The Life of Florence Nightingale Volume I Part 29

(4) Camp at Aldershot to "do for" themselves--kill cattle, bake bread, build, drain, shoe-make, tailor, &c.--_Lord P. will consider_: quite agrees; means "will do nothing."

(5) Sir J. Hall not to be made Director-General while Lord P. in office.--_I won._

(6) Colonel Tulloch to be knighted.--_I lost_ (unless I can make Col. T. accept an agreement, which I shan't).[242]

(7) About Statistics, Lord P. said (i.) the strength of these regiments averaged only 200, (ii.) denied the mortality, (iii.) said that statistics prove anything.--And I, a soldier, must not know better than my Chief.

(8) Lord P. contradicted everything--so that I retain the most sanguine expectations of success.

[241] Mr. Milton had been sent out to Scutari by the War Office to a.s.sist the Purveyor-in-Chief, and Miss Nightingale considered that he had dealt only in official "whitewash."

[242] On this subject, see below, p. 338.

A good three hours' work! But many months were to elapse before Lord Panmure's promise to appoint a Commission was fulfilled. It will be convenient, however, to antic.i.p.ate the course of events in one respect, and to finish here the story of the _personnel_ of the Commission. Lord Panmure at once wrote to Mr. Herbert, asking him to accept the Chairmans.h.i.+p: "I wrote to Panmure," he sent word to Miss Nightingale from Wilton (Nov. 25), "as agreed between us, as _suaviter_ as I could as to the _modo_, but _in re_ trying to name the Commission and define the Instructions. I hope I shall hear to-morrow from him, and I will let you know how the land lies the moment I get any sign from him. Supposing that he yields, it will be a task of great labour and difficulty, but one well worth undertaking with a fair prospect of attaining an immense good, even if we do not get all we want. If he stands out, we must hold another Council for which I will run up." The text of Mr. Herbert's letter to Lord Panmure has been printed elsewhere.[243] On the matter of _personnel_, he suggested General Storks and Colonel Lefroy; two army doctors, one of whom he insisted should be Dr. Alexander; two civil doctors, one of whom should be Sir James Clark; a sanitary authority, Dr. Sutherland; and, lastly, a good examining lawyer. The Commission, as ultimately appointed, consisted of Mr. Herbert (_Chairman_), Mr.

Augustus Stafford, M.P., General Storks, Dr. A. Smith, Dr. T. Alexander, Sir T. Phillips, Sir J. Ra.n.a.ld Martin, Sir James Clark, and Dr. J.

Sutherland, with Dr. Graham Balfour as Secretary. If the reader will compare the ten names resulting from Miss Nightingale's bargaining with Lord Panmure, it will be seen that there were four changes. She lost one friend, Colonel Lefroy, but gained another, Mr. Stafford. She gained Dr.

Alexander in place of Dr. McLachlan, and Sir James Clark in place of Dr.

Brown. Dr. Farr was struck off in favour of Mr. Herbert's "good examining lawyer," Sir T. Phillips. He was the one dark horse; and, before the Commission sat, Miss Nightingale was asked to meet him. "We propose an irregular _mess_," wrote Mrs. Herbert to her (May 12, '57), "as Sidney thinks Sir T. Phillips wants cramming." There was on the Commission only one upholder of the old regime, Dr. Andrew Smith.

[243] _Stanmore_, vol. ii. pp. 119-122.

Had the facts recited in this chapter been known at the time, Miss Nightingale's opponents might have found some warrant for a suggestion that she had packed the Commission. But she and Mr. Herbert packed it only in the public interest. In discussions about women's rights it is sometimes said that women need no other opportunities for influence than such as have always been within their reach. Miss Nightingale, who was in favour of Female Suffrage, would hardly have gained more influence by the possession of a vote. But then very few women, and not many men, have the opportunities, the industry, the mental grasp, and the strength of will which in combination were the secret of "the Nightingale power."

Lord Panmure delayed his formal reply to Mr. Herbert's letter of conditions, but sent a short note meanwhile of a friendly character. Mr.

Herbert at once forwarded it to Miss Nightingale (Nov. 30, '56), and said: "I hope the note augurs well.... All I can promise is to do my best, and to postpone all other business to this one object till it is achieved. I shall require great a.s.sistance from and thro' you. I shall like to see all that you are writing as it goes on, if you see no objection. It would probably tell me much, and lead me to question, and so learn more." Thus, then, three months after her return from the Crimean War, broken in bodily health, was this indomitable woman thrown into the maelstrom of work which will be described in the next chapter.

