The Private Life of Florence Nightingale Read online

  ‘They have arrived.’ Miss Nightingale had changed her forbidding uniform for a black merino dress trimmed with black velvet, with clean linen collar, cuffs and apron, and a white lace cap. She was looking pretty for her visitor. It was wholesome to find her not only mortal but feminine.

  We received a party of three. Mary Stanley was pale, pretty, Miss Nightingale’s age, a little too hollow of eye and cheek, beautifully dressed in wine-coloured silk. She clearly knew her welcome was amiss. Someone must have warned her aboard the Egypt.

  ‘You look troubled, Mary,’ said Miss Nightingale briskly.

  ‘I…I actually found something on my gown. Actually something,’ she confessed in horror.

  ‘A flea?’ asked Miss Nightingale casually. ‘We have ceased to think about those things now. They are everywhere. The vermin here could carry off the four miles of beds on their backs, and march them into the War Office and Horse Guards. You cannot expect the refinements of the Episcopal Palace at Norwich.’

  Mary Stanley looked more shocked at the words than the fleas. One companion was a vast nun with a complexion like a slice of boiled silverside, Mother Bridgeman. The other a frock-coated, fair-haired, drooping, sweating, brow-mopping young man seemingly on the point of collapse, the Honourable Mr Jocelyne Percy. I imagined him overpowered physically by the hospital, but he was mentally by Miss Nightingale. ‘I am here entirely at your service,’ he said breathlessly, bowing deeply. ‘To be your footman, your fag, I have abandoned entirely my life of ease, pleasure and luxury, that I might devote my enthusiasm to the commands of you, the Lady-in-Chief.’

  Miss Nightingale said nothing. There was only one seat in the room, and she sat on it. I tried to squeeze away, but she said, ‘Mr Darling, I need two witnesses. Our visitors will sign my notes of the conversation.’

  ‘But why such formality, such coldness?’ Mary Stanley exclaimed.

  ‘To whom are your nurses responsible, Mary? To whom are you?’

  ‘Why, they are responsible to me, and I to Dr Hall.’

  ‘If I may say a word, now,’ interrupted Mother Bridgeman, with an accent as thick as Irish stew, ‘my sisters answer only to myself, and I answer only to my bishop. That’s a matter I must make plain, right from the start. It is completely and absolutely inflexible.’

  ‘I have toiled my way into the confidence of the medical men here,’ said Miss Nightingale, her fury as cutting as Newbolt’s busy amputation knife. ‘I have, by incessant vigilance, day and night, introduced something like system into the disorderly operations of my nurses. And the plan may be said to have succeeded in some measure, as it stands. But to have all your women scampering about the wards of a military hospital all day long, which beyond the limits of my own discipline they certainly would do, would be as improper as absurd.’

  ‘I do not scamper! ’ cried Mary Stanley.

  ‘How do you intend to organize your nurses, pray?’

  ‘Well, there are the ladies –’

  ‘Ladies!’

  ‘Who will not, of course, wear uniform. And there are the nurses. Whom one regards as…well, as one’s maid-of-all work.’

  Miss Nightingale tore into her. ‘By strict subordination to the authorities, by avoiding all individual action, I have introduced a number of arrangements. They are within the regulations of the service, useful on a large scale, but not interesting to individual ladies. I have diet kitchens for 700 of the worst cases, wash-tubs, bath-houses and night-stools. Which are not so amusing as pottering and messing about with little cookeries of individual beef teas for the poor sufferers personally. The “Lady Plan” of yours will end in nothing but spiritual flirtation between the ladies and the soldiers. It pets the particular man, it gets nothing done in general. The ladies will all quarrel among themselves. The medical men will laugh at their helplessness, but like to have them about for the sake of a little female society. Which is natural, but not our object at Scutari.’

  ‘Dearest Florence –’ A tearful meniscus rose at her lashes. ‘If I have given you pain by coming here, I heartily ask your forgiveness. I never failed to do you justice at home, for what you have gone through. In my lonely hours since you left, I have felt all that you have been to me. I have so missed the words of sympathy that used to cheer me. Often did I sit thinking how and where you were resting on the great battlefield of life.’ She sighed. The tears spilt. ‘Would that I could have you up in my rooms as of old, and talk over the wondrous chapter of life which has passed over you this year.’

