THE STRAIN ON HER was enormous. Three months before she had been an invalid; now, as well as working night and day on the Commission, she was turning her Confidential Report into an important work covering the whole field of army medical and hospital administration in the recent war, in previous wars, and in peace. This work emerged six months later as Notes on Matters affecting the Health, Efficiency and Hospital Administration of the British Army, a volume of nearly 1000 closely printed pages, crammed with figures, facts, tables, and statistical comparisons. The strain was intensified by the petty irritations, the tensions, the emotional conflicts, inseparable from the Nightingale family life.

Fanny and Parthe were profuse in fine phrases and expressions of affection. In practice they behaved with total want of consideration. The only place, besides her bedroom, where Miss Nightingale could work was a little inner drawing-room opening off the outer drawing-room. She sat in the inner room working at a table piled with papers, immersed in figures or talking in low tones to Dr. Sutherland or Dr. Farr, while in the outer drawing-room Fanny and Parthe entertained their friends, interrupting her whenever the fancy took them. A carriage was provided for Fanny and Parthe, but it was not put at her disposal. She used cabs, or, if a cab was not available, traveled in the public omnibus, an unusual proceeding for a woman of her social position in the eighteen fifties. Several times she mentions having been stranded, unable to get cab or omnibus and forced to walk in wind and rain. In November, 1856, Fanny told W. E. N. who had fled to the peace of the library at Embley: "Yesterday Flo went with Sir John Liddell and her good angel Hilary to Chatham, setting off at 9 1/2 o'clock and not returning until 91/2 at night; 30 miles to Chatham by rail, several miles in cabs and, Sir John says, up to 20 miles walking about the 3 hospitals." The next morning she walked about the wards of St. Mary's, Paddington, of which she had been made an Honorary Life Governor; in the afternoon she went down to Bermondsey and walked about the wards of a hospital there and came back late to the Burlington and sat up until the small hours working with Dr. Sutherland and Dr. Farr.

It would have been hard work for a woman in good health; that Miss Nightingale could perform it in her physical condition was unbelievable. Statistical science was in its infancy. Statistics relating to the British Army were almost non-existent. She was doing the work of a pioneer, visiting civil and military institutions, barracks, infirmaries, asylums and prisons. After a day of toil she returned, almost fainting with exhaustion, to be scolded by Fanny and Parthe because she would not go to parties.

Again the old painful story dragged itself out. But it was impossible for Miss Nightingale not to perceive that Fanny and Parthe coveted not her companionship and affection but the reflected glory from her celebrity. "I was the same person who went to Harley Street and who went to the Crimea," she wrote in a private note of November, 1856. "Nothing was different except my popularity. Yet the person who went to Harley Street was to be cursed and the other blessed . . . this false popularity has made all the difference in the feelings of my family towards me." "Nothing has been learnt from their former experience," she wrote in another note, "but the world thinks of me differently."

After her return from the Crimea she took her furniture out of the rooms she had used at Harley Street. In a pretty little scene before a gathering of admirers and friends Parthe begged to be allowed to keep the blue teacups "as a remembrance." In a private note Miss Nightingale commented that Parthe might also keep as a remembrance the fact that she never crossed the threshold of Harley Street without having hysterics.

Financial arrangements were a constant source of irritation. Fanny never ceased to resent Miss Nightingale's allowance of 500 pounds sterling a year and behaved as if 500 a year was immense wealth. She made a practice of sending in accounts for a proportion of the hotel bill, for any expenditure that could possibly be construed as having been incurred for or through her younger daughter.

The problem was insoluble. The truth was that where money was concerned Miss Nightingale was Fanny's daughter. She was highhanded, not squandering money but disregarding it, and she was incurably generous. Almost every I of January she wrote in a private note, "This year I must retrench," but she never succeeded in living on £500 a year.

When the Commission began to sit,, pressure on her steadily increased. Early in May Fanny wrote that Florence had spent the morning in Belgrave Square "coaching up" Sidney Herbert for the sitting of the Commission next day and "the afternoon at Highgate performing the same office for Dr. Sutherland," returning to work far into the night. Next day she set off for Highgate at 9 A. M., worked there until after dark, then went on to work with Dr. Farr and did not get back to the Burlington until very late. The day after that she started for Highgate at 8.30 A.M., worked there until 7.30 P.M., came back to the Burlington to find a message from Sidney Herbert, went straight off again to Belgrave Square and did not get back until after 11 P.M.

Meanwhile Fanny and Parthe gave breakfasts and dinners, drove in the Park, received callers, and paid calls. Through a mistake, one of their bedrooms was let. Fanny and Parthe stayed in the hotel but Miss Nightingale turned out, sleeping at an annex in Albemarle Street and coming into the Burlington to eat and work. By June Parthe and Fanny were weary, but they would not go home. The season ended. London became, wrote Parthe, "dismal as for a funeral," but Florence was not going away and, until she went, Fanny and Parthe were determined not to go either.

Alarming reports reached W. E. N. at Embley. He wrote to Aunt Mai and asked her to call at the Burlington and see what could be done ---Fanny was unwell, Parthe was unwell, and Florence was apparently dying. Aunt Mai hurried to London to find she had stirred up a hornet's nest. She hastily retreated with a burst of apologies: "Dearest Parthe. I am anxious to prevent two things being thought which may APPEAR other than they are. 1, that there was any want of consideration for your dear mother either on F. N.'s part or mine. 2, that I was interfering in any way. When I came to the Burlington on Monday not only did I not know what would be best to do. I only knew that each wished to do what was best for all, and that it was very difficult to do what was desirable for each." And so on for five, six, seven pages.

The summer wore on and became a nightmare. The weather was heavy, close, without sun but with great heat. The rooms at the Burlington were dark and airless, the sky perpetually gray. Water-carts sprinkled the streets to lay the dust, but the water they used was putrid and produced a horrible smell. Still Florence had not finished her work; still Fanny and Parthe refused to leave her. "The days draw on and bring each their burden," wrote Parthe to Aunt Julia on August 17 and signed herself "yours wearily."

Ten years later Miss Nightingale described to Clarkey what she had endured from Fanny and Parthe in the summer of 1857. "The whole occupation of Parthe and Mama was to lie on two sofas and tell one another not to get tired by putting flowers into water. . . . I cannot describe to you the impression it made on me." She was in a fever of fatigue. Every day brought more than could possibly be accomplished in a year. She longed, she wrote, for rest as a man dying of thirst longs for water. In this state she reached the Burlington one evening to be told that the Duke of Newcastle had called to see her. As she passed through the drawing-room, Fanny and Parthe were lounging on the sofas. "You lead a very amusing life," they said to her. "It is a scene worthy of Molière," she wrote, "where two people in tolerable and even perfect health, lie on the sofa all day, doing absolutely nothing and persuade themselves and others that they are the victims of their self-devotion for another who is dying of overwork."

Her position was extraordinary. She was, as the men round her delighted to call her, the Commander-in-Chief. She collected the facts, she collated and verified them, she drew the conclusions, she put the conclusions down on paper, and, finally, she taught them to the men who were her mouthpieces. As each witness came up for examination, she prepared a memorandum on the facts to be elicited from him and coached Sidney Herbert before each sitting of the Commission. "These men seem to make her opinions their law," wrote Fanny to W. E. N. in June, 1857.

"By Sidney Herbert's desire," Miss Nightingale wrote in a reminiscence, "I saw everyone of the witnesses myself and reported to him what each could tell him as a witness in public." Notes from him reached her two or three times a day while the Commission was sitting. "Let me know what you think," "Give me your notes on this," "What are we to do?" "What shall we say?", "This is Hebrew to me, will you look it over," "Your report is excellent," "I am at a stand still until I see you."

