SHE WAS CONVINCED THAT her life work was ended. The death of Sidney Herbert had closed the door through which she entered the official world. Great as her influence had been, intimately as she had been concerned in army administration, all had depended upon him. She had never had any official status; she could not force the War Office to use her. She had been inside because he was inside. Now he was gone, she would be shut out.
It was the general opinion. In a letter written by one of Aunt Mai's daughters in September, 1861, Fanny asked Edwin Chadwick to suggest some new field of work for Florence, "her own being now closed against her." He agreed that her army work was ended but foresaw for her a long, useful life of labor for others in some different sphere. In the furnished rooms in Hampstead she was wretchedly ill. All the familiar symptoms of her collapses reappeared, fainting, extreme weakness, nausea at the sight of food. In addition, she suffered from nervous twitchings. She insisted on remaining alone.
In 1863 Miss Nightingale wrote of the widowed Queen Victoria: "she always reminds me of the woman in the Greek chorus, with her hands clasped above her head, wailing out her inexpressible despair." It is an apt description of her own behavior after the death of Sidney Herbert. Shut away in the rooms in Hampstead, she wrote letter after letter wailing out ruin. "My poor Master has been dead two months today," she wrote to Dr. Farr on October 2, 1861, "too long a time for him not to be forgotten. . . . The dogs have trampled on his dead body. Alas! seven years ago this month I have fought the good fight with the War Office. AND LOST IT." "Every day his decisions . . . his judgments are over-thrown. . . . We have lost the battle. Now all is over," she wrote to Harriet Martineau in September. "Would I could hide myself underground not to see what I do see," she told Lady Herbert on August 17.
But as the weeks went by the sympathy of her fellow workers became tempered with irritation. As far as they were concerned, she might as usefully have been underground as shut away in Hampstead wailing out despair. At the end of September Douglas Galton wrote to her sharply: "Notwithstanding what you say, Sidney Herbert did do a great deal, doubtless he left something still to be done. The Medical Department is in itself a great achievement. But perhaps your motto is 'Nihil actum, si quid agendum.' " (Nothing has been accomplished if there is still something to be done.) Army reform had not utterly perished with Sidney Herbert. The edifice had collapsed, but there were workers still among the ruins. Douglas Galton held his post as Inspector-General of Fortifications and controlled the erection and maintenance of barracks and hospitals. Lord de Grey, a convinced reformer and a disciple of Sidney Herbert, had been appointed Under-Secretary of State for War. Sir George Lewis, Sidney Herbert's successor, was not unfriendly. On October 21, 1861, Richard Monckton Milnes wrote, encouraging her to return to work: "I should like you to know how you will find Lord de Grey willing to do all in his power to further your great and wise designs. You won't like Sir G. Lewis, but somewhere or other you ought to do so. . . . I write this about de Grey because I was staying with him not long ago and he expressed himself on the subject with much earnestness."
Even in the dark weeks immediately following Sidney Herbert's death, a few points had been gained. In September, 1861 Douglas Galton's appointment as Inspector-General of Fortifications, which had been temporary, was confirmed. At the same time the scope of the Barrack and Hospital Commission, on which Dr. Sutherland and Douglas Galton were the most active and influential members, was extended to take in the Mediterranean stations.
A considerable victory was won over the proposed construction of a new General Military Hospital at Woolwich. The Duke of Cambridge, the Commander-in-Chief, had steadily opposed the building of this hospital, and as soon as Sidney Herbert was dead he pressed for cancellation of the scheme. This was the occasion when Lord de Grey "happened" to be in Sir George Lewis's room and said, with more honesty than wisdom: "Sir, it is impossible. Lord Herbert decided it and the House of Commons voted it." The building went forward and eventually, at Miss Nightingale's suggestion, was called the Herbert Hospital.
It was true something might still be done, but how woefully little! A point here, a point there, might with infinite labor be carried, but all high hopes, all grand schemes had perished. "It is really melancholy," wrote Douglas Galton after Sidney Herbert had been dead a fortnight, "to see the attempts made on all hands to pull down all that Sidney Herbert laboured to build up."
Victory was no longer a possibility, but every inch of ground must be contested in retreat, to preserve something in the midst of disaster.
Miss Nightingale was drawn back, but the work was bitter to her now. She had dreamed of great achievements; there were to be no great achievements. All that was left was "desperate guerilla warfare." Heartbroken and weary, she revolted. "It cannot last. I am worn out and cannot go on long," she wrote to Harriet Martineau on September 14, 1861.
Seclusion proved impossible. As soon as she finished her paper on Sidney Herbert's services to the army she went back to Hampstead to shut herself up again, but at this point she received an appeal which it was impossible to ignore. In April, 1861 civil war had begun between the Northern and Southern States of America. In October an appeal from the Secretary at War in Washington reached Miss Nightingale through the agency of Harriet Martineau, who had a channel of communication with the Northern States through her publisher in New York. She was asked for help in organizing hospitals and the care of the sick and wounded. On October 8 she told Dr. Farr she had sent to Washington "all our War Office Forms and Reports, Statistical and other. . . . It appears that they, the Northern States, are quite puzzled by their lack of any Army Organisation." She also sent Miss Dix, the Superintendent of Nurses at Washington, her evidence before the Commission of 1857, and Harriet Martineau reported that Miss Nightingale's writings were "quoted largely and incessantly in medical journals as a guide to military management in the Northern States." No channel of communication with the Southern States was available, though Miss Nightingale wrote that she was "horrified at the reports of the sufferings of their wounded." It was being made evident, had she been willing to be encouraged, how far public opinion had been educated in the importance of health administration to an army in the field. The Secretary of War was petitioned to appoint a Sanitary Commission; plans were drawn up for the inspection of camps, for the introduction of female nurses into hospitals, and for the improvement and supervision of hospital diet and cooking. What she herself had done in the Crimea was reproduced. Though circumstances prevented much of this work being successful, the attempt showed a great change had taken place.
She became involved in a very large correspondence, advising charitable committees, organizations for sick and wounded relief, and religious bodies and women's associations who were working for army welfare. In 1865, when the war was over, the Secretary of the United States Christian Union wrote to her: "Your influence and our indebtedness to you can never be known."