But it was work for the salvation of the British Army. She "stood at the altar of the murdered men"; and she shrank from no self-sacrifice.

CHAPTER II

SOWING THE SEED

(Nov. 1856-Aug. 1857)

You have sown the seed, and the harvest will come. G.o.d will give the increase.--SIR JOHN MCNEILL (_Letter to Florence Nightingale_, on her "Notes affecting the Health of the British Army").

The power of pa.s.sive resistance wielded by a Department, and the reluctance or the inability of an easy-going Minister to withstand it, are unintelligible to those who are not themselves part of an administrative machine, and they are exasperating to those who are possessed of an impetuous temper and a resolute will. The Royal Commission on the health of the Army had been settled "in principle"

between Lord Panmure and Miss Nightingale at their interview on Nov. 16, 1856, and a week later the Minister had received Mr. Herbert's conditional acceptance of the chairmans.h.i.+p. It was not till May 5, 1857, that the Royal Warrant actually setting up the Commission was issued.

Throughout the six months of delay, Mr. Herbert and Miss Nightingale were busily employed in endeavours to persuade or coerce the Secretary of State into granting the Commission effective powers; the War Office and the Army Medical Department were as busily counter-working in the hope of so restricting its scope that any recommendations it might make would be of a "harmless" character.[244] There is no reason, I think, to suspect Lord Panmure of insincerity, but he was not the man to force the pace.

[244] See _Stanmore_, vol. ii. p. 124.

There were moments during the months of delay when Miss Nightingale's patience was exhausted, and there was one moment when her spirit for the fight quailed and she thought of taking service in a civil hospital.

Lord Panmure from time to time was afflicted by the gout--"in the hands," Mr. Herbert said to Miss Nightingale, "and this explains his not writing." "His gout is always _handy_," she retorted. Then there was the call of the birds to be shot and the stags to be stalked. "But the Bison himself is bullyable, remember that." This was the word which she constantly pa.s.sed round among her allies. At one time she pressed Mr.

Herbert to issue an ultimatum. Let him renounce the chairmans.h.i.+p forthwith, unless Lord Panmure put an end peremptorily to the delays and gave a pledge that the recommendations of the Commission should be acted upon. Mr. Herbert and her other friends were for a more cautious policy, and she was overborne. "If you can get us out of the old, miry rut,"

wrote Sir John McNeill (Dec. 19, 1856), "and put us fairly on the rail, though the plant may be defective and the speed small, we shall go on improving. Do not allow yourself to be discouraged by delays." She was not in the end discouraged, but she was not the woman to sit still under the delays. She remembered her own _mot d'ordre_; and if she did not "bully the Bison," I imagine that she sometimes administered a feline stroke or two. In December Lord Panmure asked leave to come to her quiet room in Burlington Street for a talk. And the talk was quiet, too, I doubt not, for Miss Nightingale, sometimes biting in private letters, was never vehement in conversation. But she could be quietly emphatic.

She was fully conscious of the strength of a weapon which she held in reserve. That weapon was her popularity, and the command, which she could use, if she chose, of the ear of the press and the public. Lord Panmure must have been conscious of this factor in the case also. It had been settled at Balmoral, again "in principle," that Miss Nightingale was to prepare a Report embodying the results of her experience and thought. If she and the Minister remained on good terms, if she felt a.s.sured that the Army in medical and sanitary matters would be reformed from within, her Report would remain confidential. But if she were not so persuaded, there was nothing to prevent her from heading a popular agitation for reform from without. This was her weapon for "bullying the Bison." In a note of self-communing, written during some moment of disappointment, she reproaches herself with having been "a bad mother"

to the heroic dead, but pledges herself to continue the fight to the end. She had "begun at the highest, my Sovereign," and had proceeded to work through the politicians. If all else failed, she would make a last appeal, "like Cobden with the Corn Law," to the country. "Three months from this day," she wrote in one of her letters of incitement to Mr.

Herbert, "I publish my experience of the Crimean Campaign, and my suggestions for improvement, unless there has been a fair and tangible pledge by that time for reform."