"Sidney is again in despair for you," wrote Mrs. Herbert in the summer of 1857. "Can you come? You will say 'Bless that man, why can't he leave me in peace!' But I am only obeying orders in begging for you."

"She is the mainspring of the work," burst out Dr. Sutherland to Aunt Mai in May, 1857. "Nobody who has not worked with her daily could know her, could have an idea of her strength and clearness of mind, her extraordinary powers joined with her benevolence of spirit. She is one of the most gifted creatures God ever made."

The Reformers christened themselves the "band of brothers," the Burlington Hotel was "the little War Office," and the meals they shared were "our mess." Within this circle was an inner council of three---Miss Nightingale, Sidney Herbert, and Dr. Sutherland. Though Dr. Sutherland had sacrificed his life to Miss Nightingale, he still irritated her. In 1855, when he was appointed to the Sanitary Commission, he was at the opening of a distinguished career. He was Sanitary Adviser to the Government Board of Health and received --£1500 a year for part-time duties. He met Miss Nightingale at Scutari, became her slave, and his career was at an end. He worked with her throughout the Sanitary Commission on the Health of the Army without remuneration. She never thanked him and seldom had a good word for him. Once in February, 1857, when they were working together on the plans for Netley, she wrote to him: "As for Sanitary matters---Lord help you I'm only a humbug. I know nothing about them except what I have learnt from you. But you would never have found a more practical pupil." It was the only acknowledgment she ever made.

He was untidy. He left his papers scattered over the sofa at the Burlington. He was unpunctual. He lost documents. He took a great deal of care of his health. Most exasperating of all, he was deaf. The more annoyed she became, the less he appeared to hear. She threatened to buy him an ear-trumpet, and he sent his wife to explain that his was no ordinary deafness but a peculiar nervous affliction. When she was pleased with him, Miss Nightingale laughed at him and called him the "baby" ; when she was annoyed, she belabored him with the full force of her invective, and he became "my pet aversion." Dr. Sutherland described himself to her as "one of your wives."

Dr. Sutherland made his wife write for him when he feared Miss Nightingale was angry, and during the immense labors of the summer of 1857 she had to write frequently. In one note sent down from Highgate by hand, she begged Miss Nightingale to forgive her husband for not keeping an appointment. "The rain is so tremendous that he would be drenched in five minutes so he hopes the Commander in Chief will excuse him for this once." He was not excused. First thing in the morning a messenger arrived with an angry letter. "I hope you will have seen Dr. Sutherland before the return of your messenger," wrote Mrs. Sutherland. "I am so sorry he could not go to you last night. I am afraid it worried you." "My dear Lady," wrote Dr. Sutherland on May 22, 1857, "do not be unreasonable.... I would have been with you yesterday had I been able but alas my will was stronger than my legs." One evening at the Burlington Hotel he was late with an urgent report. After a scene he consented to stay and finish it. When Miss Nightingale read it through, she was not satisfied and sent up to Highgate telling him to come back at once and go through it with her again. Dr. Sutherland lost his temper and refused, upon which she collapsed and fell into an "agitated half fainting state." Aunt Mai hurried up to Highgate and implored Dr. Sutherland to come or he would kill her. He came immediately and expressed "great sorrow and penitence."

Her demands were fantastic; yet once within her orbit it was impossible not to be fascinated. The tremendous vitality, the passion of feeling she poured into her work made the rest of the world colorless. Mrs. Sutherland was devoted to her husband, devoted to her domestic life; Miss Nightingale broke up the Sutherlands' home. Dr. Sutherland was a strict Sabbatarian; she made him work on Sundays. He complained he was ill; he complained he was overworking; she abused him. Yet Mrs. Sutherland adored her. She became "Miss Nightingale's fag," shopping for her, running errands, buying oranges, pencils, new-laid eggs, dark curtains. She called her "My dear dear friend," "My dear and ever kind friend." It was impossible to know Miss Nightingale without recognizing that she possessed qualities which allowed her to transcend the ordinary rules governing human behavior.

She pressed hard on Dr. Sutherland, but she pressed even harder on Sidney Herbert. The phrase she had scribbled against his name when the Commission was first set up she repeated again and again, "Without him I can do nothing." His standing, his prestige, his power with the House of Commons, were the means by which the Commission was raised to first-class importance. His powers were incomparable---if only she could get him to devote them to the work. But he was still hanging back. He complained of his health; he suffered from lassitude, fits of depression, and general malaise. They were the first symptoms of mortal disease, but to Miss Nightingale working, as she was convinced, under sentence of death, driving herself on by sheer force of will, fainting from exhaustion, forcing herself to get up and grind on again, Sidney Herbert's complaints were "fancies." She spoke of them contemptuously as "fancies." She grumbled about him. Speaking of a difficult negotiation she said: "Mr. Herbert and no one else can do it. If I can only bring him up to the scratch."

Working together they were unequaled. Her industry, energy, and passion for facts, his incomparable talents as a negotiator, were a combination impossible to resist. "He was a man of the quickest and the most accurate perception I have ever known," she wrote. "Also he was the most sympathetic. His very manner engaged the most sulky and the most recalcitrant witnesses. He never made an enemy or a quarrel in the Commission. He used to say 'It takes two to make a quarrel and I won't be one.'"

As the Commission proceeded, it became evident that the Reformers were succeeding beyond all their hopes. The long hours of close work, the exhausting journeys, the interviews, were bearing fruit, and Miss Nightingale's case for reforming the living conditions of the British Army was proving unanswerable.

In May Dr. Andrew Smith was examined. He cut a poor figure. "Never was man so shown up as Smith," wrote Dr. Sutherland. He gave no further trouble and allowed himself, wrote Sir John McNeill in June, "to slip quietly into the current of reform."

In the middle of June Sir John Hall gave evidence. Miss Nightingale had endured insolence at Sir John Hall's hands; he had been able to humiliate her, flout her authority and finally defeat her. Now the tables were turned, and she had him at her mercy, but she wrote: "We do not want to badger the old man in his examination, which would do us no good and him harm. But ---we want to make the best out of him for our case."

In July came the turn of the most important witness of all, Miss Nightingale herself. How much dared she and should she say? Sidney Herbert wished her to make no reference whatever to her Crimean experiences. He did not want her to "make bad blood by reviving controversial issues." His plan was for her to appear personally before the Commissioners but to be asked only questions on hospital construction. Miss Nightingale disagreed. Sidney Herbert's plan combined the two worst possible policies for her. She would appear in person and provoke the personal attention---the "buz fuz"---which she was convinced did the work harm and yet say nothing of importance to compensate. "I am quite as well aware as he can be," she wrote to Sir John McNeill on July 7, 1857, "that it is inexpedient and even unprincipled to bring up past delinquencies, but it would be untrue and unconscientious for me to give evidence upon an indifferent matter like that of hospital construction, leaving untouched the great matters which affect (and have affected) our sick more than any mere architecture could do. . . . It would be treachery to the memory of my dead." She decided not to give evidence at all. "Let me entreat you to reconsider your determination," wrote Mr. Augustus Stafford, M.P., on June 11. "The absence of your name from our list of witnesses will diminish the weight of our Report, and will give rise to unfounded rumours. It will be said either, that we were afraid of your evidence and did not invite you to tender it, or, that you made suggestions the responsibility for which you were reluctant to incur in public."

A compromise was reached: she did not appear in person; she submitted written answers to questions, but she did not confine herself to hospital construction. Her evidence was read by the Commissioners "with the greatest eagerness and admiration" and was agreed to be conclusive. "It must," wrote Sir James Martin, one of the Commissioners, ". . . prove of the most vital importance to the British soldier for ages to come."

Her evidence is of great length, occupying thirty closely printed pages of the report of the Commission, and is a verbatim reproduction of part of that great work which she completed in the same month, Notes on Matters affecting the Health, Efficiency and Hospital Administration of the British Army.