To remain in Hampstead was impossible, and early in November, 1861 she was persuaded to accept Sir Harry Verney's repeated offer of the loan of his London house, and moved to 32 South Street. She was still very feeble, but she persisted in being alone.
She had only been in London a few days when she received another shattering blow: Arthur Hugh Clough died in Florence on November 12, 1861. Her grief for him was second only to her grief for Sidney Herbert. "Oh Jonathan, my brother Jonathan, my love for thee was very great, passing the love of women," she wrote to Sir John McNeill on November 18. Clough had united with intellect and wit an extraordinary ability to inspire affection. "I do not know that I have ever cared so much for any man of whom I had seen so little as I did for Clough," Sir John McNeill wrote on November 19. Miss Nightingale was blamed for misusing his talents, for hastening his end by driving him too hard, and Clough's family did not refrain from expressing their resentment. A fragment of a letter written to her by Jowett in December, 1861---the remainder of the letter has been cut away---advises her to "disregard this attack arising from common misery at the death of our dear friend."
Clough had complemented her as Sidney Herbert had complemented her; he gave her affection and sympathy, his brilliance and grace brought charm into her life. She gave him the energy, the conviction, the certainty which he had somehow fatally lost. His death inflicted a mortal wound. Coming only three months after the death of Sidney Herbert, when she was struggling to recover herself, the effect was crushing. She was totally unnerved. On November 18 she wrote to Douglas Galton, "Now hardly a man remains (that I can call a man) of all those I have worked with these five years. I survive them all. I am sure I did not mean to."
"Hardly a man (that I can call a man)." She had used that phrase before when Sidney Herbert died and she was speaking of the most faithful, the most devoted, possibly the most able of them all, of Dr. Sutherland. He alone had done what she demanded, he alone had given up his whole life to the work, yet she had never loved him, never could love him. To love was essential to her; and with Clough lost, Alexander lost, Sidney Herbert lost, she felt herself horribly alone.
On November 19 Hilary Bonham Carter went to see her; she had collapsed and been very ill. "She wept very much," wrote Hilary to Clarkey on November 20. "She thinks she may perhaps withdraw her hand from Government matters entirely."
But she was not to be allowed to withdraw her hand. A fortnight after Clough's death she received an urgent appeal from the War Office. England seemed on the brink of war with the Northern States of America: two agents of the Southern States had been taken by force from the neutral British steamship Trent and carried prisoner to a Northern port. It was an outrage on the British flag, war seemed inevitable, and the Government decided to send reinforcements at once to Canada. On December 3 Lord de Grey wrote asking if he might call and be advised by her "as to sanitary arrangements generally" for the expedition, including transport, hospitals, the clothing and feeding of the troops, and comforts for the sick.
Ill, shattered, sunk in grief though she was, she summoned energy to work night and day. She did far more than advise. She redrafted the proposed instructions to officers in charge of the expedition, and on December 10 Lord de Grey wrote to tell her that every one of her alterations had been adopted. She ascertained the average speed of transport by sledge and calculated the time required to transport the sick over the immense distances of Canada. She drew up schemes for relays of transport and for the setting up of depots containing necessary stores. She investigated the question of clothing and recommended that buffalo robes should be issued to the troops in place of blankets. Her astonishing capacity for detail was unimpaired. On December 19 she wrote to Douglas Galton: "Your draft does not define with sufficient precision the manner in which the meat is to get from the Commissariat into the soldiers' kettle; and the clothing from the Q.M.G.'s store on to the soldiers' back. You must define all this. Otherwise you will have men, as you did in the Crimea, shirking responsibility."
Through the intervention of the Prince Consort war was avoided. Though mortally ill, he roused himself from his deathbed to insert, with his own hand, modifications in the British despatch which made it possible for the Northern States to withdraw without humiliation. It was his last public act, and a fortnight later he died. Miss Nightingale felt his death was a great national disaster of which the nation was oblivious. "He was," she wrote to Clarkey, "really a minister. This very few knew. He neither liked nor was liked, but what he has done for this country no one knows."
The Canadian Expedition was a turning-point. She was back in harness; work came rushing in; retirement was impossible. Weary, heart-broken, grief-stricken though she might be, her private feelings must be laid aside, and she must force herself to work once more. Jowett once said Miss Nightingale was the only person he had ever met in whom public feelings were stronger than private feelings. But that did not mean that her private feelings were weak; on the contrary, they were almost overwhelmingly strong, and in 1861, though her sense of duty forced her to dedicate herself to the respublica, she was unreconciled to her lot. She resented more than ever the sacrifice demanded of her, she fell even more frequently into frenzies of grief, rage, and disgust with the world.
She was horribly lonely. She had no friend; she had no helper. She was entering a period of great toil, relentless self-sacrifice, discouragement, and she had no single soul to give her support.
She looked round the world and what did she see? Women everywhere. The world was full of women, and not one of them would help. Rage seized her. What had she not endured from the pretensions, the foolishness, the frivolity, the selfishness of women! All her grief, her pain, concentrated itself into a passion of contempt and dislike for her own sex. On December 13 she began to pour out to Clarkey, who had just written a book on Madame Récamier, an enormous, disconnected diatribe on women:
". . . you say 'women are more sympathetic than men.' Now if I were to write a book out of my experience, I should begin, Women have no sympathy. Yours is the tradition---mine is the conviction of experience. I have never found one woman who has altered her life by one iota for me or my opinions. Now look at my experience of men.
"A Statesman, past middle age, absorbed in politics for a quarter of a century, out of sympathy with me, remodels his whole life and policy ---learns a science, the driest, the most technical, the most difficult, that of administration as far as it concerns the lives of men,---not, as I learned it, in the field from the living experience, but by writing dry regulations in a London room, by my sofa, with me.
"This is what I call real sympathy.
"Another (Alexander whom I made Director General) does very nearly the same thing. He is dead too.
"Clough, a poet born if there ever was one, takes to nursing administration in the same way, for me.
"I only mention three, whose whole lives were re-modelled by sympathy for me. But I could mention very many others---Farr, McNeill, Tulloch, Storks, Martin, who in a lesser degree have altered their work by my opinions. And, most wonderful of all---a man born without a soul, like Undine---Sutherland. All these elderly men.