  Flattery washed a rock bare of sympathy. ‘I have no Mary Stanley.’

  ‘Flo! But how you loved me –’

  ‘Yes, and no one will ever love you more. To her whom I once thought my Mary Stanley, I have nothing to say,’ Miss Nightingale pronounced. ‘You have injured my work. You have damned my courage, pursued me by treachery. Her whom I so loved and trusted!’

  I could have felt no more uncomfortable than straying into a boudoir and discovering both ladies déshabillées. Miss Bancroft, hands folded as usual, bright eyed and pink-cheeked, smiled with satisfaction, as she had smiled in Harley Street at Miss Nightingale’s spiking my pop-gun. Mr Jocelyne Percy was in a muck-sweat. Mother Bridgeman broke the tension by declaring loudly, ‘The position of my sisters will not be of nurses, but of assistant ecclesiastics.’

  ‘In years to come,’ the Lady-in-Chief added, ‘the world will have heard of Miss Florence Nightingale. Yet not one of Miss Mary Stanley.’

  The Irish nun demanded irritably, ‘Will you give attention, please, to Mother Bridgeman?’

  ‘Mother Brickbat,’ spat Miss Nightingale in her direction. Shortly the party broke up, to the variable relief of its members.

  That afternoon, I suggested a compromise. Mary Stanley shortly took half her nurses and nuns to the Naval Hospital at Therapia. Mr Jocelyne Percy shortly took himself off to England. But Miss Nightingale was never the same. Always jealous about her work, she became like a passionate woman with a wayward lover. With the standard of a rival commander raised at Therapia, anyone who did not care to obey Miss Nightingale felt no longer the duty to do so. The despot was diminished. Her subjects disregarded her for empty squabbles over religious trifles.

  Dear Uncle, I wrote to the Bishop’s Palace at Chelsea the following Sunday.

  Conditions have improved in the hospital during December. The men are reasonably clean and comfortable, have beds, enough food and even a few comforts. All this was achieved by the cool head and shrewd management of Miss Nightingale, who had the letter from Windsor, with which you will be familiar, read from ward to ward by the chaplains, ending with ‘God Save the Queen!’

  I assure you, sir, that Miss Nightingale is as adept a propagandist as Dr Manning, who I learn is disturbed not by the number of men dying, but in doing so without the Last Sacrament. Since the arrival of Miss Stanley’s party, we seethe with theological rancour. The chaplains accused Miss Stanley’s nurses of circulating improper books in the wards – not French novels, sir, which I sought for confiscation, but the Puseyite John Keble’s verses The Christian Year (which is Wordsworth and water).

  Miss Nightingale complains that she is caught between a Protestant howl and a Catholic storm, which distracts from her real work. Miss Nightingale would like some Presbyterians to keep the balance, but not over fourteen stone, three of such nurses being nearly swamped in a caique. Would that a gentleman of your great qualities and authority were here to restore us to our senses!

  After I had applied my threepenny stamp – only the men’s letters went free – and posted it, I had a sickly fear that my uncle might take my invitation seriously.

  Then Harriet died.

  On the morning of Christmas Eve, Handshear told me in his usual casual manner that she was ill. I found her with three sick nurses in a small square room at the base of the Sisters’ Tower. She had the cholera. The disease had stuck to Scutari like a life-sucking leech, despite the cold of winter. She was ashen, thin as a stick, mouth loose, eyes fi
xed, deadly purple fingers caressing her cheeks, her hands, the foot which Miss Nightingale gently tucked into the blanket covering her palliasse on the floor.

  She screamed, wrenched by the fearsome cramps. Then she moaned, moved her eyes, seemed not to recognize me, called me lovey. I took her cold fingers. One of the rats, which had come to regard themselves as rightful co-tenants of the building with humans, was staring at me just past Harriet’s head. Miss Nightingale seized a club kept in the corner for these intruders, and split its skull before it could scamper beneath the wooden divan. She had brought her customary efficiency to rat-killing.

  Florence nursed her own sick. With the men, she would swoop above the heads of nurses and orderlies to dress a wound, set a limb, or with her portable ink-pot take down precisely dying wishes. I now watched as she applied the stupe. She groped with tongs among the torn squares of old blanket in a tub of boiling water, wrung one dry in a canvas sleeve with sticks across each end, sprinkled it with chloroform and spread it on Harriet’s hollow stomach, afterwards rubbing the heated skin with mustard and turpentine. The two other women were convalescent, and lay drinking tea, unconcerned. Death was our stock-in-trade.