The enormous volume of the Notes was written by Miss Nightingale in six months at the same time as she was working day. and night on the Commission. It is a work on the grand scale. The canvas is immense; great masses of detail, vast quantities of facts and figures are handled with admirable lucidity; yet detail never obscures the main theme. The huge volume written at white-hot speed burns with an urgency which still strikes the reader with a physical shock. She uses the Crimean Campaign as a test case, a gigantic experiment in military hygiene. "It is a complete example (history does not afford its equal) of an army after falling to the lowest ebb of disease and disaster from neglects committed, rising again to the highest state of health and efficiency from remedies applied. It is the whole experiment on a colossal scale."

In six long and detailed sections she examines the causes; the course and the cure of the Crimean disaster, quoting facts and figures, giving tables, plans, diet sheets, proving conclusively that the hospital was more fatal than the battlefield, that bad food, inadequate clothing, insanitary conditions led inevitably to defeat, while good food, proper clothing, tolerable conditions restored discipline and efficiency.

Let the past, she pleads, be buried, but alter the system so that the soldier is more humanely treated in future. "It would be useless as injudicious to select individual instances or persons as the objects of animadversion. The system which placed them where they were is the point to be considered. . . . Let us try to see whether such a system cannot be invented as men of ordinary calibre can work in, to the preservation and not to the destruction of an Army. It has been said by officers enthusiastic in their profession that there are three causes which make a soldier enlist, viz. being out of work, in a state of intoxication, or, jilted by his sweetheart. Yet the incentives to enlistment, which we desire to multiply, can hardly be put by Englishmen of the nineteenth century in this form, viz. more poverty, more drink, more faithless sweethearts."

The most important part of the book follows. She had collected figures which proved living conditions in the barracks of the British Army in time of peace to be so bad that the rate of mortality in the army was always double, and in some cases more than double, the rate of mortality of the civilian population outside. For instance, in the parish of St. Pancras the civil rate of mortality was 2.2 per 100. In the barracks of the Life Guards, situated in St. Pancras, the rate was 10.4. In the borough of Kensington the civil rate of mortality was 3.3. In the Knightsbridge barracks, situated in the borough of Kensington, the rate was 17.5. Yet the men in the Army were all young strong men who bad been subjected to a medical examination to guarantee their physical fitness, while the civilian population included old people, infants, and the physically unfit. "The Army are picked lives," she wrote. "The inferior lives are thrown back into the mass of the population. The civil population has all the loss, the Army has all the gain. Yet, with all this, the Army from which the injured lives are subtracted dies at twice the rate of mortality of the general population. 1500 good soldiers are as certainly killed by these neglects yearly as if they were drawn up on Salisbury Plain and shot." In a phrase which became the battle-cry of the Reformers she declared: "Our soldiers enlist to death in the barracks."

Here was something very different from the dry bones of administrative reform, very different from jobbing back to old disasters, old grievances in the Crimea. "Our soldiers enlist to death in the barracks" was a challenge no Government could afford to ignore.

There were two channels through which her disclosures could reach the public, through the Commission and through publication of the Notes. In July, the month in which she completed the Notes, it became evident that, owing to the white-hot speed at which she had driven the Commission, its Report would be written in August. She decided to put the Notes on one side---it was a confidential report addressed only to Lord Panmure and easily shelved by him, while facts stated before a Royal Commission and included in its report could not be suppressed. The enormous volume, representing such agonizing effort, such almost incredible toil, was sacrificed. Lord Panmure was not presented with Notes on Matters Affecting the Health, Efficiency and Hospital Administration of the British Army until after he had received the report of the Commission in November, 1857. The public never had the opportunity of seeing it at all. It was never published and has remained unread. "It is an old story now," Miss Nightingale wrote of the Notes in December, 1858. She had a few copies privately printed at her own expense which from time to time she gave away, and in these alone this monumental work survives.

In July she began to write the report of the first Royal Sanitary Com-mission on the Health of the Army. She lists the Report as "one of my works." Success had been achieved, but at the price of her health. "Most people in her state," wrote Aunt Mai to W. E. N., "would be in bed not attempting to work but . . . if she can keep up for this time her object will be gained." She had set herself a goal: to finish the report. Everything was to be sacrificed, everything was to be endured until it was completed. When that was done she would rest.

But one day at the end of July she scribbled a sentence on the margin of a draft: "Reports are not self executive." She wrote the sentence again and again, in a private note, in a letter, on scraps of paper. "Reports are not self executive." She had realized that her task would end only when the recommendations of the report were put into force. Panmure had nearly succeeded in shelving the Commission; he would certainly try to evade the bothers involved in carrying out its recommendations. Once more the Bison must be bullied.

On August 7, 1857, Sidney Herbert wrote to Lord Panmure and communicated the outstanding points which would emerge from the report. In suave terms he pointed out that the disclosures as to the living conditions of the army were sensational, that public attention would certainly be arrested, and the Government would be attacked. He suggested the Government should protect itself by taking measures to remedy the worst of the abuses before the report came before the House. "The simultaneous publication of the recommendations of the Commission and of new orders and regulations already introduced by the Government to remedy the abuses the Report disclosed, will give the Government the prestige which promptitude always carries with it."

He then outlined a plan drawn up by Miss Nightingale which put the reorganization of the health administration of the army into the Reformers' hands. Four sub-Commissions were to be appointed at once by Lord Panmure, and Sidney Herbert was to be chairman of each. The four Commissions would begin to put the recommendations of the report into practical operation at once. Each Commission would have executive powers, and finance would be provided by an interim grant from the Treasury.

The four sub-Commissions would:

(1) put the Barracks in sanitary order;

(2) found a Statistical Department for the Army;

(3) institute an Army Medical School;

(4) completely reconstruct the Army Medical Department, revise the Hospital Regulations, and draw up a new Warrant for the Promotion of Medical Officers.

The fourth sub-Commission was christened the "wiping Commission" by Miss Nightingale, because its wide scope enabled the Reformers to wipe the slate clean and start afresh.

On August 9 Sidney Herbert told her that "Panmure writes fairly enough but he has gone to shoot grouse." A week later Panmure was forced to come south on urgent business, was caught "on the wing" at the War Office, and after a long discussion agreed to the four sub-Commissions "in general terms." Sidney Herbert then left for Ireland to fish for a month, writing on August 14 that he went "with a lighter heart after seeing Pan. But I am not easy about you.---Why can't you who do man's work take man's exercise in some shape?"

Miss Nightingale was still at the Burlington, still toiling in the stuffiness and heat, still plagued by Fanny and Parthe. The report was completed, but the four sub-Commissions must be prepared. It must be decided in what places and from what persons evidence should be taken and what questions should be asked. In addition, she was unexpectedly overwhelmed with work in connection with the Nightingale Fund. On August 11 she had a complete collapse.

"I must be alone, quite alone," she suddenly broke out to Parthe. "I have not been alone for 4 years." She was at her last gasp. She had eaten no solid food for four weeks and had lived on tea. Parthe forgot her grievances and was frightened. "It was very affecting poor dear," she wrote to Aunt Mai. When Miss Nightingale was calmer, she told Parthe: "I who required more time alone than anybody, who could not live without silence and solitude, have never had one moment to myself since I went to Harley Street. I don't call writing being alone. It is by far the greatest sacrifice I have made." She refused to go to Embley; she refused to be nursed. She must go away by herself. She admitted she was ill and consented to take a cure at Malvern, but she must be quite alone. "She took," wrote Fanny to W. E. N., "a sudden resolution to go to Malvern. Nothing would induce her to take anyone but George [a footman]. It makes us very unhappy to think of her so forlorn and comfortless."