"Now just look at the degree in which women have sympathy---as far as my experience is concerned. And my experience of women is almost as large as Europe. And it is so intimate too. I have lived and slept in the same bed with English Countesses and Prussian Bauerinnen, with a closeness of intimacy no one ever had before. No Roman Catholic Supérieure has ever had the charge of women of the most different creeds that I have had. No woman has excited 'passions' among women more than I have.
"Yet I leave no school behind me. My doctrines have taken no hold among women. Not one of my Crimean following learnt anything from me---or gave herself for one moment, after she came home, to carry out the lesson of that war, or of those hospitals. I have lived with a sister 30 years, with an aunt four or five, with a cousin two or three. Not one has altered one hour of her existence for me. Not one has read one of my books so as to be able to save me the trouble of writing or telling it all over again.
"Hilary is the type of want of sympathy. Because she is the most unselfish, and because she has a 'passion' for me. Yet have I not influenced her by one inch. Nay rather all these women have influenced me, much more than I have them. Parthe always told me, as a reproach, that I was, 'more like a man.' Indeed I began to think it was true.
"No woman that I know has ever appris à apprendre. And I attribute this to want of sympathy. . . .
"It makes me mad the 'Woman's Rights' talk about the 'want of a field' for them---when I know that I would gladly give £500 a year for a Woman Secretary. And two English Superintendents have told me the same. And we can't get one.
"As for my own family, their want of the commonest knowledge of contemporary history makes them quite useless as secretaries. They don't know the names of the Cabinet Ministers. They don't know the offices at the Horse Guards. They don't know who of the men of today is dead and who is alive. They don't know which of the Churches has Bishops and which not.
"Now I'm sure I did not know these things. When I went to the Crimea I did not know a Colonel from a Corporal. But there are such things as Army Lists and Almanacs. Yet I never knew a woman who, out of sympathy, would consult one---for my work.
". . . A woman once told me my character would be. more sympathised with by men than by women. In one sense, I don't choose to have that said. Sidney Herbert and I were together exactly like two men ---exactly like him and Gladstone. And as for Clough, oh Jonathan, my brother Jonathan, my love for thee was very great, PASSING THE LOVE OF WOMEN.
"In another sense I do believe it is true. I do believe I am 'like a man,' as Parthe says. But how? In having sympathy. I am sure I have nothing else. I am sure I have no genius. I am sure that my contemporaries, Parthe, Hilary, Marianne, Lady Dunsany, were all cleverer than I was, and several of them more unselfish. But not one had a bit of sympathy.
. . . Women crave for being loved, not for loving. They scream at you for sympathy all day long, they are incapable of giving any in return, for they cannot remember your affairs long enough to do so.... They cannot state a fact accurately to another, nor can that other attend to it accurately enough for it to become information. Now is not an this the result of want of sympathy? If you knew what it has been to me, having my aunt instead of S. Herbert, Hilary instead of Clough, etc. etc. etc.---not because the man had power the women none. But simply from what I say of want of attention. I'm sure I don't think what falls from my lips pearls and diamonds. Only, if they are not going to listen, I had so much rather not say it. I'm none too fond of talking. . . .
"People often say to me, you don't know what a wife and mother feels. No, I say, I don't and I'm very glad I don't. And they don't know what I feel. Why, dear soul, Blanche went away and left her husband for a year! I am the only person who made any effort to save his life and gave him £500 to go abroad, my hard earned savings. And they are living on that now, his wife and sisters, at Florence. . . .
"I am sick with indignation at what wives and mothers will do of the most egregious selfishness. And people call it all maternal or conjugal affection, and think it pretty to say so. No, no, let each person tell the truth from his own experience.
"Ezekiel went running about naked, 'for a sign.' I can't run about naked because it is not the custom of the country. But I would mount three widows' caps on my head, 'for a sign.' And I would cry. This is for Sidney Herbert, I am his real widow. This is for Arthur Clough, I am his true widow (and I don't find it a comfort that I had two legs. to cut off, whereas other people have but one). And this, the biggest widow's cap of all, is for the loss of all sympathy on the part of my nearest and dearest. (For that my aunt was. We were like two lovers.)
". . . This is the shortest day, would it were the last. Adieu dear friend. I am worse. I have had two consultations and they say that all this worry has brought on congestion of the spine, which leads straight to paralysis. And they say I must not write letters. Whereupon I do it all the more."
Her health was approaching a new crisis. She had already collapsed twice within the last six months, once when Sidney Herbert died in August and again when the news of Clough's death reached her in November. She was alone, devoured by grief, remorse, and resentment, unable to rise from her bed, unable to eat. In this condition she had forced herself to work day and night on the Canadian Expedition. On Christmas Eve 1861 she was dangerously ill, more dangerously ill than she had been since her collapse in the summer of 1857.
For some weeks she was expected to die. She longed to die, but her iron constitution triumphed, and by the middle of January she was able to sit up in bed. But a further stage had been reached in the decline of her health. After this last illness she became bed-ridden and did not leave her room for six years. She moved from house to house but could not walk---she had to be carried. She never saw the outside world, to exchange one set of four walls for another was the only variation in her outlook.
By the end of January, 1862 she was convalescent, but hope had left her; she was like a man brought back to health so that he might be able to walk to the gallows. "I have lost all," she wrote to Fanny on March 7, 1862. "All the others have children or some high and inspiring interest to live for---while I have lost husband and children and all. And am left to the dreary hopeless struggle. . . . It is this desperate guerilla warfare ending in so little which makes me impatient of life. I, who could once do so much . . . I think what I have felt most during my last 3 months of extreme weakness is the not having one single person to give one inspiring word, or even one. correct fact. I am glad to end a day which never can come back, gladder to end a night, gladder still to end a month."
