CHAPTER XVIII.

CHAPTER XVIII.The Nightingale Fund—Miss Nightingale remains at her post, organizing healthy occupations for the men off duty—Sisters of Mercy—The Queen’s jewel—Its meaning.

The Nightingale Fund—Miss Nightingale remains at her post, organizing healthy occupations for the men off duty—Sisters of Mercy—The Queen’s jewel—Its meaning.

Far and wide spread the news of the fall of Sebastopol, and London took the lead in rejoicings. The Tower guns shouted the victory, the arsenals fired their salutes, cathedrals and village churches rang out their welcome to peace. There were sons, husbands, brothers, fathers, for whom there would be no more home-coming on earth; and some who would come back broken and maimed: but all had served their country, and heroism lasts beyond time and death.

All through the empire arose an outcry of thanksgiving to the woman who still remained at her post among the sick and the dying—the woman who had saved England’s honour in theday of disgrace and neglect, and had saved also countless lives among her brave sons.

The Queen and all her people were eager to know what there was that they might lay at her feet. In one form only would Miss Nightingale accept the testimony offered—namely, the means of yet further work. The Herberts knew she had longed to organize a hospital on the lines of unpaid nursing, but there was a difficulty for the moment, because she could not bring herself to leave the East until her work there was fully completed, and such a hospital must, they thought, have her presence from the first. Just now she was with Sister Aloysius at Balaclava, nursing one of her staff, and while there an accident on the rough roads, which injured not only herself, but also the Sister who was walking beside her, led to a thoughtful kindness from Colonel Macmurdo, who had a little carriage especially made for her. In this little carriage, through the cutting cold and snow of a Crimean winter, she would drive about among the camp hospitals with no escort but her driver, as she returned through the dark night at the end of herlong day of self-imposed duties. Sometimes she has stood for hours on a cold, shelterless rock, giving her directions, and when one and another of her friends entreated against such risk and exposure, she would just smile with a quiet certainty that, for all that in her eyes was her clear duty, strength and protection would certainly be given.

She was much occupied in helping and uplifting the convalescent, and not only these, but also all the soldiers in camp in the army of occupation, which was for a while to be left in the East until the treaty was signed, and would necessarily be surrounded by special temptations in time of peace. Her way of fighting drunkenness—and after Sebastopol you may be sure there was a good deal of “drinking of healths”—was to provide all possible means of interest and amusement. Huts were built, clubs were formed. Stationery was provided for letters home. So effectually was every one in England interested that, while Queen Victoria herself led the way in sending newspapers and magazines, all through the country her example was followed.

And while this was going on, the great testimonial fund in London was mounting and mounting.

The Duke of Cambridge, Lord Houghton, and the Marquis of Ripon were members of the committee. The great bankers opened their books. The churches collected funds,the rank and file of our impoverished army sent £4,000, and taking Mrs. Tooley’s figures, which are doubtless correct, and including all ranks and all troops throughout the world, the military contributions alone appear to have risen to about £10,000.

Jenny Lind, then Madame Goldschmidt, gave a concert, of which she herself bore all the expense, amounting to about £500, and then gave the entire proceeds, about £2,000, to the fund. This was so warmly appreciated by some of those interested in the success of the fund that, by private subscription, they gave a marble bust of Queen Victoria to the Goldschmidts as a thank-offering.

From the overseas dominions came over £4,000; from provincial cities, towns, andvillages in Britain, between £6,000 and £7,000, and from British residents abroad also a very handsome sum. Indeed, it may be truly said that in every quarter of the globe men and women united to pour forth their gratitude to Miss Nightingale, and to enable her to complete the work so bravely begun, by transforming the old and evil methods of nursing under British rule to that ideal art in which fortitude, tenderness, and skill receive their crowning grace. It has been said—I know not with what exactitude—that no British subject has ever received such world-wide honour as was at this time laid at her feet.

At one of the great meetings Mr. Sidney Herbert read the following letter from one of his friends:—

“I have just heard a pretty account from a soldier describing the comfort it was even to see Florence pass. ‘She would speak to one and another,’ he said, ‘and nod and smile to many more, but she could not do it to all, you know, for we lay there by hundreds; but we could kissher shadow[16]as it fell, and lay our heads on the pillow again content.’”

That letter alone, we are told, brought another £10,000.

The gross amount had reached £44,000, but in 1857 Miss Nightingale desired that the list should be closed and help be given instead to our French Allies, who were then suffering from the terrible floods that laid waste their country in that year.

And whatever she commanded, of course, was done. Alike in England and in the Crimea, her influence was potent for all good.

She herself was still busy nursing some of the Roman Catholic members of her staff in the huts on the snowclad heights of Balaclava, and how heartily she valued them may be judged from these closing sentences of a letter to their Reverend Mother:—

“You know that I shall do everything I can for the Sisters whom you have left me. I will care for them as if they were my own children. But it will not be like you.”