She was very ill, so ill that it was generally thought she must die, and in London Harriet Martineau wrote her obituary, which was actually set up by the Daily News. Dr. Sutherland wrote imploring her to stay on at Malvern, pointing out as her physician that the Burlington Hotel, dark, stuffy, and in the center of London was the worst possible place for a person in her state of health. "The day you left town," he wrote at the end of August, "it appeared as if all your blood wanted renewing and that cannot be done in a week. You must have new blood or you can't work and new blood can't be made out of tea at least so far as I know. . . ."

Ill as she was, she seized her pen and wrote him an enormous angry letter. Her brain wandered; her sentences were incoherent; her writing straggled over the page but she still had strength to be irritated by him. ". . . Had I lived anywhere but handy would Mr. Herbert have used me? Had I not been ever at hand could he have used me? . . . Now had I lost the Report what would the health I should have 'saved' have profited me, or what would the ten years of my life have 'advantaged' me exchanged for the ten weeks this summer? Yes, you say, you might have walked, or driven, or eaten meat. Well . . . let me tell you Doctor, that after any walk or drive I sat up all night with palpitation. And the sight of animal food increased the sickness. . . . Now I have written myself into a palpitation. . . . I have been greatly harassed by seeing my poor owl lately without her head, without her life, without her talons, lying in the cage of your canary . . . and the little villain pecking at her. Now, that's me. I am lying without my head, without my claws and you all peck at me. It is de rigueur, d'obligation, like the saying something to one's hat when one goes into church to say to me all that has been said to me 110 times a day during the last 3 months. It is the obbligato on the violin, and the twelve violins all practise it together, like the clocks striking twelve o'clock at night all over London, till I say like Xavier Le Maistre 'Assez, je le sais, je le sais que trop."'

Dr. Sutherland replied on September 7 that she was decidedly wrong in passing herself off for a dead owl. He himself had got all the pecking "and your little beak is of the sharpest." Nevertheless, he loved her. "You little know what daily anxiety it has caused me to see you dying by inches in doing work fit only for the strongest constitutions. When I think of it all I can hardly bear the sight of a report. . . . One thing is quite clear that women can do what men could not do, and that women will dare suffering knowingly where men would shrink."

His affection and concern only provoked her. Impatience was gaining on her. Everything was to be wiped out of her life but work. Work loomed always before her, mountains of it, endless labor, endless toil which somehow must be struggled through. Mr. Herbert went away to fish; Dr. Sutherland prated of rest. Did they not understand, could they not understand that the only way anything could be accomplished was by unremitting effort, unceasing toil? Did they think she had brought herself to the verge of the grave for her own amusement?

She wrote Dr. Sutherland a cross, snubbing note. He was to cease this nonsense about being afraid of her and this nonsense about her taking a rest. Far from taking a rest, she ordered him to come to Malvern on Monday, when she intended to start work again. Everything, figures, facts, plans for the four new sub-Commissions must be ready for Mr. Herbert when he came back to London.

"I have your note Caratina Mia," Dr. Sutherland wrote on September 11, "and write to say how sorry I am that I should seem to be afraid of your biting me. . . . But what are Mr. Herbert and I to do when you are buried? How is the play to go on without Hamlet? . . . The daughters of Sermiah be too much for me. I'll take the veil. I'll retire from the world. There's no help for it then but my coming down on Monday."

He arrived to find her apparently at death's door. For once her iron will was defeated, and she was forced to stay in Malvern for over a month. Her pulse raced, and she was given two cold-water packs a day to bring it down. In spite of her physical condition she obstinately continued to work.

Fanny and Parthe, both unwell themselves and sobered by the frightening spectacle of her collapse in London, made only half-hearted attempts to join her. W. E. N. came to Malvern and insisted on seeing her for a few minutes. He was horrified. "Her days may be numbered, he wrote to Fanny. "Her breathing betrays her moments of distress, her power to take food fails her if excited, her nights are sleepless in consequence. . . . 'Tis a sad tale. I'm not able to say more. Adieu, W E. N.' I've said too much."

Once more Aunt Mai was called in. In the middle of September she left her husband and family and went to Malvern. She was expected to return in a week or two but she did not return. Husband and family were put on one side, and when Miss Nightingale returned to the Burlington at the end of September, Aunt Mai went with her.

The collapse of August, 1857 was the beginning of Miss Nightingale's retirement as an invalid. For the first year after her return from the Crimea, though she had gone into strict retirement as a public figure, she had led her normal life. She had had strength, she said, to "rush about."

Though she had refused to attend functions, she had seen her friends. "You should know Lord Stanley . . . come and dine with him here on Sunday," Richard Monckton Milnes had written in February, 1857. After August, 1857 she had strength only to work. "It is an intolerable life she is leading," wrote Parthe to Clarkey in December, "lying down between whiles to enable her just to go on." After any prolonged exertion her exhaustion was frightening, and she often fainted.

She not only became an invalid; she began to exploit her ill health. From the summer of 1857 she used her illness as a weapon to protect herself from her family. The summer had discouraged Fanny. She had been ill, and she announced that her health would not permit her to "attempt the Burlington" in the winter. Parthe, however, wrote that she proposed coming to London. Aunt Mai was told to write and tell Parthe not to come. Parthe was furious. Did Florence think her own sister was not capable of doing what was wanted for her? She insisted on coming.

Miss Nightingale's reply was to have an "attack." Aunt Mai wrote in the greatest agitation. After reading Parthe's letter Florence had been ill all night. Dr. Sutherland had been much alarmed and had said he could not sleep for thinking of her. "It was excessive hurried breathing with pain in the head and the heart." As a result, Parthe did not come to London. W. E. N. then insisted on coming; he must see Florence and discuss her future plans. She had another "attack," and he retreated.

It was evident that in the present state of her health, while her life, as Aunt Mai wrote, "hung by a thread," it was too much for her to see her family. They must keep away from her.

This unpalatable news was conveyed to the Nightingales by Aunt Mai in a series of letters of immense length, every page criss-crossed, every statement wrapped in layer upon layer of explanation, withdrawal, and apology. They were forced to give way.

By January, 1858 a point had been reached at which Aunt Mai could suggest that Parthe and Fanny had better give up coming to London at all. "My fear would be," she wrote to "dear friends at Embley," "that if you were staying in London and she trying to think day after day when would she see you, thus would be caused the agitation we so dread." In an undated note of 1858 Fanny wrote to Parthe: "My dear---Florence thinks we are staying in town for her sake, so we must go on Friday." Parthe made one further effort. In February, 1858 she wrote that she was coming up to London with Fanny for the season and intended to stay at the Burlington. This announcement brought on another "attack." Again Parthe and Fanny gave way. They must come to London, but they would go to another hotel. Miss Nightingale's condition improved instantly, and Aunt Mai wrote to W. E. N.: "Thank God all seems relieved."

Fortunately a new interest was occupying Parthe's mind. In the previous summer Fanny, writing to W. E. N. from the Burlington, described a visit from Sir Harry Verney, "an old guardsman, very much interested in Flo's work, his wife died last year and left as her earnest request that her daughters should become acquainted with F, but F. had not time for young ladies and she would not see Sir H."

Sir Harry Verney, head of the Verney family and owner of the historic mansion of Claydon House, in Buckinghamshire; was fifty-six years old and one of the handsomest men in England. He was immensely tall, his features were aristocratic and aquiline, and he possessed an air of nobility so extraordinary that people turned to look after him in the street as if he were a visitant from another world. He had originally held a commission in the Life Guards and intended to make a career in the army. When he inherited the family estates in Buckinghamshire, he was so horrified by the miserable condition of his land and his tenants that he gave up the army and devoted himself to becoming a model landlord. Agriculture and the agricultural laborer, owing to a long depression, were shamefully neglected. Sir Harry became a pioneer in rural housing and administration. From 1832 he sat as Liberal Member for Buckinghamshire, and he held the seat for fifty-two years. A Verney had represented Buckinghamshire, either the shire or the borough, in the House of Commons continuously since the reign of Edward VI.