The task which lay before her was indeed daunting. The reformers had been appalled at Sidney Herbert's death, but even so they had not fully realized his value. On June 6, 1862, Miss Nightingale admitted to Douglas Galton: "One did not appreciate the power of Sidney Herbert's hand at the War Office while he was alive." Her close intimacy with Sidney Herbert could not be repeated, but it was a malign stroke of fate which replaced Sidney Herbert by Sir George Lewis---no two people could have honestly found each other more difficult to understand than Sir George Lewis and Miss Nightingale. His virtues were of a kind which she was unable to appreciate. He was one of the best classical scholars in Europe, extremely industrious, and of unimpeachable integrity, but he lacked warmth. Greville said he was as cold-blooded as a fish. He had written several books in a restrained and polished style on classical and political subjects and had considerable wit. One of his sayings, "the indiscretion of biographers adds a new terror to death," was often quoted by Miss Nightingale. In his position as Secretary of State for War he deserved sympathy; he had been unwilling to take office, and had accepted only out of public spirit. "I can fancy no fish more out of water than Lewis amidst Armstrong guns and General Officers," Sidney Herbert had written on July 16, 1861, adding that he was a gentleman and an honest man. But the nature of his breeding and integrity belonged to the eighteenth rather than the nineteenth century. He was no philanthropist, no reformer. He was able, as Richard Monckton Milnes said, to make up his mind to the "damnabilities of the work."
Miss Nightingale never would meet him. The spell which she had cast over Panmure she never would attempt to cast over him. On his side Sir George Lewis was friendly. In the spring of 1862 he suggested he should call, but she refused on the grounds of her recent illness. Knowing her to be a classical scholar, he sent her one of the classical jeux d'esprit in which he excelled, the nursery rhyme "Hey Diddle Diddle" translated into Latin verse. She was not flattered, but enraged, and wrote to Douglas Galton that Sir George Lewis would do far better to keep his mind on the War Office. Meanwhile he followed up "Hey Diddle Diddle" in Latin with "Humpty Dumpty" in Greek.
However, owing to Sir George's lack of experience in army administration, Lord de Grey was becoming of increasing importance, and since the Canadian Expedition he had become her friend. Lord de Grey had been born to great position and great wealth. His father, Lord Ripon, was Prime Minister at the time of his birth, and his birthplace was 10 Downing Street. He united an instinctively aristocratic outlook with radical and even revolutionary views. When a young man he had been a member of the Christian socialist movement, and had written a pamphlet which was suppressed. His integrity was beyond question, his capacity for work great, and his sense of public duty very high.
When Miss Nightingale reentered the War Office after the Canadian Expedition, she had Lord de Grey behind her and influence within the departments through Douglas Galton and Dr. Sutherland. Outside the War Office she had a powerful friend and protector in Lord Palmerston, who had become Prime Minister again in 1859.
Almost immediately a crisis arose. On May 15, 1862, Sir Benjamin Hawes, Permanent Under-Secretary for War, unexpectedly died. Both the man and his office had been major obstacles in the path of reform. The Permanent Under-Secretary for War stood in an administrative bottle-neck. "He was," wrote Miss Nightingale, "a dictator, an autocrat, irresponsible to Parliament, quite unassailable from any quarter, unmovable in the middle of a (so-called) Constitutional Government and under a Secretary of State who is responsible to Parliament." One of the fundamental principles of her scheme of War Office reorganization had been the abolition of the office of Permanent Under-Secretary.
The office had been attacked, and the attack had failed. Benjamin Hawes had beaten Sidney Herbert. Now Fate had intervened, and he was dead. Supported by Lord de Grey, she pressed urgently for reform. The office of Permanent Under-Secretary should be abolished, the work divided into two parts and performed by two Under-Secretaries, each directly responsible to the Secretary of State for War. The purely military work was to be done by the Military Under-Secretary, a post, already in existence, which had been created by Sidney Herbert, and the health and sanitary administration of the army should be done by a civilian with the title of Assistant Under-Secretary. She made the bold suggestion that Douglas Galton should be allowed to resign his commission and be appointed to this post as a civilian.
A pitched battle ensued. Objections to splitting the office of the Permanent Under-Secretary into two were strengthened by the name of Sir Charles Trevelyan being put forward as Benjamin Hawes' successor. Sir Charles was an able man and an admirable administrator whom Miss Nightingale liked and respected. But she was not to be turned from her determination. The system was wrong; and "there could be no more fatal mistake than to attempt to offset the evil of a system by introducing into it individuals of merit." As Permanent Under-Secretary under the present system, Sir Charles Trevelyan would still be "an absolute despot though a wise one," she wrote to W. E. N. on May 24, 1862; and, "inasmuch as Trevelyan is a better and abler man than Hawes, it would have been worse for my reform of principle."
She succeeded. It was agreed that the work of the office should he divided; its importance was halved, and it became no longer worthy of Sir Charles Trevelyan's consideration.
The next step was to secure the appointment of Douglas Galton as Assistant Under-Secretary. Official opposition was determined, and Miss Nightingale appealed directly to the Prime Minister. Lord Palmerston spoke to the Commander-in-Chief, who told him that the appointment was "simply impossible." Lord Palmerston refused to be deterred. Miss Nightingale had convinced him, as six years ago she had convinced him in the matter of the plans for Netley Hospital. He had been thwarted then; he did not intend to be thwarted now. He ignored the Commander-in-Chief and directed Sir George Lewis to make the appointment, which he obediently did. Miss Nightingale, who despised Sir George Lewis's powers of administration, said he did not understand what he was doing. On May 24 Douglas Galton was appointed.
She had won a notable victory. With Douglas Galton in charge of the health and sanitary administration of the army, with Lord de Grey as Parliamentary Under-Secretary, with Sir George Lewis acquiescent, she saw War Office reorganization as a certainty in the near future; and she allowed herself to rejoice. On May 24, 1862, heading her letter "The poor Queen's Birthday," she wrote to W. E. N.: "I must tell you the first joy I have had since poor Sidney Herbert's death. Lord Palmerston has forced Sir G. Lewis to carry out Mr. Herbert's and my plan for the re-organisation of the War Office in some measure. And it may seem some compensation to you for the enormous expense I cause you, that, if I had not been here, it would not have been done. Would that Sidney Herbert could have lived to do it himself!"