Not very far from the sanatorium on the heights above Balaclava, two new camp hospitals had been put up, and while superintending the nursing there, our Lady-in-Chief lived in a three-roomed hut with a medical store attached to it, where she was quite near to sanatorium and hospitals. She and the three Sisters who were with her had not very weather-proof quarters. One of them, whose letters are full of interest, tells of their waking one morning to find themselves covered with snow, and leading a life of such adventurous simplicity that when the Protestant chaplain brought some eggs tied up in a handkerchief the gift was regarded as princely! Happily, they were able to reward the gentleman by washing his neckties, and ironing them with an ingenious makeshift for the missing flat-iron, in the shape of a teapot filled with hot water. Every night everything in the huts froze, even to the ink. But Miss Nightingale tells how braveand entirely self-forgetful the Sisters were under every hardship and privation.

Miss Nightingale’s Medals and Decorations.

By those who have never had the privilege of knowing such women intimately, her affection for them may be the better understood from the following graphic letter written by Lord Napier:—

“At an early period of my life I held a diplomatic position under Lord Stratford de Redcliffe in Constantinople. During the distress of the Crimean War the Ambassador called me one morning and said: ‘Go down to the port; you will find a ship there loaded with Jewish exiles—Russian subjects from the Crimea. It is your duty to disembark them. The Turks will give you a house in which they may be placed. I turn them over entirely to you.’ I went down to the shore and received about two hundred persons, the most miserable objects that could be witnessed, most of them old men, women, and children. I placed them in the cold, ruinous lodging allocated to them by the Ottoman authorities. I went back to the Ambassador andsaid: ‘Your Excellency, these people are cold, and I have no fuel or blankets. They are hungry, and I have no food. They are dirty, and I have no soap. Their hair is in an indescribable condition, and I have no combs. What am I to do with these people?’ ‘Do?’ said the Ambassador. ‘Get a couple of Sisters of Mercy; they will put all to right in a moment.’ I went, saw the Mother Superior, and explained the case. I asked for two Sisters. She ordered two from her presence to follow me. They were ladies of refinement and intellect. I was a stranger and a Protestant, and I invoked their assistance for the benefit of the Jews. Yet these two women made up their bundles and followed me through the rain, without a look, a whisper, a sign of hesitation. From that moment my fugitives were saved. I witnessed the labours of those Sisters for months, and they never endeavoured to make a single convert.”

The military men were not less enthusiastic. When Colonel Connolly, brother-in-law to Mr. Bruin, of Carlow, was travelling,after his return from the war, near the Bruin estate, a fellow-traveller spoke disrespectfully of nuns. The colonel, a Protestant, not only made a warm defence of the ladies who had nursed him in Russia and Ottoman regions, and for their sakes of all other nuns, but handed the assailant his card, saying: “If you say another word against these saintly gentlewomen I shall call you out.” The slanderer subsided very quickly.

Sister Aloysius, one of those very Sisters who were with Miss Nightingale in the huts, has written in her “Memories of the Crimea”:—

“It was said at one time that the War Office was on the point of issuing a mandate forbidding us to speak even to the Catholic soldiers on religion, or to say a prayer for them. However, that mandate never came; we often thought the guardian angels of the soldiers prevented it.”

It made no difference to the loyalty of their work together that Miss Nightingale was not a Roman Catholic; they all obeyed the Master who has taught that it is not the way in which He isaddressed that matters, but whether we help those whom He gave His life to help, and in loving and serving whom, we love and serve Him.

So in London and in Balaclava the good of her influence was felt. In London the funds mounted, and at Balaclava the excellent work among the soldiers still went on.

Her very presence among the men helped to keep them sober and diligent, and in every way at their best, in those first months of victory when heads are only too easily turned. And she had the reward she most desired, for she was able to speak of these brave fellows—the nameless heroes of the long campaign—as having been “uniformly quiet and well-bred.” Those words, it is true, were spoken of the men attending the reading-huts; but they are quite in line with her more general verdict with regard to Tommy; though, alas, we cannot stretch them to cover his behaviour at the canteens, where we are told that much drunkenness prevailed.

She had advanced money for the building of a coffee-house at Inkermann, and had helped the chaplain to get maps and slates for his schoolwork, and the bundles of magazines and illustrated papers, sent out from England in answer to her appeal, as well as books sent out by the Duchess of Kent, cheered and brightened many a long hour for the men. She was always on the alert to help them about sending home their pay, and quick to care for the interests of their wives and children.

Before she left the Crimea, her hut was beset by fifty or sixty poor women who had been left behind when their husbands sailed for home with their regiments. They had followed their husbands to the war without leave and, having proved themselves useful, had been allowed to remain. And now they were left alone in a strange land and, but for Florence Nightingale, the end of the story might have been bitter sorrow. But she managed to get them sent home in a British ship.