  The disease which felled the robust trunks of guardsmen in a day swept the leaf of Harriet’s life from the world in a morning. I was there when she died. I left her a little bulge under a blanket on the floor.

  ‘I think you knew her better than you cared to pretend, Mr Darling,’ Miss Nightingale said on the landing outside.

  ‘Yes, I knew her very well. She loved me. Perhaps she didn’t, she only loved herself. It was impossible to tell. No, I didn’t know her at all,’ I contradicted myself.

  ‘Would you write to her family, or shall I?’ I was about to admit that I never knew her family, when Miss Nightingale drew from the pocket of her black dress a ring with three diamonds, looped on a thread. ‘It’s a man’s ring.’

  ‘It’s her brother’s. She kept it for luck. She was very attached to him.’

  ‘A valuable object to wear as a charm?’

  ‘I’ll see he has it back.’ I took the ring from her.

  ‘Martyrs there must be in every cause.’ Miss Nightingale sighed deeply. ‘But it leaves me one pair of hands the less.’

  Corpses were never left long at Scutari. Their space was needed, and the rats ate them. We buried Harriet at dusk on Christmas Eve in the British part of the cemetery at Kalyon, a mile distant, two furlongs from the sea. Her body was stitched in the blanket she died in, and lifted on an araba pulled by half a dozen soldiers. Miss Nightingale wrapped it with a white pall, emblem of youthful purity. Harriet went to the grave with us still sharing a joke.

  There was the chaplain, Dr Menzies in scarlet and gold full dress and cocked hat, a dozen nurses, Miss Nightingale. It was a wild night, which strained the cypresses and drenched the mourners. Miss Nightingale’s Turkish lantern kept blowing out, but the clergyman long ago had the burial service by heart. We slid her into a shallow grave in the brimming cemetery. The soldiers had buried a dozen that morning. I noticed a clawed hand and wrist sticking in lifeless supplication from loose earth. Carelessness always comes with Christmas.

  The burial, even the memory, of Harriet were tidied away from the busy concourse of Miss Nightingale’s mind. We went straight from the funeral to her office. She had more tasks for me. I would supervise the three hundred women amid the dirt and vermin in the basements, establish a lying-in hospital, see the thirty-six nursing mothers were properly fed, eradicate prostitution.

  I was irritable, my emotions in fragments, angry at Miss Nightingale’s inhuman detachment. I objected shortly that I was unsuitable for the last duty, having no morals.

  ‘The causes of vice are not moral but physical,’ she informed me, ‘filth, overcrowding, drunkenness, ignorance and want of occupation. In civil life, you don’t expect every workman who does not marry before thirty to become diseased. In military life, you do. Why? Because a workman has occupation and amusement, and consorts with honest women. People always say that a woman like me can’t know anything about it, but because I know more about the actual workings of the thing than most men, I cannot hold my tongue.’

  ‘I doubt, Miss Nightingale, the possibility of even a corps of sanitarians making the army a moral institution.’

  She looked at me sharply, and reminded of something searched among her papers.

  ‘Our work here makes either angels or devils of men, and women, too. The cubs you mess with are somewhat devilish.’ She found Wiley’s letter, and ripped it into shreds. ‘I intended passing this to Dr Menzies. But I shall tolerate the unlicked cubs, in hope of their growing into good old bears.’

  I went straight to Major Sillery’s office. He had sent a detachment of six riflemen, and a corporal to precede the funeral with reversed arms, but did not show his own beefy face. I threw the ring into the circle of lamplight on his table. He said nothing, his fleshy lips open, his fat cheeks sagging.

  ‘I shouldn’t wear it again,’ I told him angrily. ‘Miss Nightingale didn’t recognize it, when she took it from Harriet’s body. Though she was suspicious – perhaps she thought it was mine. But a lapse of Miss Nightingale’s usual powers of observation cannot be relied upon to happen twice.’

  He started to say something, but even unaspirated speech was beyond him. I stamped down to our mess-room. The three others were drinking champagne from tumblers and eating Christmas goose at the brightly candle-lit table, all in untidy civilian clothes.