Her jubilation was short-lived, for no radical change took place in the War Office. She had hoped too much both from the reform and the reformers. Douglas Galton and Lord de Grey, sincere, talented, and hard-working, did not possess the genius, the driving force which alone could have accomplished what she had called "the fearful task of cleansing the Augean stable." Where Sidney Herbert had failed, it was not surprising that Douglas Galton and Lord de Grey did not succeed. On August 8, 1862, she wrote to Sir John McNeill: "Lord de Grey and Douglas Galton miscalculated their powers and their intelligence when they promised to re-organise the W.O. The administrative work they do well."
It was final defeat, and she accepted it. She continued to press Douglas Galton and Lord de Grey in season and out of season for departmental efficiency, but the grand project of complete War Office reorganization was relinquished for ever.
It was not revived even when, on April 13, 1863, the situation was changed once more by the sudden death of Sir George Lewis. Three men were possible candidates for the office of Secretary of State for War---Lord Panmure, Mr. Cardwell, and Lord de Grey. The prospect of having the Bison once more at the War Office was distasteful, but even more distasteful was the prospect of Mr. Cardwell. Edward Cardwell, who ten years later carried through the most important army reforms of the century, was a man to whom Miss Nightingale failed to do justice. He had been a scholar of Winchester and Balliol; he was conscientious, industrious, eminently discreet, kind-hearted, and an excellent public servant. But he lacked charm. Nor did he commend himself to her by being the devoted disciple of Gladstone. They had already met in 1857, while she was working on the first Royal Sanitary Commission, and they had not been attracted to each other.
She plunged into a campaign to secure the appointment of Lord de Grey. Lord Palmerston had been the friend and admirer of Sidney Herbert, and she appealed to him, speaking not with her own voice but with the voice of Sidney Herbert. On April 15 Sir Harry Verney was sent down to read Lord Palmerston a letter she had written. On the afternoon of April 15 he wrote describing the interview. "Lord Palmerston was so good as to admit me., I said I had seen you this morning, and that by your desire I requested him to allow me to read a letter to him from you. He said 'Certainly'; and I read it to him rather slowly. Having read it, I said that you had mentioned this morning that within a fortnight of Lord Herbert's death, he had said to you more than once that he hoped Lord de Grey would be his successor. He took the letter and put it in his pocket. He then asked how you were and where, and I told him. There is a Cabinet at 5.30 this afternoon." A copy of the letter was also sent to Mr. Gladstone before the Cabinet meeting.
At the same time Miss Nightingale appealed urgently to Harriet Martineau for newspaper support. A draft of a telegram, written in her own hand and sent on April 16, 1863, runs: "From Florence Nightingale to Harriet Martineau--- Agitate, agitate, for Lord de Grey to succeed Sir George Lewis." On the following day the Daily News published a leading article pressing for his appointment.
In fact the matter was already decided. Lord Palmerston had once more been convinced. On April 16, the day after the Cabinet meeting, he went down to Windsor and read Miss Nightingale's letter to the Queen, and the appointment of Lord de Grey was announced on April 22, 1863.
The appointment ensured that Miss Nightingale's influence in army affairs continued, but her position was not the position she had held when Sidney Herbert was alive. She had then been closely concerned in the internal affairs of the War Office. She had done the work of an administrator. In 1863, not only was her friendship with Lord de Grey very different from her close intimacy with Sidney Herbert, but there was no urgent task, such as the Royal Sanitary Commission of 1857 had been, to bring her directly into War Office affairs. She herself wrote in 1862 that she had done the work of a Secretary of State at the War Office for five years, but she was doing that work no longer. She had passed from being an administrator to being an adviser.
As an adviser her position was extraordinary. For the next four years every problem affecting the health and sanitary administration of the British Army was referred to Miss Nightingale, though she was not only a woman but an invalid who never left her house and for months on end did not leave her bed. She had enormous knowledge of the history of the departments; she knew the course of every transaction for years past; she knew where to go for information; she knew where papers were to be found. Secretaries borrowed copies of documents from her which were inexplicably missing from War Office files. She saved trouble to busy men. Once there was work to be done, she asked neither for credit nor consideration, only to be allowed to do it. Ministers, Under-Secretaries, Assistant Secretaries wrote to her daily asking her as an expert for expert assistance. It was as if she were indeed a retired Secretary of State with vast experience, willing to devote his life to anonymous and unpaid work. She drafted hundreds of minutes; she drew up warrants and regulations; she wrote official memoranda, letters, and summaries for the Ministers' use; she composed instructions.
Her genius for financial administration was extraordinary. She devised a cost-accounting system for the Army Medical Services, which was put into operation between 1860 and 1865 and, eighty years later, was still in use. In 1947 the Select Committee on Estimates reported favorably on it, commented that it worked admirably, though in other departments systems installed within the last twenty years had been discarded, and inquired with whom it had originated. They were told---Miss Nightingale.
War Office Abstracts list the questions on which she was engaged during one year as a new Warrant for Apothecaries, Proposals for Equipment of Military Hospitals, a scheme for the Organization of Hospitals for Soldiers' Wives, Proposals for the revision of Army Rations, Warrant and Instructions for Staff Surgeons, Instructions for treatment of yellow fever, Proposals for revision of Purveying and Commissariat in the Colonies, Revised diet sheets for Troop-Ships, Proposals for appointments at Netley and Chatham, Instructions for Treatment of Cholera. And these were sidelines; her main work for the Army was still concerned with the improvement of barrack and hospital accommodation and the reform and reconstruction of the Army Medical Department, the two contributions Sidney Herbert had succeeded in making which she carried forward as a sacred trust.
She exercised authority over plans for building and reconstructing barracks and hospitals. Douglas Galton had all construction works under his control and submitted almost all plans to her. He leaned, as Sidney Herbert had leaned, not only on her judgment but on her remarkable ability to tear the essentials out of great masses of detail, and her astonishing unwearying thoroughness. A specimen memorandum on the plans for the new general military hospital at Malta covers more than two dozen foolscap pages.