II

Miss Nightingale's exasperation was increased by the att.i.tude of the Government towards the report of the "Chelsea Board." The McNeill-Tulloch _affaire_, which filled a large s.p.a.ce in public attention at the time, requires only a brief notice here; the dramatic aspect of the now forgotten scene at Chelsea is admirably presented by Kinglake who, however, is not to be accepted as an unbiased authority on the merits of the dispute.[245] Sir John McNeill and Colonel Tulloch, it will be remembered,[246] had been sent out to the East in 1855 to inquire into the transport and commissariat arrangements of the campaign. Their Report, issued in January 1856, was the one official doc.u.ment among the pile produced by the Crimean War which brought responsibility directly home to specified individuals. Every one remembers the story of Lord Melbourne's protest when he had accidentally heard a rousing evangelical sermon with a direct "application": "Things have come to a pretty pa.s.s," he said, "when religion is allowed to invade the sphere of private life." Something of the same indignant remonstrance was rife when a Report on the Crimean muddle presumed to invade the sphere of personal responsibility. The impugned officers raised an outcry, and the Government appointed an examining Board of other officers to report on the Report which had reported them. This Board--called after the "Chelsea" Hospital where it sat--removed all blame from individuals, and found in July 1856 that the true cause of the Crimean muddle was the failure of the Treasury to send out, at the proper moment, a particular consignment of pressed hay. Miss Nightingale had many a gibe at this ridiculous mouse; and, many years later, Sir John McNeill rebuked "the levity" which referred "the fatal privations so heroically endured by the troops to so ludicrously inadequate a cause."[247] Some months were next occupied in the drafting, by the Treasury officials, of an explanation of the regrettable incident of the hay. The Government acquiesced, and the affair seemed to be over. And so it would have been, but for two factors--the press and public opinion.

The _Times_ led a spirited attack upon the Chelsea Board, and public opinion espoused the cause of Sir John McNeill and Colonel Tulloch.

Their Report had been set aside, and Lord Panmure had omitted even to thank them for their labours. Sir John remained contemptuously silent, but Colonel Tulloch, who was of a warmer temper, was vigorous in self-defence and rejoinder. In several large towns sympathy was expressed with the slighted Commissioners--a movement which Miss Nightingale and her family, through friends in various places, did something to advance. Complimentary addresses were sent to the Commissioners from the Mayor and Citizens of Bath, of Birmingham, of Liverpool, of Manchester and of Preston, as also from the Company of Merchants of the City of Edinburgh.[248] Noting this movement of public opinion, which was beginning to be reflected in the House of Commons, Lord Panmure bethought himself of doing something. His expedient was signally ill-judged. He had "the honour to acquaint" the Commissioners "that Her Majesty's Government have decided to mark the services rendered by you in the discharge of your duties in the Crimea, by tendering to each of you the sum of 1000." This pecuniary estimate of their services was promptly refused by each of them. "To accept it,"

wrote Mrs. Tulloch, "is almost the only thing I could not pardon in my husband, but, thank G.o.d, he feels as I do on the subject." Miss Nightingale was equally indignant, but her political instinct was not at fault. "I am _glad_," she wrote in reply to Mrs. Tulloch (Feb. 20), "that they have been such _fools_! I am sure the British Lion will sympathise in this insult, and if it does not, then it is a degraded beast." She proceeded to rouse the beast. She told Mr. Herbert about the Government's offer, and he concurred in her view. It was decided to raise the whole subject in the House of Commons. On March 12, 1857, Mr.

Herbert moved a Humble Address to the Crown praying that Her Majesty might be pleased to confer some signal mark of favour upon Sir John McNeill and Colonel Tulloch. The Prime Minister, noting the course of the debate, accepted the motion, which was agreed to without a division.

"Victory!" wrote Miss Nightingale in her diary; "Milnes came in to tell us." She thought she had lost in her round with Lord Panmure about Colonel Tulloch (above, p. 331); but she won after all. He was created K.C.B., and Sir John, who was already G.C.B., was sworn of the Privy Council. This episode, which in its initial stages exasperated Miss Nightingale so much that she was half inclined to throw up the fight, ended by giving her fresh spirit and encouragement. Her _mot d'ordre_ had come true: the "Bison" had proved bullyable--by parliamentary pressure. "I direct my letter," she wrote to the now Right Honourable Sir John McNeill (May 12), "with a great deal of pleasure. I consider that you and Sir Alexander Tulloch have been borne on the arms of the people--a much higher triumph than a mere gift of honours by the Crown.

