The Private Life of Florence Nightingale Read online

  ‘The Cambria and the Andes with the remains of Balaclava,’ said Newbolt. ‘They’re hospital ships. There’ll be two or three transports under sail on their way. Say, 500 or more men aboard each? Having enjoyed a voyage of 300 miles in ten days, probably on deck, without drugs, doctors, dressings or even much to drink. That’s the usual plan, ten dying a day, the sailors chucking the cholera corpses over the side like dead horses. We have to clean up the mess. Well, I’m a professional surgeon. If I couldn’t contend with every variety of bodily disaster which mankind brings upon itself, I’d chuck it and take to religion.’

  I could see through the glasses caiques nestling against both ships and rowing for the rickety jetty. I looked at my father’s watch. It was barely eight. ‘Can I lend you a hand?’

  ‘Please yourself.’

  ‘I should like to,’ I insisted. ‘I don’t really think that I shall be utterly useless here, as Miss Nightingale’s secretary. But you make me feel so.’

  I donned my fur-collared greatcoat. Outside was a blustery morning, throwing rain into my face by the pailful. The first pair of caiques were already unloading below. Tattered, bloody, bandaged, some shawled in blankets, some tottering on sticks, helping one another where they could, the lucky ones carried on stretchers, or by armpits and knees between a pair of Turks, the luckless thrown screaming to the ground by their slithering bearers, the troops mounted the drenched and greasy track to the refuge they had craved since the instant of wounding.

  The Barrack Hospital was a treacherous end of a terrible journey. The men had been first collected in farmhouses, their wounds dressed and operations done lying on straw. There were no operating tables with the army, Dr John Hall believing it a poor surgeon who could not extemporize his own. He had not noticed that the squatting Turks had no tables of any sort.

  The wounded were then moved by pannier, or by the araba – the wicker-sided Turkish cart, loose planks on a pair of axles with four small wheels, drawn by a yoke of their scrawny oxen – or mostly on their feet. Some were strapped to seats on the backs of mules, and found sometimes sitting stone dead. They went down the hill to Balaclava, the fishing village aggrandized as the army’s main port, its harbour crammed with craft like Boulter’s Lock on Bank Holiday, their anchors liable to dredge up limbs amputated by the surgeons or bodies relinquished by the equally overworked gravediggers.

  They boarded transports as overloaded as understaffed. The captains were furious at the degradation of ferrying the sick. One sought to avoid it by concealing his cargo of medical stores, which were found months later, looted and spoiled.

  The extra patients could not strain the resources of the barrack hospital, because there were none. They had to be laid somewhere and they had to be seen by a surgeon, both ridiculously difficult under the cumbrous administration. They were collected within the massive arch of the Main Guard, a hundred or more men leaning against the walls, squatting and lying on the rough stones of the floor. Their eyes were closed, their mouths open, some showed life only by the thin stream of breath from their pinched lips into the frosty air. They were in rags, thighs and shoulders red from rubbing against the decks, some worn to raw flesh and bare bone. All were shivering, all emaciated, all stinking, all were lively with lice.

  Handshear moved among them, collecting names for his Diet Roll, to be returned daily in duplicate to the Purveyor, Mr Ward – ‘Poor Old Ward’. Several spoke to me cheerfully, with the British soldier’s desperation to make the best of his plight. Upon one pale, quaking wretch I instinctively wrapped my greatcoat. A beau geste, but a foolish one, for I never saw it again and heard it was sold almost immediately for ten shillings.

  Many were weak not from the ravages of the enemy but from those of dysentery, diarrhoea and cholera. Several were already dying. Once inside, they might rally, then sink suddenly, feet turning black from the collapse of their circulation. For the following month, we were burying forty-five a day.

  I wondered where Miss Nightingale was.

  The rushed preparations in London, the uncomfortable journey, our shock on arrival, the indifference of our greeting, were surely to be eradicated that morning by the awareness of our value. But there was no nurse in sight. When I reached the north-west tower, they appeared to be enjoying a sewing-bee. At one end of the crowded room the nuns sat on the floor, at the other the uniformed nurses, all busy with needle and thread. Miss Nightingale stood in the middle with Miss Bancroft, as calm as if in Harley Street with no problems more savage than the rustle of the nurses’ dresses.