Before the end of the summer of 1857 Sir Harry was a frequent caller at the Burlington. He fell in love with Miss Nightingale and asked her to marry him, and she refused him. During the winter he stayed at Embley, and it began to be evident that he was becoming attached to Parthe. The engagement was announced in April, and the marriage took place quietly at Embley in June, 1858.

The prospect of becoming Lady Verney occupied Parthe's mind; the business of marrying a daughter delighted and distracted Fanny. Hilary Bonham Carter told Clarkey in May, 1858 that she had been seeing Fanny and Parthe in London and spent "some horrible long days fussing and shopping with Aunt Fanny," but though Fanny and Parthe were staying in a hotel close to Florence "they did not wish to interfere with her in the slightest." At last she was left alone.

A HUSH FELL OVER HER life. She moved to new rooms in an annex of the Burlington---three bedrooms and a dressing-room on one floor, a double sitting-room on a floor below. The street was quiet; the house had none of the bustle of the hotel. The atmosphere was heavy with solemnity. Voices were lowered; feet trod lightly as her fellow workers were shown into the drawing-room where she lay prostrate on the sofa. She was convinced, everyone round her was convinced, that she had at most a few months to live.

Aunt Mai broke up her family life. She shut up her house, her husband and girls went to stay at Embley, and she came to the Burlington to make Florence's last months on earth easy. Her son-in-law, Arthur Hugh Clough, became Florence's slave. He came to the Burlington every day, wrote notes, delivered reports, fetched letters, tied up parcels,. and was content, she wrote, "to do the work of a cab horse." The Nightingales, cowed, remained at a distance. Aunt Mai and Clough became the twin guardians of a shrine.

It was a strange, hot-house existence led under the shadow of impending death. One day Miss Nightingale had a long conversation with Clough in which she arranged all the details of her funeral. She wrote many letters "to be sent when I am dead." On November 26, 1857, Sidney Herbert was given as a sacred trust the task of carrying out the reforms recommended in the report of the Commission. He was not to regret the manner of her death. "You have sometimes said you were sorry you employed me. I assure you that it has kept me alive."

On December 11, 1857, she gave Parthe directions for her burial. Her love for the troops and her association with the men had made her feel what she never expected to feel---a superstition. She had a yearning to be buried in the Crimea, "absurd as I know it to be. For they are not there."

In November, 1857 she made a will in which the property she would one day inherit from her father and mother was to be used to erect a model barrack, not forgetting the wives but having a kind of Model Lodging House for the married men.

Personal remembrances were to he sent to Mrs. Herbert, Dr. Sutherland, and Sir John McNeill, "after I am dead," and Parthe was instructed to bring them from Embley.

It was an atmosphere in which emotion ran riot, and the exalted affection between Miss Nightingale and Aunt Mai burst into strange flower. Wounded by the behavior of Fanny and Parthe during the summer, she conceived an idea which she called the "Virgin Mother," to explain the love and sympathy she felt in Aunt Mai, the indifference she felt in Fanny. "Probably there is not a word of truth in the story of the Virgin Mary," she wrote in a private note of 1857. "But the deepest truth lies in the idea of the Virgin Mother. The real fathers and mothers of the human race are NOT the fathers and mothers according to the flesh. I don't know why it should be so. It 'did not ought to be so.' But it is. Perhaps it had better not be said at all. What is 'Motherhood in the Flesh'? A pretty girl meets a man and they are married. Is there any thought of the children? The children come without their consent even having been asked because it can't be helped. . . . For every one of my 18,000 children, for every one of these poor tiresome Harley Street creatures I have expended more motherly feeling and action in a week than my mother has expended for me in 37 years."

In another note she wrote: "I have had a spiritual mother without whom I could have done nothing, who has been all along a 'Holy Ghost' to me and lately has lived the life of a porter's wife for me." On Aunt Mai's side affection passed into worship. "My child, my friend, my guide and uplifter, my dearest one on earth or in heaven," she wrote. Recalling this period to Clarkey, Miss Nightingale said: "We were like two lovers."

Her family had agreed not to expect letters from her; her energy must be preserved for work, Aunt Mai was to send reports. And now, lying on the sofa in the drawing-room, seldom sitting up and almost never going out, she proceeded to toil as she had never toiled before. In November, 1857 Aunt Mai wrote: "Mr. Herbert for 3 hours in the morning, Dr. Sutherland for 4 hours in the afternoon. Dr. Balfour, Dr. Farr, Dr. Alexander interspersed." A little later: "Flo is working double tides, labouring day after day until she is almost fainting." The task differed from the task of a year ago when the material for the Commission was being collected. "There is now the most important work of all to be done namely to gain the fruit of the Report in working the Reforms which have been its purpose---they have now not only to work but to fight." "Dr. Sutherland quite admits," wrote Aunt Mai, "that . . . completion depends on her. She alone can give facts which no one else hardly possesses . . . she alone has both the smallest details at her finger ends and the great general view of the whole. He has been saying all this while at his luncheon, now he is at his work, and I only hope he won't too soon say 'Will you tell her I am at a standstill until I see her,' for she is now resting, and I am always afraid to hear those words which don't at all the less come because he begins by saying, 'I don't want her at all, I only want her to rest.' "

Lord Panmure was behaving over the four sub-Commissions exactly as he had behaved over the Commission itself. He had been frightened by Sidney Herbert into agreement, but, under pressure from within the War Office, he lost his nerve and once more retreated to the Highlands where he shot grouse, left letters unanswered, and refused to come to London.

"Pan is still shooting," wrote Sidney Herbert on September 28. "In future you must defend the Bison, for I won't." Miss Nightingale sent letters to Brechin Castle; she got wind of a flying visit Panmure was secretly paying to London and sent him round a note by hand. She declared in a letter to Sir John McNeill on October 10: "I shall not leave P. alone till this is done." Her personal relations with Panmure continued playful. Grim determination was masked by compliments and jokes. She wrote him humorous notes; he sent her grouse. In private she raged against his "unmanly and brutal indifference." "I have been three years serving in the War Department," she wrote to Sidney Herbert in November, 1857. "When I began there was incapacity but not indifference. Now there is incapacity and indifference."

Lord Panmure was being rent apart. The Reformers were powerful, they had public opinion with them, and public opinion was to be dreaded; but the reactionary party within the War Office was powerful and to be dreaded as well. On the administrative side Sir Benjamin Hawes was capable of causing infinite trouble, while Dr. Andrew Smith was fighting furiously against the "wiping" sub-Commission, which wiped the slate clean for the complete reorganization of the Army Medical Department. In November, 1857 pressure from the War Office was so great that Panmure revoked the "wiping" sub-Commission. The Reformers were appalled, Sidney Herbert forced Panmure to see him, and after a long and stormy interview this sub-Commission was reinstated.

It became clear to Miss Nightingale that the issue turned on the ability of each side to frighten Panmure. Whichever side could frighten him most thoroughly would be victorious.

She devised a new idea. Public opinion was the Reformers' strongest weapon. She would instruct public opinion and at the same time put pressure on Panmure through a Press campaign which should tell the nation the truth about conditions in the army.