The poor Crown has been worsted. I am sorry for it. But it was not our fault."[249]

[245] In chap. ix. of vol. vi. Kinglake accepts the finding of the Chelsea, Board as the last word on the dispute. For the other side, see Sir Alexander Tulloch's _Crimean Commission and the Chelsea Board_, 2nd ed., with preface by Sir John McNeill (1880).

[246] See above, p. 257.

[247] Preface to Tulloch's _Crimean Commission_, etc., 1880, p. xiii.

[248] For these addresses, see a pamphlet printed at Edinburgh in 1857, ent.i.tled _Addresses Presented to Sir John McNeill, G.C.B., and Colonel Tulloch, with their Answers_.

[249] Twenty years later another reparation was made. Sir Theodore Martin, in his _Life of the Prince Consort_, had taken an unfavourable view of the McNeill-Tulloch report. In the fifth edition he revised the pa.s.sage. "It is almost more than we could have hoped," wrote Lady Tulloch, in telling Miss Nightingale of the revision; "I say _we_, knowing how much interest you took in the matter." "I give you joy," replied Miss Nightingale (Feb. 23, 1878); "I give you both joy, for this crowning recognition of one of the n.o.blest labours ever, done on earth. You yourself cannot cling to it more than I do: hardly so much in one sense, for I saw how Sir John McNeill and Sir A. Tulloch's reporting was the salvation of the Army in the Crimea. Without them everything that happened would have been considered 'all right.' ... I look back upon those twenty years as if they were yesterday, but also as if they were a thousand years. Success be with us and the n.o.ble dead."

A copy of this letter was sent to Sir John McNeill, who replied (March 25): "It was kind of you to copy it for me. There is no one, dead or alive, whose testimony I could value so highly with regard to the matters in question as I do Miss Florence Nightingale's. Her favourable opinion is very precious to me, not only because she knew more, and was intellectually more capable of forming a correct judgment than any one else who visited that strange scene, but because my regard and affection for her is such as would make it very painful to me to find that she had reason to think in any degree less favourably of our services than she did formerly. Her letter is very characteristic, and therefore to me very precious."

III

It was her friend Mr. Milnes who had suggested that Miss Nightingale should go a little outside her "Cabinet" and increase her influence by extending the range of her parliamentary acquaintances. "Before the Estimates come on," he had written (Feb. 1857), "you should surely have some people in the House who know what you want." And again: "You should know Lord Stanley; he is the best man you could get in the House in whatever you wish to be done. Come and dine with him here on Sunday."

Mr. Milnes was right about Lord Stanley.[250] His public appreciation of Miss Nightingale has been mentioned already. He was not enthusiastic about many persons or things, but Miss Nightingale and her work were among the number. On now making her personal acquaintance, he sat, as it were, at her feet; he told her that he lived in hopes of being allowed to receive "future instructions" from her; he sent her early copies of papers and bills likely to interest her, and asked questions in the House of Commons which she suggested. When presently he became a Secretary for State they were to be a.s.sociated in important work.

[250] Better known to the world as the 15th Earl of Derby; Secretary of State for India (1858-9); Foreign Secretary (1867-8); Foreign Secretary under Disraeli (1874-8); Colonial Secretary under Gladstone (1882-5).

Miss Nightingale, for all her impetuosity of spirit, had plenty of tact, and knew how to adjust the means to her several ends. In the spring of 1857, an expeditionary force was being dispatched to China, and she was very anxious that the health of her "children," the British troops, should be better cared for than it was, at sea or on land, in the Crimean Campaign. Her ally, Sir James Clark, was on friendly terms with her opponent, Dr. Andrew Smith. So she used her ally to coax her enemy.

"I had a very satisfactory conversation with Dr. Smith," reported Sir James. "I find he has attended to almost everything I suggested--the ventilation of the s.h.i.+ps, the diet of the troops; and they are to have fresh meat and vegetables during the whole voyage and while on the station when it is possible. Nothing seems to be forgotten or neglected on Smith's part, and the Duke of Cambridge backed our recommendations.