  ‘Slings for stumps, slings for arms, bandages, shirts, dressings, all can luckily be improvised from material we have brought for our own use, as you can see, Mr Darling. We should be scrubbing as well as stitching, because the quarters are filthy and the hairs of the general we found in occupation disturb my nurses. But there are neither brushes nor brooms, and household soap has become more valuable than blocks of gold.’

  I followed her into a small room leading from the corner, with a single high window, in our quarters a store. She had a camp stool and her papers spread across a portmanteau.

  ‘Why aren’t you doing your proper work?’ I asked at once.

  ‘Because I haven’t been invited. We must not show trop de zèle.’

  I noticed the pewter inkstand from Harley Street. ‘Invited? This is hardly a society ball.’

  ‘Your memory is short.’ She sat on the stool. ‘You printed my official instructions from Sidney Herbert in your own newspaper. I was to place myself in communication with the Chief Army Medical Officer of the Hospital at Scutari. That is Dr Menzies, who apparently nobody sees, because he has so many duties he can manage to do none of them. I am under his orders completely. Everything relating to the distribution of the nurses, the hours of their attendance, their allotment to particular duties, is placed in my hands – subject to the sanction and approval of the doctors. Admirably concise. Would that Lord Raglan made his intentions as clear to Lord Cardigan.’

  ‘But your nurses might as well be still sitting in Mrs Herbert’s dining-room –’

  ‘I will not move one nurse from this Black Hole of Calcutta until I receive Dr Menzies’ summons. I must blazon my humble submission to the doctors. If I upset them, we shall be disregarded and despised, and might as well pack our bags to be homeward bound on the Vectis.’

  ‘You’re vain,’ I said angrily. It was the first time I had dared disagree with her. To argue with Miss Nightingale was to grow closer to her, because she had to extend her intelligence in your direction. ‘Men at this moment are literally screaming for your ministrations. But you won’t give them until you are implored to, so that your qualities might be valued by others as you value them yourself.’

  She replied only, ‘Save your breath, Mr Darling. You may be needing it for moving the tubs which serve as night-stools.’ She sat stiffly straight, hands folded on lap. ‘You and not myself are speaking with your emotions. And emotions are as useless for getting things done as unconfined steam for working an engine. Pity is valueless for treating the sick – or treating with the officials who control their miseries. Pity as much as you like, but firstly plan. I am surprised at your naïvety.’

  ‘Why should I crumple under your opinions? I’m a camp follower, not a disciple.’

  ‘You must accept my doctrines, or go home. If I stepped into the wards without instructions, I should be breaking regulations. And the heads of all officials here are so flattened between the boards of Army regulations they remain old children all their lives. But like children, they will come running to mother once they are frightened.’

  She reached with her toe to crush a louse scampering over the floor. ‘I can say with Queen Elizabeth, “I thank God I am endowed with such qualities that if I were turned out of the realm in my petticoat, I were able to live in any place in Christendom.” Though Scutari is not Christendom in any respect. The Main Guard might well be inscribed, Lasciate ogni speranza, voi ch’entrate, but rather than g
ive a dying man a drink unasked, I shall sit here all day. Tomorrow being Sunday, we shall go to church. The hospital chaplain I hear is an inspiring preacher.’ She plucked pen from inkpot. ‘Will you please find Dr Menzies, to say I have a limited supply of medical comforts – arrowroot, sago, jelly, eggs, port wine, there is an official list – which my nurses can make into portions for his disposal.’

  I was determined to play Polonius rather than Rosencrantz in this grisly Elsinore. I found Dr Menzies in Major Sillery’s office, on the landing above our own quarters, both at a trestle table covered with papers.

  First-class Staff Surgeon Menzies was in command of the hospital’s medical affairs. He was a gingery Scot who said little, and would have preferred to say nothing at all, for fear of committing or compromising himself. Major Sillery always said too much, for fear of not sufficiently justifying himself. It was their contrasting way of admitting a common failure. Both wore the blue undress uniform, in which officers worked at Scutari.