The outlines, the facts, even the headings for all articles were supplied to contributors by her. "I enclose a sketch, add to it, take away from it, alter it," she wrote to Edwin Chadwick in August, 1858. Lord Stanley, Sidney Herbert, Edwin Chadwick, who had sat on the first Poor Law Commission of 1834 and instigated the first Sanitary Commission of 1839, wrote for her. She refused to sign anything herself. Her contribution was an unsigned pamphlet, Mortality in the British Army, which was one of the earliest, if not the earliest, instance of the presentation of statistical facts by means of pictorial charts---Miss Nightingale believed she invented this method. The facts that the majority of deaths in the Crimean mortality were due not to war but to preventable disease, and that mortality in barracks was double the mortality in civil life, were driven home at a glance by means of colored circles and wedges. The text was an explanation of the diagrams based on the Reformers' battle-cry, "Our soldiers enlist to death in the barracks."

By the end of 1857 Panmure had given way. The four sub-Commissions were granted and set up in December. "With such ample instructions as you may guess them to be, when I tell you they were written by me," wrote Miss Nightingale to Sir John McNeill.

She did not go to Embley for Christmas, but stayed in London at the Burlington with Aunt Mai and Clough. The year 1858 dawned brightly for the Reformers, and as the summer came they gained success after success; even though in February, 1858 Lord Palmerston's government fell. Lord Panmure went out of office, and for a moment it appeared as if his exit might be fatal. Dr. Andrew Smith had at last retired, and the next man in order of seniority was Sir John Hall. Lord Panmure had pledged his word that as long as he held office Sir John Hall should never be Director-General, but at this crucial moment Panmure was succeeded by General Peel. Miss Nightingale was in an agony. The appointment hung in the balance, and she raged at the fate which had decreed the Bison's disappearance at the one moment when he could be of use. However, Sidney Herbert, with his matchless talent for negotiation, approached General Peel. On February 27 Peel promised he would make no appointment until he had conferred with Sidney Herbert, but would not commit himself further. Sidney Herbert continued to put himself in Peel's way, not speaking directly on the appointment but "throwing in a little praise of Alexander when talking or writing on other subjects." His persuasiveness was effectual. On May 25 he wrote that he had won the day. Sir John Hall was passed over, and Alexander was appointed Director-General of the Medical Department of the British Army and officially gazetted on June 11.

A citadel had fallen. Cooperation would replace obstruction from within the Medical Department at the War Office. "Smith is really gone," wrote Sidney Herbert. ---It is no use trying to realise the enormous importance of such a fact." Yet another victory followed. On May 11 in the House of Commons Lord Ebrington moved a series of resolutions on the health of the army founded on the report of the Royal Sanitary Commission. He called attention to the figures published in the report revealing the high mortality in barracks compared to the mortality in civil life. "Improvements," he concluded, "are imperatively called for not less by good policy and true economy than by justice and humanity." There were deafening cheers. After reading the account of this debate, Sir John McNeill wrote to Miss Nightingale on May 13: "To you more than to any other man or woman alive will henceforth be due the welfare and efficiency of the British Army. I thank God that I have lived to see your success."

Throughout the summer of 1858 she was at the Burlington, going out of London only twice for a week's cure of "fresh air and water packs" at Malvern. She traveled by railway in an invalid carriage attended by Aunt Mai as "dragon" and Clough as courier. Bystanders were struck with awe. She was carried in a chair, and usually her bearers were old soldiers, who carried her as if she were a divinity. A space was cleared on the platform, curious onlookers were pushed back, voices were hushed, and the station-master and his staff stood bareheaded as she was carried into the carriage. She was already becoming a legend.

Though she cut herself off from the world, her rooms at the Burlington, the "little War Office," were a hive of industry. She had made her rooms cheerful with new carpets and curtains at her own expense. Lady Ashburton, who before her marriage had been Miss Louisa Stewart Mackenzie, "beloved Zöe," sent flowers and plants from Melchett Court every week; Fanny supplemented the catering of the Burlington with game, hot-house fruit, eggs, and cream. Miss Nightingale was very ready to provide her fellow workers with breakfasts, luncheons, and dinners. "If you will come and talk ought it not to be with dinner?" she wrote to Dr. Farr in 1859. "Please come here you shall have dinner at 7," she wrote to Dr. Balfour in 1859. She offered the delegates to the Statistical Congress of 1860 "a room, breakfast, dinner and a place to work at any time---a better dinner with notice." She seldom joined these parties herself, but from her couch she kept a hand on detail. "Take care of your cream for the breakfast---it is quite turned." "Put Dr. Balfour's big book back where he can see it while drinking his tea," she told Aunt Mai.

She visited no one, but eminent visitors came to her. The Queen of Holland, the Crown Princess of Prussia, the Duke of Cambridge called on her regularly. Kinglake consulted her when he was writing his Invasion on of the Crimea. She was not impressed. "I found him exceedingly courteous and agreeable," she wrote to Edwin Chadwick, "looking upon the war as a work of art and emotion---and upon me as one of the figures in the picture ... upon figures (arithmetical) as worthless---upon assertion as proof. He was utterly and self sufficiently in the dark as to all the real causes of Crimean Mortality." Kinglake's well-known description of herself and her work she dismissed shortly: "He meant it to be kind, but it was fulsome."

Manning visited her, and she wrote to him in February, 1860 as "one of those whom I know to be friendly to me." She told Sidney Herbert that Manning had always treated her fairly; he advised her on the special needs of the Catholic regiments of the army.

In the spring of 1858 she had begun an important friendship. Captain Douglas Galton, a brilliant young Royal Engineer, was the army's leading expert on barrack construction, ventilation, heating, water supply, and drainage. He held an important War Office appointment, had been appointed referee for the consideration of plans for the drainage of London, and was a member of the Barrack sub-Commission. He was also a family connection, for in 1851 he had married the beautiful Marianne Nicholson. In 1857 Marianne and the Nightingales were reconciled, and Clarkey was asked to meet her at a breakfast given by Fanny and Parthe at the Burlington. "In comes Marianne by invitation," wrote Clarkey to Mrs. Bonham Carter on July 18; "we are all loving, she is always as pretty and much improved in character, she takes an interest in amendments and don't never flirt no more. Let people talk against matrimony! "

After the Barrack Commission was set up, Miss Nightingale and Douglas Galton met and corresponded almost daily. She absorbed him. She was too busy to see Marianne, but she wrote her kind letters and was godmother to one of the Galton children. Otherwise Marianne's name was not mentioned. Once at the foot of a long letter dealing with the construction of a hospital at Woolwich, he scribbled in pencil: "Marianne had a boy this morning."

The support of Douglas Galton, the appointment of Alexander as Director-General of the Army Medical Department, the appointment of Dr. Balfour to establish a statistical department within the War Office strengthened Miss Nightingale's hand, and in the autumn of 1858 she judged the time was ripe for another Press campaign. The only way to influence Ministers, she wrote, was through the public.

Notes on Matters affecting the Health, Efficiency and Hospital Administration of the British Army was lying unused. Copies were sent to the Queen, the Commander-in-Chief, Members of the Cabinet, War Office officials, and well-known public figures with a covering letter. "This is an advance copy of a Confidential Report," she wrote. "May I ask you not to mention to anyone that you have this Report." A copy was sent to Harriet Martineau with a letter calculated to provoke her interest by warning her, "this Report is in no sense public property."

Harriet Martineau was a leader-writer on the Daily News. The daughter of an unsuccessful sugar-refiner, deaf, sickly, physically unattractive, and born without the sense of taste or smell---she said she had only once in her life been able to taste a leg of mutton and found it delicious---she had become a political power through her writings. She had hit on the idea of conveying knowledge in the form of fiction, and in an enormously successful series of tales had illustrated the facts of political economy, taxation, and the poor law.

Like Miss Nightingale, she suffered from bad health, and her character was, she wrote, gloomy, jealous, and morbid. In 1839 she was pronounced to be suffering from an incurable disease and had spent five years in bed. She recovered, cured by mesmerism. In 1855 she was announced to be dying of heart disease, but in fact she did not die until twenty years later.