It was the toughest and driest work, only occasionally enlivened by a gleam of humor. In 1863 Douglas Galton sent her plans for model cavalry barracks; she returned them with the request that the horses should be provided with windows to look out of. "I do not speak from hearsay but from actual personal acquaintance with horses of the most intimate kind," she wrote on June 4, 1863. "And I assure you they tell me it is of the utmost consequence to their health and spirits when in the loose box to have a window to look out of. A small bulls eye will do. I have told Dr. Sutherland but he has no feeling." On this letter Dr. Sutherland scribbled: "We have provided such a window and every horse can see out if he chooses to stand on his hind legs with his fore feet against the wall. It is the least exertion he can put himself to."
The task of reconstructing and reforming the Army Medical Service was the most difficult of all her tasks. Constant and bitter opposition came from within the Medical Department itself: the senior members had scores to settle dating back to the Crimea. Opposition blazed up into fury when, in 1862, Miss Nightingale and the Medical Department found themselves on different sides in the controversy over the Contagious Diseases, i.e. Venereal Diseases, Act.
The proportion of men in the British Army invalided with syphilis was disconcertingly high, and since 1861 the War Office had been debating measures to reduce it. The Medical Department recommended that the continental system, by which prostitutes were licensed, inspected and, if necessary, forced to submit to medical treatment, should be adopted. To this system Miss Nightingale was passionately opposed.
She considered the continental system morally disgusting, unworkable in practice, and unsuccessful in results.
In the hospitals and barracks of Scutari and Balaclava, in the crowded slums of London, she had come into close contact with prostitution. The quality of her mind, her common sense, her humanity freed her from contemporary prejudice. In 1862 she wrote to Edwin Chadwick that the causes of vice in the Army were not "moral but physical."
"They are," she wrote, "1. Filthy crowded dwellings. 2. Drunkenness. 3. Ignorance and want of occupation." The way to improve the soldiers' morals was to improve his living conditions. "In civil life you don't expect that every workman who does not marry before he is 30 will become diseased," she wrote to Douglas Galton in June, 1861. "In military life you do. Why? Because a workman may have occupation and amusement and consort with honest women. People always say a woman can't know anything about it. It is because I know more about the actual workings of the thing than most men that I cannot hold my tongue." She advanced her views with such force that in 1862 she was officially invited to submit a paper, giving her first-hand experience in barracks and hospitals. Lord de Grey told Douglas Galton that he was shaken by her figures, but Mr. Gladstone, though he said he should approach the question with circumspection, "doubted the possibility of making a standing army a moral institution."
She had made sufficient impression for the Government to proceed cautiously. In 1863 a committee was set up by the War Office to investigate the results of police inspection of prostitutes in what were termed "protected" armies. The instructions for the committee were drawn up by Miss Nightingale, and she was invited to submit a list of suitable members.
Meanwhile the Army Medical Department was becoming more and more infuriated. Though Miss Nightingale's name did not appear, it was an open secret that she was the moving spirit. In July, 1863 one of the few scurrilous attacks ever made on her came from a member of the Department, who wrote her anonymously she told Harriet Martineau, a letter of "vulgar and indecent abuse."
The suggestions put forward by the Army Medical Department were of incredible naïveté. One doctor told Dr. Sutherland, "quite gravely, that the only way would be to attach a certain number of these women to each regiment and place them under religious instruction." Miss Nightingale remarked, "the prostitutes who survive five years of this life should have good service pensions." She had great faith in the effect of the inquiry made by the War Office Committee. She was wrong. Public opinion was not converted; the House of Commons was overwhelmingly in favor of police regulation and inspection; and in 1864 the Contagious Diseases Act became law. Miss Nightingale said that the War Office deserved the V.C. for their cool intrepidity in the face of facts.
The passage of the Act left her depressed. Was she succeeding to any degree, was she accomplishing anything at all? Ill, lonely, grief-stricken, toiling incessantly, living without the slightest relaxation, she was haunted by a settled conviction of failure. Any compromise was defeat. Everything was to be measured against perfection; if it fell short of perfection there was no good in it; and yet, if she would only see it, she was repeatedly presented with solid evidence of how much she had achieved.
In the spring of 1864 she was asked to supply information for a speech to be made in the House of Commons by Lord Hartington, the Under-Secretary for War, who was to defend the increase in the cost of the hospital and medical services for the Army, which had risen from £97,000 in 1853 to no less than £295,000 in 1864. Surely here was cause for congratulation; here was proof of extraordinary progress? She refused to be cheered. She sent Lord Hartington a detailed memorandum, setting out what the nation got for its money, which he used with success. She experienced no gratification and pronounced the speech to be very dull.
In the following year she had even more remarkable proof of progress. Lord Panmure, now sitting in the House of Lords as Lord Dalhousie, made an attack on sanitary principles in general and sanitarians in particular; he attacked the Herbert Hospital as being "all glass and glare" and providing only a fraction of the accommodation of his hospital at Netley; he attacked the wasteful system which Lord Herbert had inaugurated by paying attention to sanitarians; and, finally, he made a personal attack on Miss Nightingale herself. He "could not help thinking that all these unnecessary knick knacks in hospitals were introduced partly from the habit, which prevailed at the War Office, of consulting hygienists not connected with the Army."
She had prepared Lord de Grey with a reply, but defense was not necessary---the speech fell flat. Lord Dalhousie's attack on sanitary science was out of fashion. In eleven years so great a change had taken place that his voice seemed to come from a past age.
"Do not fear," Lord Stanley wrote to Miss Nightingale on July 10, 1863, "that Lord Herbert's work will be left unfinished: sanitary ideas have taken root in the public mind, and they cannot be treated as visionary. . . . The ground that has been gained cannot be lost."
If she felt any satisfaction, she did not record it. War Office affairs had become of secondary importance; memoranda, the drafting of minutes, warrants and instructions, the never-ending toil involved in the scrutiny of plans for barracks and hospitals had become sidelines. Another vast undertaking had come into her life which was overwhelming her and crushing her as no other previous labor had done---the Royal Sanitary Commission on the Health of the Army in India.
ONCE MORE, AS MISS Nightingale approaches this enormous task, one is overcome by a feeling of hopelessness. It is too much to attempt; the labor is too gigantic, the questions involved too vast and too intricate; the difficulties of distance, language, communication must prove insuperable. She herself is now a bed-ridden invalid of over forty, shattered in health and overwhelmed with other work. Nevertheless, in 1862 and 1863 she reached the peak of her working life; her will conquered her physical disabilities; she drove herself to work as she had never worked before, and as, after this period, she was never able to work again.
