (“preposterous luxuries,” snarled Dr. Hall)⁠—were distributed to those who needed them. One thing, however, she could not effect. The separation of the bones from the meat was no part of official cookery: the rule was that the food must be divided into equal portions, and if some of the portions were all bone⁠—well, every man must take his chance. The rule, perhaps, was not a very good one; but there it was. “It would require a new Regulation of the Service,” she was told, “to bone the meat.” As for the washing arrangements, they were revolutionised. Up to the time of Miss Nightingale’s arrival, the number of shirts the authorities had succeeded in washing was seven. The hospital bedding, she found, was “washed” in cold water. She took a Turkish house, had boilers installed, and employed soldiers’ wives to do the laundry work. The expenses were defrayed from her own funds and that of the Times; and henceforward, the sick and wounded had the comfort of clean linen.

Then she turned her attention to their clothing. Owing to military exigencies, the greater number of the men had abandoned their kit; their knapsacks were lost forever; they possessed nothing but what was on their persons, and that was usually only fit for speedy destruction. The Purveyor, of course, pointed out that, according to the regulations, all soldiers should bring with them into hospital an adequate supply of clothing, and he declared that it was no business of his to make good their deficiencies. Apparently, it was the business of Miss Nightingale. She procured socks, boots, and shirts in enormous quantities; she had trousers made, she rigged up dressing-gowns. “The fact is,” she told Sidney Herbert, “I am now clothing the British Army.”

All at once, word came from the Crimea that a great new contingent of sick and wounded might shortly be expected. Where were they to go? Every available inch in the wards was occupied; the affair was serious and pressing, and the authorities stood aghast. There were some dilapidated rooms in the Barrack Hospital, unfit for human habitation, but Miss Nightingale believed that if measures were promptly taken they might be made capable of accommodating several hundred beds. One of the doctors agreed with her; the rest of the officials were irresolute⁠—it would be a very expensive job, they said; it would involve building; and who could take the responsibility? The proper course was that a representation should be made to the Director-General of the Army Medical Department in London; then the Director-General would apply to the Horse Guards, the Horse Guards would move the Ordnance, the Ordnance would lay the matter before the Treasury, and, if the Treasury gave its consent, the work might be correctly carried through, several months after the necessity for it had disappeared. Miss Nightingale, however, had made up her mind, and she persuaded Lord Stratford⁠—or thought she had persuaded him⁠—to give his sanction to the required expenditure. One hundred and twenty-five workmen were immediately engaged, and the work was begun. The workmen struck; whereupon Lord Stratford washed his hands of the whole business. Miss Nightingale engaged 200 other workmen on her own authority, and paid the bill out of her own resources. The wards were ready by the required date; 500 sick men were received in them; and all the utensils, including knives, forks, spoons, cans and towels, were supplied by Miss Nightingale.

This remarkable woman was in truth performing the function of an administrative chief. How had this come about? Was she not in reality merely a nurse? Was it not her duty simply to tend the sick? And indeed, was it not as a ministering angel, a gentle “lady with a lamp,” that she actually impressed the minds of her contemporaries? No doubt that was so; and yet it is no less certain that, as she herself said, the specific business of nursing was “the least important of the functions into which she had been forced.” It was clear that in the state of disorganisation into which the hospitals at Scutari had fallen, the most pressing, the really vital, need was for something more than nursing; it was for the necessary elements of civilised life⁠—the commonest material objects, the most ordinary cleanliness, the rudimentary habits of order and authority. “Oh, dear Miss Nightingale,” said one of her party as they were approaching Constantinople, “when we land, let there be no delays, let us get straight to nursing the poor fellows!” “The strongest will be wanted at the washtub,” was Miss Nightingale’s answer. And it was upon the washtub, and all that the washtub stood for, that she expended her