  ‘’Pon my soul, sir, you do take a simple view of army administration,’ Sillery answered my request, red face glistening with sweat. Unlike the wards, his office enjoyed a roaring stove. ‘There is an official way of doing things, which everyone must adhere to, or nobody has any notion where they stand. When Dr Menzies decides a man needs medical comforts, he instructs the Purveyor, Mr Ward –’

  Menzies grunted. ‘Poor old Ward! Sixty-eight, goes back to the Peninsula and the Walcheren expedition.’

  ‘He is hard-pressed, with only two clerks. You can’t expect the army to sit on a fat rump of purveyors and the like, Mr Darling. Your Parliamentary gentlemen would soon wax wrathful at the expense. Mr Ward indents the Commissariat, on the appropriate form –’

  ‘Forms, dockets, receipts,’ said Menzies gloomily, indicating the table with a sweep of his hand. ‘Requisitions, reports, diet rolls. What time’s left for me to see a sick man?’

  ‘The Commissariat either supplies the articles, or returns the form marked “None in store”.’

  ‘What then?’

  Sillery looked at me pityingly. ‘Articles unavailable obviously cannot be supplied.’

  ‘Does the Commissariat always trouble to look?’

  The men exchanged an uncomfortable glance. ‘Things are not right here, I cannot but ’umbly deny it,’ said Sillery, wiping his face. ‘But the situation will shortly be transformed, believe me, sir. The Prince is on her way via Balaclava, loaded with beds and bedding, medicines, clothing, all we could want. They’d be here now, but for the navy’s infernal habit of marking medical stores “Not Urgent”. ’Ave the goodness to inform Miss Nightingale.’

  I smelt scandal reeking of blood and gunpowder, not the perfumes of London drawing-rooms. ‘Why have the men no spare shirt, no dry socks, no extra blanket, when they come in?’

  Sillery looked triumphant. ‘Lord Raglan’s orders. They were to march light, and Sebastopol was expected to fall easily, so they left their knapsacks before the Alma.’

  ‘Two months ago? Couldn’t they be retrieved?’

  ‘Matters are not arranged as neatly on a campaign as you civilians expect.’

  ‘Why are the privies so filthy?’

  Menzies replied curtly, ‘Privies are not my affair. If I got men to clean them, I should be accused of stepping on the Purveyor’s toes.’

  I had another question. ‘Why is the army more frightened of using its initiative than facing the enemy?’

  ‘Sir, you are getting above yourself,’ growled Menzies.

  ‘I have reason to,’ I said importantly. ‘I am charged with writing dispatches for the Penny Pioneer –’ Sillery looked alarmed, Menzies contemptuous. ‘Can I include the news that Miss Nightingale and her nurses have been promptly ordered to work in your wards?’

  ‘Mr Darling, see reason.’ Menzies was exasperated. ‘We have 510 wounded coming ashore now, another 540 due from the Andes, two more vessels still loading in Balaclava Harbour. I have four miles of beds, you’ve seen for yourself. To let loose a party of delicate ladies upon this would be a cruelty to them, and cause the utmost confusion to a system in which they have no place.’

  ‘If they do, Major Sillery can easily order them back to the boudoir which he has provided.’

  They looked at each other again. The Times had done mischief enough, but it was the newspaper of a gentleman. The Penny Pioneer would hurl the equivalent of a Cockney’s dead cat. Were they, too, frightened of the urchin?

  ‘If that proviso is clearly understood,’ said Menzies.

  I rose. Within half an hour I was overseeing a pair of grumbling, clay-pipe smoking, elderly orderlies, hauling out the overflowing latrine-tubs to a distant cesspool.

  13

  It was the hour of the ‘professionals’, Newbolt, Handshear and Wiley. The wards were all blood and jagged bones, men with bloody rags in place of arm or leg, sometimes both, occasionally all four. Men pierced with musket balls, ripping with indifference through skin, flesh, bone, eyes, joints or throat. Hands and feet lay on the floors of the wards, amputated arms and legs, some in their sleeves and trousers. Shortly, a small, bloodstained room was established for operating, which many of the men preferred death to entering.

  I won my release from the latrine-tubs through Wiley, who pressed me into service as an amateur chloroformist. We operated on a door or window-shutter across a pair of chairs if we could find them, on the ward floor if we could not, in view of succeeding candidates for the knife and handkerchief of Lethe. My first inexpert ministrations had men groaning and struggling beneath me, sometimes they half-slipped from the improvised table. I supported them with my spare hand while Newbolt or Handshear worked fast. I grew better. I proved that The Bird’s little man had not a chicken’s heart.