Sidney Herbert had left her a frightful legacy in the Indian Sanitary Commission. Without him, she repeatedly said, she would never have contemplated it. Lord Stanley, "that noble and industrious lord," was not altogether satisfactory to her. They were friends, but he was cool, "singularly cool," one of his contemporaries called him, cautious and critical. His slowness to take action, refusal to be driven, threw Miss Nightingale into frenzies of irritation. She did not realize his value. The fact that the movement to improve Indian sanitation had behind it a man of Lord Stanley's known stability was in reality of the greatest assistance to her.
Early in May, 1859, before the warrant for the Commission was issued, Miss Nightingale had discovered that no satisfactory figures and records, on which she and Dr. Farr could work, existed and that to obtain even ordinary documents relating to India in London was a hopeless task. She decided to obtain all her information at first-hand, and in consultation with Sir John McNeill and Sir Charles Trevelyan, at this time Governor of Madras, she drafted a Circular of Enquiry which was to be sent to every military station in India. She also wrote to 200 larger stations asking for copies of all regulations, including local Regulations, relating to the health and sanitary administration of the army. Finally, she wrote individually to all military and medical officers of high rank in India with whom she was acquainted, or to whom she could obtain introductions, asking for their goodwill and cooperation.
As the reports returned from India, they were sent to Miss Nightingale, who analyzed them, assisted by Dr. Sutherland and Dr. Farr. The task was colossal. Literally tons of paper were involved. When she took a house, the reports required a whole room to house them. When she moved, they filled two vans.
Eventually the Station Reports filled the second volume of the Indian Sanitary Commission's Report, a folio volume of nearly 1,000 pages in small type. "The bulk of the Report" wrote Henry Reeve "is truly appalling." They are documentary evidence of immense value, providing a detailed picture, which is recorded nowhere else, of military life in India, both British and native, in the years immediately preceding and following the Mutiny. No official survey of India was undertaken until 1872.
As the analysis proceeded, it became clear that facts of such overwhelming importance were being disclosed that they must constitute the basis of the Commission's Report. Yet Miss Nightingale, who had originated the scheme and executed it, from the drafting of the questions to the analysis of the replies, was not a member of the Commission nor did she qualify as a witness. How was her work to be included? The solution proved the extraordinary place she had earned in official estimation. She was officially invited, in October, 1861, to submit in due course "Remarks" on the Station Reports, which should be signed by her and incorporated under her name into the report of the Commission. By August, 1862 the analysis was complete, and she had written her remarks under the title Observations by Miss Nightingale.
After Notes on Nursing, Observations is the most readable of her writings. Ill, exhausted, and bereaved, she had never written anything with fiercer vitality. She intended Observations to be provocative. She told a frightful story with accuracy. "The picture is terrible but it is all true," wrote Sir John McNeill on August 9, 1862.
Statistics showed that for years the death-rate. of the British Army in India had been 69 per 1,000. "It is at that expense," wrote Miss Nightingale, "that we have held dominion there for a century; a company out of every regiment has been sacrificed every twenty months." This enormously high death-rate was not the inevitable result of the climate. The diseases from which troops died like flies were not specifically tropical diseases; they were camp diseases rendered a hundred times more deadly in India by climate and the proximity of native populations living in conditions of appalling filth.
Barracks were built of lath and plaster with floors of earth varnished over with cow dung "like Mahomet and the dung hill, if men won't go to the dung hill, the dung hill it appears comes to them." The water supply was deplorable. Only two stations supplied a chemical analysis, one of which read "like an intricate prescription," other stations contented themselves by describing their water as "smells good" or "smells bad."
No drainage whatever existed "in any sense in which we understand drainage. The reports speak of cess pits as if they were dressing rooms," wrote Miss Nightingale. The Indian Authorities were like the London woman who when asked to point out the drains said: "No, thank God, Sir, we have none of them foul stinking things here." Means of washing were practically nil; stations were either without lavatories or, if lavatories existed, they had no fittings. One station washed in "earthenware pie dishes on a wooden form." "If the facilities for washing were as great as those for drink, our Indian army would be the cleanest body of men in the world," commented Miss Nightingale. Drunkenness was universal. A station was described as "temperate" in which one man out of every three admitted to hospital was suffering directly from the effects of drink.
Barracks were crammed with troops. One report stated that "300 men per room were generally accommodated without inconvenient overcrowding." "What is convenient overcrowding?" inquired Miss Nightingale. Troops had no occupation, no means of recreation, and no opportunities for exercise. In the hot weather they were customarily confined to barracks from 8 A.M. to 5.P.M. They had nothing to do, nothing to read, nowhere to go. Out of 24 hours they lay on their beds for 18.
Hospitals were inferior in construction and comfort even, to barracks. Often they were merely sheds supported on poles. Patients were washed and nursed by a ward coolie hired at 4 rupees a month who was not a soldier and, in a cholera epidemic, usually ran away. When a man was dangerously ill, one of his comrades was sent for and then, in Miss Nightingale's words, "The Regimental Comrade not knowing the language, nurses the Patient by beating the Coolie."
The allowance of tubs and basins was 1 per 100 men. Washing was done by pouring water over the patients from a tin pot. Convalescents spent 74 hours a day in bed. Privies were highly offensive and gangrene and erysipelas widespread. Troops would conceal their illness rather than go into hospital.
To rectify these conditions involved a new problem. Of what use to improve and sanitate barracks and hospitals when next door lay the bazaar and native city in all their filth? To improve conditions for the troops, the whole sanitary level of the country must be raised. "The salvation of the Indian Army must be brought about by sanitary measures everywhere," Miss Nightingale wrote. The health of the army and the people of India went hand in hand.
Another great mission had come to her. Work in military hospitals had inevitably led her to civil hospitals; sanitary work for troops in India led her to work for the health of the peoples of India. By the time she had finished the report, she was as much concerned with the one as the other. "This is the dawn of a new day for India in sanitary things, not only as regards our Army but as regards the native population," she wrote to Harriet Martineau in May, 1863.