So that the disasters of the Crimea are already telling for the benefit of the soldiers."

In the fight over the Netley Hospital, Miss Nightingale was defeated by Lord Panmure on the main issue; but she had some success in minor matters; and, though on the main issue she lost in the particular case, she won the day for the future. She was a pioneer in this country in advocating the "pavilion" system of hospital construction, which she had studied in France. Well-known examples of it are the Herbert Hospital at Woolwich, and St. Thomas's at Westminster. The plans for the Netley Hospital, which Lord Panmure sent her, were laid on the old "corridor"

lines, and she instantly condemned the plans on that and other grounds.

Into this cause, as into everything that she took up, she flung herself with full energy. She consulted all the best authorities, she collected information at home and abroad, she drew up memoranda, she prepared alternative plans. Lord Panmure did not dispute that her alternative might, in the abstract, be better, but pleaded that in this case the cost of alteration, now that the foundations were already laid, would be too great. Besides, there were susceptibilities--his own and other people's--to be considered. Miss Nightingale thereupon appealed to the Prime Minister. "If Miss Nightingale's suggestions are good," he wrote to Lord Panmure (Nov. 30, 1856), "it will be worth while to alter our intended arrangement of the building rather than have an imperfect Hospital."[251] Determining to press her advantage, Miss Nightingale went down to Embley in the Christmas vacation, and dined and slept at Broadlands. How great was the impression she made upon Lord Palmerston is shown by the peremptory letter which he next addressed to Lord Panmure (Jan. 17). It has been printed _in extenso_ elsewhere[252]; and a sentence or two will here suffice. "I am bound to say she has left on my mind at present a conviction that the plan is fundamentally wrong, and that it would be better to pull down and rebuild all that has been built. She brought hither the ground-plan and elevation of the proposed Netley Hospital, and the ground-plan of the last new Military Hospital at Paris, which she says has been adopted as the model for the Hospital at Aldershot." (The reader will note, I doubt not, Miss Nightingale's diplomatic touch; she only asked Lord Panmure to do at Netley what he himself was doing at Aldershot.) "It seems to me," continued Lord Palmerston most characteristically, "that at Netley all consideration of what would best tend to the comfort and recovery of the patients has been sacrificed to the vanity of the architect, whose sole object has been to make a building which should cut a dash when looked at from the Southampton River.... Pray, therefore, for the present, stop all further progress in the work till the matter can be duly considered." But even the most peremptory of Prime Ministers are not all-powerful. Lord Panmure immediately replied that the step ordered by his Chief "would involve us in great difficulties, as it would entail a rupture of all our extensive contracts, not to mention the reflections which it must cast on all concerned in the planning of those designs on which we have worked.... Many of Miss Nightingale's suggestions in the Report signed by herself and Dr. Sutherland can be carried out by alterations, but the total abandonment of the plan will be a most serious affair."[253] It appears from Miss Nightingale's papers that the War Office's estimate of the cost was 70,000; and these 70,000 reasons, combined with the argument from _amour propre_, caused Lord Panmure to win. Though ever reluctant to acknowledge defeat till she had fired her last shot, Miss Nightingale knew when she was finally beaten on one ground and she then made a stand on another. Foiled in her attempt to improve the Hospital root and branch, she used in good part the opportunities which Lord Panmure gave her of patching up "the patient," as she called it, so far as was still possible. The corridor was thrown more open; more window-s.p.a.ce was given to the wards; borrowed lights and odd corners were abolished; the appurtenances were separated; and the ventilation was improved.[254] With regard to the future, Miss Nightingale in her private Report, and in almost identical words the Royal Commission in its public Report, recommended "that all plans for the original construction of Hospitals be submitted to competent sanitary authorities before such plans are finally approved," and "that all new Hospitals be constructed in separate pavilions, in order to prevent a large number of sick from being agglomerated under one roof." This recommendation was stoutly opposed by medical officers of the old school. "Poor Andrew Smith," wrote Mr. Herbert during a sitting of the Royal Commission, "swallowed some bitter pills to-day, including Pavilions." The bitter pill, administered by Miss Nightingale, is now the recognized prescription in the building of Hospitals.

[251] _Panmure Papers_, vol. ii. p. 321.

[252] _Ibid_. vol. ii. pp. 332-4.