She was a passionate supporter of the movement for "Women's Rights," unlike Miss Nightingale who, though she did more to open new worlds to women than perhaps any other woman, was not a feminist. Miss Nightingale dedicated herself to the cause of the unfortunate, the weak, the suffering, and the defenseless, and it was a matter of indifference to her whether they happened to be women or men.

She forbade Harriet Martineau to use the Notes as the text for a sermon on pioneer women. "I have a great horror of its being made use of after my death by 'Women's Missionaries' and those kinds of people. I am brutally indifferent to the wrongs or the rights of my sex," she wrote on November 30, 1858. Miss Martineau used information from the Notes for a series of articles on the army which were published in the Daily News and successfully reprinted in 1859 in book form under the title England and her Soldiers.

It was a hopeful period. The four sub-Commissions, in spite of official opposition, were accomplishing a great deal. Barracks were being inspected and plans laid for rebuilding and reconditioning. Alexander was hard at work on the new regulations which were to transform the Army Medical Department. For the future, developments of the greatest importance were taking shape.

In the summer of 1857 the Indian Mutiny had broken out. Miss Nightingale longed to leave her desk and go out to the troops, but Sidney Herbert prevented her. "I may tell you in confidence," she wrote to Dr. Pattinson Walker in 1865, "that in 1857, that dreadful year for India, I offered to go out to India in the same way as to the Crimea. But Sidney Herbert . . . put a stop to it. He said that I had undertaken this work, caused him to undertake it and that I must stay and help him." She consoled herself with the reflection that by her work for the army in England she was saving more lives than by going to India. "What are the murders committed by these miserable Bengalese compared to the murders committed by the insouciance of educated cultivated Englishmen?" she wrote to Sidney Herbert in September, 1857. As a result of the Mutiny India passed from the government of the East India Company to the government of the Crown, and the welfare of the troops in India became the responsibility of the British Government. In the course of the Royal Commission appalling reports were received of sanitary conditions in India, and for six months Miss Nightingale had been asking for a second Royal Sanitary Commission to deal with the health of the army in India. Now she seemed likely to succeed. The first Secretary of State for India to be appointed after the passage of the Control of India Bill in 1858 was Lord Stanley, her admirer and friend, and there was every probability that the Commission would be set up in the near future.

All too soon the sky darkened. In August, 1858 Alexis Soyer died. At the time of his death he was collaborating with her on the Barracks' Commission, and one of his last acts was to open, on July 28, his model kitchen at the Wellington Barracks. On August 28 she wrote to Douglas Galton: "Soyer's death is a great disaster. My only comfort is that you were imbued before his death with his notions."

But the disaster of Soyer's death was as nothing compared with the next disaster that threatened---the breakdown of Sidney Herbert's health. He had never been robust. After his term of office during the Crimea his health had broken down and he had gone abroad for a cure, and during the Royal Commission he had broken down again. Two months of fishing in Ireland, and riding and shooting at Wilton during the long vacation, partially restored him, but when he had returned to London in the autumn of 1857 he had to grapple with the enormous tasks of setting up the four sub-Commissions and then of administering them, since he was chairman of each of the four.

The work was crushing, physically. Inspection of barracks meant constant traveling; there was opposition; commanding officers were insolent. Facilities for inspection were refused, and the Commissioners were kept waiting on barrack squares in cold and wind. "The Big-Wigs were surly," he wrote after a visit to Aldershot in March, 1858. Physical exertions were succeeded by the close and gruelling labor of drafting and revising regulations, for three of the sub-Commissions dealt with administration. The strain was too great. From the beginning of 1858 a marked deterioration in his health began.

In January of that year he was suffering from acute neuralgia and tic in the temples. Miss Nightingale recommended "saturating a small piece of cotton with chloroform and camphor, putting it up the nose and inhaling strongly." He followed this prescription, did it too frequently, and made himself sick. At the end of the month he wrote: "My head is very shaky in the neuralgic way." On February 2 he was apologizing for missing a conference---"I am fairly broken down, but will be up again directly." He got up but felt so ill that he had to go back to bed. Three days later he wrote that he was suffering tortures from headache and was unable to work. On the 15 March he was in bed again---"Here I am idling away my time in bed. I have been heartily ashamed of myself these last few days."

Never did a man receive less sympathy. Miss Nightingale working, as she believed on her deathbed, had small consideration for lesser ailments. What was a headache, a feeling of wretchedness compared with what she was enduring? It was no new thing for her to complain of him. They had differed when she was in the Crimea. He had evaded her on the subject of Army Reform when she came home. "Ten years have I been endeavouring to obtain an expression of opinion from him and have never succeeded yet," she wrote to Sir John McNeill in November, 1857. Nevertheless, she finished the letter with the phrase she used so often, "without him I could do nothing."

She drove him. That was her function. He did not shrink from her white-hot energy, her implacability---he needed its vitalizing warmth. The fundamental differences between their two characters balanced each of them and gave their collaboration its immense value. But because they were so different, complications ensued. They irritated each other. Miss Nightingale lavished no admiration on Sidney Herbert while he was alive; her eulogies were written after his death. She was impatient with him; she hunted him; she grumbled at him; and Sidney Herbert, renowned for his urbanity and gentleness, scolded her. He told her she was irritable, exacting, impatient, that she exaggerated and was too fond of justifying herself. He never broke into the panegyrics commonly indulged in by her fellow workers. Only the words used by him at the end of every note he wrote her, of every interview they had together, "God bless you," spoke of the affection between them. The tie which united them was so strong that it did not need support. "We were identified," she wrote to Clarkey in 1861. "No other acknowledgment was needed."

While on one hand Miss Nightingale drove him; on the other he was urged on no less relentlessly by his wife. Far from resenting his work with Miss Nightingale, Liz encouraged it; work with Florence was the part of her husband's life which she most thoroughly shared.

Before his marriage Sidney Herbert had been the close friend of the beautiful and unhappy Caroline Norton, one of three lovely sisters nicknamed the Three Graces. The granddaughters of Sherijan, they had inherited his wit and captivating charm. One sister became Lady Dufferin, one became Duchess of Somerset, and Caroline herself married the Hon. George Chappel Norton, younger brother of Lord Grantley. It was an unhappy match; George Norton, an unsuccessful barrister, had a violent temper, and the Nortons were incessantly in financial difficulties. Caroline became a professional author and achieved considerable success. She had wit and brilliant beauty, and the parties she gave In her little drawing-room in Storeys Gate became famous. One of her most intimate friends was Lord Melbourne. George Norton, though insanely jealous, was willing to profit from his wife's friendships, and in 1831 he was made a Metropolitan Police Magistrate by Lord Melbourne. Five years later he brought proceedings charging Lord Melbourne with committing adultery with Caroline. The action failed, the jury dismissed the case without even calling upon the defense, but as a result the Nortons separated and the tragedy of Caroline's life began. As a woman living apart from her husband, she had no rights either over her income or her children. Her children, whom she adored, were removed, and George Norton not only refused to make her an allowance but brought an action demanding the money she made from her books. She did not think her children were well treated; her youngest boy, after being taken away, died at the age of nine as the result of a fall from a pony. The miseries she endured were instrumental in bringing about an improvement in the laws relating to women.

In the early forties Sidney Herbert, "beautiful as an angel," chivalrous, brilliantly clever, immensely rich, was always to be seen at Caroline Norton's house. Their attachment was well known, and Meredith was said to have based his novel Diana of the Crossways on it.