  ‘Hurrah! The Bird’s chick,’ cried Handshear, glass aloft. ‘Just in time to join the fun and gobble the gosling. Horace! Fill a bumper of the Widow for the worthy Darling.’

  ‘I don’t want anything to eat or drink.’ I sat on my uncle’s packing case by the stove.

  ‘Whoa! He’s in love,’ said Newbolt.

  ‘I’ve just been to a funeral.’

  ‘That’s hardly unexpected,’ Newbolt objected. ‘It’s easy to die in Scutari Spa.’

  ‘You know who it was.’

  ‘She was a pretty thing,’ reflected Wiley seriously. ‘Sure was a pretty thing.’

  ‘It distressed me. Tremendously.’ I was confessing as much to myself as to them. ‘I’m not inured to death like you doctors. I’m not hardened to the blood and sickness, and all the dreadful deeds you must do. I join in, because otherwise I might as well be dancing in Mayfair ballrooms. You don’t know the number of times I’ve had to fight back vomit. Or tears, which would be worse.’

  ‘Aw, come on, drink up and forget it.’ Wiley urged solemnly. ‘Only thing, drown your sorrows.’

  ‘I’ll go to bed. I don’t want to be the skeleton at your feast. Though I suppose to you a skeleton wouldn’t signify much.’

  They would have liked me to stay. They were good-natured men, sensitive to my distress but by their professional natures unable to share it, or even show it. It would not be fair to sit and spoil their dinner, goose and champagne not coming our way every day. ‘By the by,’ I said to Wiley, rising from the packing case. ‘The Bird is furious with you about that love letter.’

  ‘Not with me she ain’t.’

  ‘You can take my word for it. I’ve just watched her tear it to bits. It was touch and go whether she sent it to Menzies, with one of her vinegary little notes attached. If you’d been a British officer, you could have found yourself court-martialled.’

  ‘No, she ain’t mad with me, not one little bit,’ said Wiley smugly. ‘I’m no greenhorn. I signed it with the name of Thomas Handshear.’

  ‘Why, you Yankee swine!’ shouted Handshear.

  In my cold, dark bedroom, I could hear them laughing. Our joke on Miss Nightingale was no less significant than the bug crushed under my foot. So was her resignation, of which no more was heard – exactly as I had expected.

  16

  After Christmas, the hospital smelt better. Captain Gordon and his engineers cleaned the sewers. They got six hundred baskets of muck, two dead horses, a dozen dead dogs, a m
ixed dozen of sheep, cats, rats, donkeys and two men. The beds which the patients feared to take, next to the privies and swiftly fatal, became no more perilous than all the others.

  The engineers built a narrow-gauge railway from the jetty to the Main Guard, they boarded windows and holes in the roof, the wind and snow no longer blew from the Bosphorus across the patients, as though still exposed on the deck of their transports – from which we unloaded several with flesh and clothes frozen together, boots to be sliced away piecemeal, each with its backing of flesh, sometimes undressing them down to bare sinews and bare bones, one or two lying close for warmth frozen inseparably to each other.

  The pale horse galloped unreined through the wards.

  A British army of 10,000 men had been marooned on the heights overlooking Sebastopol by Lord Raglan, as effectively as if abandoned on those overlooking the North Pole by Commander Peary. There was a bigger British army of 12,000 men in the hospitals. The abandonment of knapsacks in September, the hurricane which sank the Prince in November and flattened their huts, left nothing between the troops and bitterest cold than their linen suits of summer. They supplemented their rags with sheepskins, horse-hides, and cut-up blankets, pulled mess-tin covers over their ears, grew long beards and moustaches which sometimes froze so that they could not open their mouths. There was not a tree, not a twig for a fire, the ebony-hard vine roots hacked from the frozen ground were running short, sometimes they enjoyed a bag of charcoal in their ragged tent and died of the fumes.

  The army was only five miles up the road from Balaclava, but the road was single, narrow, and impassable. Greatcoats, blankets, beds, tents, drugs, food, comforts were crammed into the Turkish Customs House at Constantinople, but of use only to the Turks who pilfered them. All awaited issue through the proper channels, which had long run dry. The Thin Red Line was so attenuated that Parliament stuffed it with German mercenaries at 2s a day, who aroused more disgust from the men than the enemy or their own generals. But the army’s organization had broken down. Heroism was not enough.