Many a mother at home must already have blessed her; for reckless boys who had enlisted, without the sanction of their families, had again and again been by her persuaded to write home, and in the first months of the war she hadactually undertaken to stamp for the men any letters home which were sent to her camp. And at Scutari she had arranged a provisional money-order office where, four afternoons in each week, she received from the men the pay which she encouraged them to send home. When we are told that, in small sums, about £1,000 passed through this office month by month, we realize dimly something of the labour involved, and thinking of all her other cares and labours, which were nevertheless not allowed to stand in the way of such practical thoughtfulness as this, we do not wonder that “the services” loved her with a love that was akin to worship. The money, as she herself says, “was literally so much rescued from the canteens and from drunkenness;” and the Government, following her lead, had themselves established money-order offices later at Scutari, Balaclava, Constantinople, and the Headquarters, Crimea.

It is not surprising that, in the “Old Country,” songs were dedicated to her as “the good angel of Derbyshire,” and that her very portrait became a popular advertisement.

And we have it on good authority that her name was revered alike by English, French, Turks, and Russians.

The Treaty of Peace was signed at Paris on March 30, 1856, and on July 12 General Codrington formally gave up Sebastopol and Balaclava to the Russians. When the last remnant of our army was ordered home and the hospitals were finally closed, Florence Nightingale was for the first time willing to leave a post which she had held so bravely and so long. But before she left she wished to leave a memorial to the brave men who had fallen, and the brave women, her comrades, who had died upon that other battlefield where disease, and Death himself, must be wrestled with on behalf of those who are nursed and tended.

And so it comes to pass that among the visible tokens which the war has left behind, is a gigantic white marble cross erected by Florence Nightingale upon the sombre heights of Balaclava, where it still opens wide its arms for every gleam of golden sunlight, every reflected shimmer, through the dark night, of silvery moonand star, to hearten the sailors voyaging northward and mark a prayer for the brave men and women who toiled and suffered there. It is inscribed with the words in Italian, “Lord, have mercy upon us.” But while she herself asked only mercy for herself and others, that human shortcomings might be forgiven, her compatriots were uniting to do her honour.

On December 20, 1855, theMorning Postprinted the following announcement:—

“The country will experience much satisfaction, though no surprise, on learning, as we believe we are correct in stating, that Her Majesty the Queen has, in a manner as honourable to herself as it must be gratifying to her people, been pleased to mark her warm appreciation of the unparalleled self-devotion of the good Miss Nightingale. The Queen has transmitted to that lady a jewelled ornament of great beauty, which may be worn as a decoration, and has accompanied it with an autograph letter—such a letter as Queen Victoria has ere now proved she can write—a letter not merely of gracefulacknowledgment, but full of that deep feeling which speaks from heart to heart, and at once ennobles the sovereign and the subject.”

Of the symbolic meaning of this jewel the following exposition appeared in the issue of January 15, 1856, of the same paper:—

“The design of the jewel is admirable, and the effect no less brilliant than chaste. It is characteristic and emblematical—being formed of a St. George’s cross in ruby-red enamel, on a white field—representing England. This is encircled by a black band, typifying the office of Charity, on which is inscribed a golden legend, ‘Blessed are the merciful.’ The Royal donor is expressed by the letters ‘V. R.’ surmounted by a crown in diamonds, impressed upon the centre of the St. George’s cross, from which also rays of gold emanating upon the field of white enamel are supposed to represent the glory of England. While spreading branches of palm, in bright green enamel, tipped with gold, form a framework for the shield, their stems at the bottombeing banded with a ribbon of blue enamel (the colour of the ribbon for the Crimean medal), on which, in golden letters, is inscribed ‘Crimea.’ At the top of the shield, between the palm branches, and connecting the whole, three brilliant stars of diamonds illustrate the idea of the light of heaven shed upon the labours of Mercy, Peace, and Charity, in connection with the glory of a nation. On the back of this Royal jewel is an inscription on a golden tablet, written by Her Majesty ... recording it to be a gift and testimonial in memory of services rendered to her brave army by Miss Nightingale. The jewel is about three inches in depth by two and a half in width. It is to be worn, not as a brooch or ornament, but rather as the badge of an order. We believe the credit of the design is due to the illustrious consort of Her Majesty.”

Punch, of course, had always taken the liveliest interest in Miss Nightingale’s work, and having begun with friendly jesting, he ended with a tribute so tender in its grave beauty that it would hardly have been out of place in achurch window; for below a sketch of Florence Nightingale herself, holding a wounded soldier by the hand, and with the badge of Scutari across her breast, was a vision of the Good Samaritan.

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