CHAPTER IX.The Crimean muddle—Explanations and excuses.
The Crimean muddle—Explanations and excuses.
In our last chapter we ended with a word about those sanitary reforms which were yet to come. How appalling was the ignorance and confusion in 1854, when the war in the Crimea began, has now become matter of common knowledge everywhere.
I note later, as a result of my talk with General Evatt, some of the reasons and excuses for the dire neglect and muddle that reigned. John Bull was, as usual, so arrogantly sure of himself that he had—also as usual—taken no sort of care to keep himself fit in time of peace, and there was no central organizing authority for the equipment of the army—every one was responsible, and therefore no one. The provisions bought by contract were many of them rotten and mouldy, so cleverly had the purchasers beendeceived and defrauded. The clothing provided for the men before Sebastopol, where, in at least one instance, man was literally frozen to man, were such as would have been better suited to India or South Africa. Many of the boots sent out were fitter for women and children playing on green lawns than for the men who must tramp over rough and icy roads. The very horses were left to starve for want of proper hay. Proper medical provision there was none. There were doctors, some of them nobly unselfish, but few of them trained for that particular work. An army surgeon gets little practice in time of peace, and one lady, a Red Cross nurse, told me that even in our South African campaign the doctor with whom she did her first bit of bandaging out there told her he had not bandaged an arm for fifteen years! But indeed many of the doctors in the Crimea were not only badly prepared, they were also so tied up with red-tape details that, though they gave their lives freely, they quickly fell in with the helpless chaos of a hospital without a head.
England shuddered to the heart when at lastshe woke up under the lash of the following letter from William Howard Russell, theTimeswar correspondent:—
“The commonest accessories of a hospital are wanting, there is not the least attention paid to decency or cleanliness, the stench is appalling ... and, for all I can observe, the men die without the least effort to save them. There they lie just as they were let gently down on the ground by the poor fellows, the comrades, who brought them on their backs from the camp with the greatest tenderness, but who are not allowed to remain with them.”“Are there,” he wrote at a later date, “no devoted women among us, able and willing to go forth and minister to the sick and suffering soldiers of the East in the hospitals at Scutari? Are none of the daughters of England, at this extreme hour of need, ready for such a work of mercy?... France has sent forth her Sisters of Mercy unsparingly, and they are even now by the bedsides of the wounded and the dying, giving what woman’s hand alone can give ofcomfort and relief.... Must we fall so far below the French in self-sacrifice and devotedness, in a work which Christ so signally blesses as done unto Himself? ‘I was sick and ye visited me.’”
“The commonest accessories of a hospital are wanting, there is not the least attention paid to decency or cleanliness, the stench is appalling ... and, for all I can observe, the men die without the least effort to save them. There they lie just as they were let gently down on the ground by the poor fellows, the comrades, who brought them on their backs from the camp with the greatest tenderness, but who are not allowed to remain with them.”
“Are there,” he wrote at a later date, “no devoted women among us, able and willing to go forth and minister to the sick and suffering soldiers of the East in the hospitals at Scutari? Are none of the daughters of England, at this extreme hour of need, ready for such a work of mercy?... France has sent forth her Sisters of Mercy unsparingly, and they are even now by the bedsides of the wounded and the dying, giving what woman’s hand alone can give ofcomfort and relief.... Must we fall so far below the French in self-sacrifice and devotedness, in a work which Christ so signally blesses as done unto Himself? ‘I was sick and ye visited me.’”
What the art of nursing had fallen to in England may be guessed from the fact lately mentioned to me by a great friend of Miss Nightingale’s, that when Florence Nightingale told her family she would like to devote her life to nursing, they said with a smile, “Are you sure you would not like to be a kitchen-maid?”
Yet the Nightingales were, on other questions, such as that of the education of girls, far in advance of their time.
Possibly nothing short of those letters to theTimes, touching, as they did, the very quick of the national pride, could have broken down the “Chinese wall” of that particular prejudice.
Something may be said at this point as to what had been at the root of the dreadful condition of things in the hospitals before Miss Nightingale’s arrival. I have had some instructive talk with Surgeon-General Evatt, who knows the medicaladministration of our army through and through, and whose friendship with Miss Nightingale arose in a very interesting way, but will be mentioned later on in its due place.
General Evatt has pointed out to me in conversation that what is still a weakness of our great London hospitals, though lessened there by the fierce light of public opinion that is ever beating upon them, was the very source of the evil at Scutari.
Such hospitals as the London, doing such magnificent work that it deserves a thousand times the support it receives, are, explained General Evatt, without any central authority. The doctors pay their daily visits and their code is a high one, but they are as varied in ability and in character as any other group of doctors, and are responsible to no one but God and their own conscience. The nursing staff havetheirduties andtheircode, but are under separate management. The committee secures the funds and manages the finance, but it is again quite distinct in its powers, and does not control either doctors or nurses.
The Barrack Hospital at Scutari was, said the General, in this respect just like a London hospital of sixty years ago, set down in the midst of the Crimea. There was, he said—to adapt a well-known quotation—“knowledge without authority, and authority without knowledge,” but no power to unite them in responsible effort. Therefore we must feel deep pity, not indignation, with regard to any one member of the staff; for each alone was helpless against the chaos, until Miss Nightingale, who stood outside the official muddle, yet with the friendship of a great War Minister behind her, and in her hand all the powers of wealth, hereditary influence, and personal charm, quietly cut some of the knots of red tape which were, as she saw clearly, strangling the very lives of our wounded soldiers. When I spoke of the miracle by which a woman who had been all her life fitting herself for this work, had suddenly received her world-wide opportunity, he replied: “Yes, I have often said it was as if a very perfect machine had through long years been fitted together and polished to the highest efficiency, and when, at last, it was ready forservice, a hand was put forth to accept and use it.”
Just as he sought to explain the awful condition of the army hospitals at the beginning of the war; so also he, as a military doctor, pointed out to me that there were even many excuses for the condition of the transport service, and the idiotic blunders of a government that sent soldiers to the freezing winters of the Crimea in clothes that would have been better suited to the hot climate of India.
The army after the Peninsular War had been split up into battalions, and had, like the hospitals, lost allcentreof authority. England had been seething with the social troubles of our transition from the feudal order to the new competitions and miseries of a commercial and mechanical age. Machinery was causing uproar among the hand-workers. Chartist riots, bread riots, were upsetting the customary peace. Troops were sent hither and thither, scattered over the country, and allowed a certain degree of licence and slackness. The army had no administrative head. There was no one to consider thequestion of stores or transit, and, even when the war broke out, it was treated with John Bull’s too casual self-satisfaction as a moment of excitement and self-glorification, from which our troops were to return as victors in October, after displaying themselves for a few weeks and satisfactorily alarming the enemy. The moral of it all is ever present and needs no pressing home. Not until every man has had the training of a man in defence of his own home, and is himself responsible for the defence of his own hearth, shall we as a nation learn the humility and caution of the true courage, and realize how much, at the best, is outside human control, and how great is our responsibility in every detail for all that lies within it.