  Amid this gory chaos walked Poor Old Ward, spare, frail, in the blue undress uniform of an apothecary, a sheaf of forms under his arm. His responsibilities in the hospital comprised cooking, washing and cleaning – though not of the wards, which was the doctors’ duty – paying the staff wages, stopping part of the soldiers’ for being there, writing their wills and arranging their funerals.

  ‘Poor old Ward,’ said Newbolt. ‘Menzies hates him quite as savagely as The Bird. Last June, he tried to get rid of him by having a medical board pass him unfit. But Ward had chums in high places, who got Lord Raglan to quash the proceedings without setting eyes on him. That’s how the army works. You can see Raglan’s point of view. He’s almost as old as Ward, and almost as inefficient.’

  It was the evening of Wednesday, November 15. I had been in Scutari ten days, and a mental sextant was beginning to fix my position on the uncharted waters where strange tides had borne me from London. The war was 300 miles away to the north-east. After forcing the Alma river in September, Lord Raglan had found an attack on Sebastopol from the north blocked by a massive star-shaped fort on a commanding hill, and decided instead to mark round the Russian flank, settling his arm in a crescent of besieging trenches to the south.

  His base was the small port of Balaclava, six miles south of the trenches. Lord Raglan’s General Headquarters, and the Headquarters of the Medical Department, were a mile or two out of the town. There was nothing else between Lord Raglan and Army Headquarters at the Horse Guards in Whitehall, nor between Dr Hall and Dr Andrew Smith at No. 13 St James’s Street. Balaclava had a couple of small hospitals, and another being improvised from a church, but most of the sick and wounded were ferried across the Black Sea to the medical base at Scutari.

  The caiques connected us with Constantinople, and Constantinople connected us with home, by the electric telegraph and by sea, through the Straits of Gibraltar or more speedily through Marseilles and the Straits of Dover. A favourable wind of circumstances could blow a letter from London to Scutari in a week. There was plenty of shipping – sail, paddle and screw – and there was never enough.

  The weather had turned worse, as bitter and blustery as midwinter in the English Channel. Behind the picture-decked door wh
ich separated us from the cathedral of suffering, we were cosy enough. We had wood for the stove, if no coal, none being issued by the Commissariat because none had been issued during the Peninsular War.

  We were waiting for Kipping from the officers’ kitchen. We dined generally off preserved soup, Black Sea turbot, good value at five shillings, mutton, hash and pickled cabbage, dried fruit and rice pudding. Sometimes an officer shot quail for breakfast. We had plenty to drink, French wine, Turkish spirits, the rum ration, porter at three-ha’pence a pint, ‘Zest’ from home, and for a luxury, goat’s milk.

  Newbolt was cleaning his instruments, Wiley playing complicated patience with a ragged pack of cards, at which his New England conscience never allowed cheating.

  ‘Ward’s a ghost, anyway,’ Newbolt squinted down the edge of his amputation knife, as an officer along his sword. ‘The purveyors’ department was killed by economic strangulation after Waterloo, but the purveyors somehow remain to haunt us. Neither the doctors nor anyone else has the slightest control over them, while they control absolutely everything we do.’

  ‘Why shouldn’t you be proper officers?’

  He laughed. ‘Can you see it? Those swells in the Guards and the Cavalry, fractioning their authority with medical men? At home, we call by the tradesmen’s entrance, and they rate us lower than the veterinary. The great Baron Larrey survived comradely animosity only as Napoleon’s pet.’

  Wiley swore, sweeping up his display of cards. Handshear came in, picked up the bottle of raki, poured himself a drink and sat on a packing-case with a greasy Illustrated London News. ‘Watched a flogging this afternoon,’ he remarked casually.

  I sat up, the horrifying being always compelling.

  ‘Fifty lashes, which is the stiffest dose,’ he continued in the same tone. ‘One of the cavalry depot troops. They set up the triangles in the courtyard, and paraded the regiment to watch. I had to stand right up by the adjutant. He counts the farriers’ strokes, and sees they pitch in properly. They do it in relays, you know. Can’t have them getting weary.’