Sidney Herbert was now first in the succession to Wilton. His father's eldest son by his first marriage had, in 1814, contracted a disastrous marriage with a Sicilian pseudo-countess, which the family had tried in vain to annul, and in 1827 had succeeded to the title as the twelfth Earl of Pembroke. It was evident that his health was hopelessly impaired, and, as he had no children, it had become increasingly desirable that Sidney Herbert should marry. In 1846 he married Miss Elizabeth à Court, who had been devoted to him since childhood, who was beautiful, well born, and devoutly religious; they had been married for eighteen months when Miss Nightingale met them in Rome. Caroline Norton disappeared from his life. In 1847 Fanny Allen met one of Sidney Herbert's "intimates" who "detailed the course of his [Sidney Herbert's] marriage and the loosening of the tie between him and Mrs. Norton, who behaved very well on the occasion and assured him when he married she would never cross his path."

Liz Herbert's devotion to her husband was possessive. Miss Nightingale, meeting her in Rome, had noticed her almost unbalanced affection for Sidney, her eagerness to be everything to him, to share his every thought. She was insecure. "You know all I have to bear more than anyone else," she wrote to Miss Nightingale after Sidney's death. "It is strange but I think his whole family believe he did not love me." Far from remonstrating with Florence for driving Sidney too hard, Liz supported her. She clung to Florence---she had clung to her from the first moment they met in Rome in 1849, because through her she drew nearer to Sidney.

Thus urged, goaded, driven, Sidney Herbert struggled through 1858, and immeasurably greater demands were made on him the next year. Early in 1859 it became evident that what Miss Nightingale described to Harriet Martineau as "eight months importunate widowing of Lord Stanley" was to be successful. A Royal Sanitary Commission was to be set up to do for the army in India what the Royal Sanitary Commission of 1857 had done for the army at home, and Sidney Herbert was invited to be chairman. It was a hideously laborious prospect. The work would be gigantic; the state of India was inextricably confused, the opposition obstinate; the distance from which data must be collected was an enormous complication. His health was steadily deteriorating, and he still had to devote long hours to the four sub-Commissions. Nevertheless, he felt himself bound to accept. A month later an even greater task was thrust on him. The Government had fallen in March, and in the general election which followed Lord Palmerston was returned to power. He invited Sidney Herbert to become Secretary of State for War. It was, on the face of it, a triumph. What could not Sidney Herbert do for Army Reform in the place of Panmure? But his first sensation was one of despair. On June 13 he wrote to Miss Nightingale:---I must write you a line to tell you I have undertaken the Ministry of War. I have undertaken it because I believe that in certain branches of administration I can be of use, but I do not disguise from myself the severity of the task, nor the probability of my proving unequal to it. But I know you will be pleased at my being there. I will try and ride down to you tomorrow afternoon. God bless you."

The Reformers seemed now to be in a strong position. Sidney Herbert was Secretary of State for War; Alexander was Director-General of the Army Medical Department. The Royal Sanitary Commission on the Health of the Army of 1857 was being put into operation, and a new Commission on the Health of the Army in India was being set up. It seemed there was every reason for optimism; but there was no optimism. Instead there was depression. The Reformers felt that the future was dark.

Only now, when so much progress had been made, did the almost insuperable difficulties confronting them emerge. The basic difficulty was the administrative system of the War Office itself. In November, 1859 Miss Nightingale summed up her experience. "The War Office is a very slow office, an enormously expensive office, and one in which the Minister's intentions can be entirely negatived by all his sub-departments and those of each of the sub-departments by every other."

A new issue had become clear. Progress was impossible with the existing machinery. Before reforms could be carried through the War Office itself must be reformed. Sidney Herbert must nerve himself to yet another gigantic task. Once again he felt he had no choice. In consultation with Miss Nightingale a scheme was prepared. Its objects, she wrote, were "to simplify procedure, to abolish divided responsibility, to define clearly the duties of each head of a department and of each class of office; to hold heads responsible for their respective departments with direct communication with the Secretary of State."

She approached this new task with a determination so grim that it was almost despair. The enthusiasm, the exhilaration with which she had approached the first Royal Commission of 1857 were gone for ever. She was being crushed, as Sidney Herbert was being crushed, by the weight of her labors. "I am being worked on the tread-mill," she wrote.

Miss Nightingale had no secretary. The compilation of statistics, the noting down of columns of figures, the laborious comparisons were done by herself. The innumerable letters, the immensely long reports were written by her own hand. The physical effort of writing down the enormous number of words she produced each day was staggering. The only method of duplicating was to have the text set by a printer and copies struck off. She had this done at her own expense, recording that from 1857-1860 she spent 700 pounds sterling out of her own private income on printing.

As she toiled her sense of resentment grew fiercer. Was ever suffering like mine? Was ever self-sacrifice like mine? she constantly asked herself. Sidney Herbert with his health, Dr. Sutherland with his desire for holidays, Dr. Alexander, even Aunt Mai, even Clough, all aggravated her; all were inadequate.

At the end of the summer of 1859 she had another collapse, with the familiar symptoms of fainting, breathlessness, weakness, and inability to digest food. It was impossible for her to leave London, impossible for her to pass another summer at the Burlington. She compromised by taking rooms at Hampstead, a custom she continued for many years. Dr. Sutherland and Clough came daily and stayed all day. Aunt Mai took the opportunity of going home to see her family, and Hilary Bonham Carter took her place as "dragon." Sidney Herbert, also kept in London by his work, rode out nearly every evening from Belgrave Square.

For a short interval she was quiet. Hilary, writing a bulletin to Embley, described her "lying on her couch, wrapt up in her delicate blanket, her little head resting on the pillow peeping from the blanket gives her quite an infantine appearance." In September Fanny came to Hampstead---she had not seen Florence for nearly six months. "She received me as if we had only just been parted, very affectionately, but her manner was nervous as if she feared to touch upon exciting subjects." She told Parthe, now Lady Verney, "She would have made a beautiful sketch, lying there reclining upon pillows in a blue drifting gown, her hair so picturesquely arranged, her expression most trusting, hardly harmonizing with the trenchant things she sometimes says, her sweet little hands lying there ready for action." There were, Fanny noticed, "several pussy cats" in the room; one was lying on Florence's shoulder.

She was now in bed or on her couch continuously. She never walked; she seldom went out. Fanny noticed that her face was flushed, her hands hot, and that talking seemed an effort. Nevertheless, ill though she might be, the attitude of her circle toward her physical condition was changing. Time had passed. She still spoke as if she were on her deathbed, her life was still described as hanging by a thread, but-it had been hanging by a thread for two years.

Aunt Mai's family became impatient. Two years had passed since Aunt Mai, who was greatly beloved at home, had gone to the Burlington. In the early summer of 1859 Uncle Sam wrote to Fanny complaining---not to Florence; she had established herself in a position where none of the family dared write to her direct. His grievance did not stop at Aunt Mai---there was Clough. His daughter Blanche's life had been broken up by Florence's absorption of Clough. For the past year Blanche had been living with her children in her father's house, while Clough stayed in London. Clough was delicate, his health was causing grave anxiety, and it was felt Florence asked too much of him.

At the end of September, 1859, when Miss Nightingale left Hampstead and went back to the Burlington, Uncle Sam did his best to persuade Aunt Mai to leave her. Miss Nightingale was very angry. To her, Aunt Mai's problem was not a personal problem. Aunt Mai's presence in London was essential to the work. Since she was the instrument chosen to do the work, if she suffered the work must suffer. She insisted that Aunt Mai must return.

In October, back in the Burlington once more, she had Aunt Mai and Clough to slave for her and cherish her, the familiar round of conferences and interviews, the inevitable burden of crushing work. But though outwardly everything was the same, inwardly nothing was the same. Difficulties were piling up. She was anxious over Clough's health and Aunt Mai's troubles with her family. The task of War Office reform became daily more complicated, more hopelessly involved, more infinitely laborious. Above all, there was the constant menace of Sidney Herbert's failing health. Everywhere she turned she saw threats of disaster.