Miss Nightingale proposed that a Sanitary Department should be established at the India Office to draw up and enforce a sanitary code for all India. She did not succeed. The Sanitary Commission on the Health of the Army in India was a military commission, instructed to concern itself with military affairs. Between the civil and military administration in India there was friction; no suggestions for changes in civilian administration would be entertained which emanated from a military Commission. She did, however, succeed in establishing some sanitary control at home. Two Indian representatives were added to the Barrack and Hospital Commission, and its powers were extended to include India; as a result all sanitary works for the Army in India would pass through Dr. Sutherland's hands. The sky seemed to be clearing, and Miss Nightingale, relieved from the enormous burden under which she had staggered for two years, allowed herself a moment of elation. On May 19, 1863, she wrote to Harriet Martineau: "I cannot help telling you in the joy of my heart that the final meeting of the Indian Sanitary Commission was held today---that the Report was signed and that, after a very tough fight, lasting over three days to convince these people that a report was not self executive, our working commission was carried."
She was confident that the report would be read, not only by Members of Parliament, but by the public. So many copies of the Army Sanitary Report of 1857 had been sold that the Government had made a profit, and she anticipated that the sales of the Indian Report would be larger still. But disaster followed. Either a genuine mistake occurred, or, as she believed, she was the victim of a deliberate plot. It appeared that an attempt was made, if not to suppress the whole report, then at least to suppress the disclosures most unpalatable to the Government.
Unknown to her the Clerk to the Commission prepared a new and shorter edition: shorter because it left out the facts on which the report was based---the Station Reports, her abstract of the Station Reports and her Observations. The ground was covered by giving a Précis of the Evidence, executed with so little competence that reference was repeatedly made to passages in the sections which had been eliminated. This edition was to be the only one on sale to the public and was to be the edition presented to both Houses of Parliament. A thousand copies only had been printed of the original report, the type for the two enormous volumes having already been broken up. Even these copies were not obtainable. They were "reserved" by the Government.
On July 20 Miss Nightingale wrote to Sir James Clark: "There has been a perfect outcry (and I think a legitimate one) because the two folio book is not to be sold, not to be had, not to be published, not to be presented to Parliament, and that the 8vo makes references passim to a work which is not to be had." She refused to believe that the affair was an unfortunate mistake. The Report contained too many inconvenient revelations. On August 11 she wrote to Harriet Martineau, "the Government wished to suppress the sale."
She could do nothing; it was impossible to set up and reprint the two enormous books. The position must be accepted, and she must set to work to see what could be salvaged from yet another wreck.
She discovered that the 1,000 "reserved" copies were to be had "on application" by Members of Parliament. By an irony of Fate the address to which applicants were directed was the Burial Board, where the Clerk to the Commission happened to hold a post. She wrote to Members with whom she was acquainted begging them to apply and heard that for the first time in history there was a run on a Blue Book.
Next she published the Observations. Copies went out to India and were read by officials first with anger, then with conviction. Many years later Sir Bartle Frere was asked what had started the movement for sanitary reform in India. It was not the Blue Book, he said, which no one read, but a certain little red book "which made some of us very savage at the time but did us all immense good."
Finally, she persuaded Lord de Grey to allow her to rewrite the abridged edition. "Surely," she wrote in August, 1863, "Sir Charles Wood [Secretary of State for India] will be very grateful to you for remedying his mistake." The inevitable objection that the Treasury would not authorize the expense, she met by offering to pay the cost herself. With the issue of the revised edition all she could do on the report itself was finished. Its possibilities had been enormous, and it had been a crushing disappointment.
She began to work on setting up the administrative machinery which should put its recommendations into practice. For the moment all went well; an official despatch was sent to India recommending the formation of sanitary commissions in each Presidency; the two additional members to represent India were added to the Barrack and Hospital Improvement Commission; and Miss Nightingale was asked to prepare a list of suggestions for sanitary improvements which might be sent to India and be the foundation of a sanitary code.
An outcry followed, furious opposition coming from officials in the India Office, in the War Office, in India itself and it became evident that sanitary reform would only be carried out in the teeth of resistance from every authority concerned. All through the summer Miss Nightingale stayed in London, ill, miserable, and alone. Lord Stanley had gone to the country and would not be persuaded to return. The work of the Indian Sanitary Commission was at a standstill. All her gigantic labors seemed once more to be dissolving into thin air.
Suddenly, however, the scene changed. In October, 1863 Lord Elgin, the Viceroy, was taken seriously ill. On November 20 he died, and Sir John Lawrence was appointed his successor.
The appointment of Sir John Lawrence as Viceroy of India opened a new period in Miss Nightingale's life. He was the first of a series of Indian officials of the highest rank who became her intimate friends, and through whose affection and admiration she gained an inside influence in Indian affairs approximating to some extent to the influence she had exercised at the War Office while Sidney Herbert was alive and in office.
Her position in Indian affairs was even more extraordinary than her position at the War Office. She had never been to India, she never did go to India, and yet she was considered an expert on India and consulted on its affairs by men who had lived there all their working lives. This knowledge was the reward of her enormous labors on the Station Reports. To her bedroom had come a return from almost every military station in India, not from one Presidency or one district but the entire Peninsula. Year after year she had toiled, examining, classifying, grouping. She possessed prodigious powers of absorbing, retaining, and marshaling masses of facts, and when she had completed her task the whole vast teeming country lay before her mind's eye like a map.
Sir John Lawrence had first called on her when she was in the midst of her work on the Station Reports in 1861. Both felt an instant attraction. He had striking personal beauty, immense height, curling golden hair, and flashing blue eyes. He was fearless, chivalrous, incorruptible, and deeply religious. Lord Stanley described his quality by saying that he had "a certain Homeric simplicity." He had passionately desired to be a soldier, and it was a crushing disappointment when he found he was to be taken into the East India Company's service with a civil and not a military appointment. "A soldier I am and a soldier I will be," he exclaimed, and he conducted his life with a soldier's fearlessness, directness, discipline, and austerity. Fate brought him the opportunity to display military genius. When the Mutiny broke out, he was Governor of the Punjab. His swift action and personal courage, his bold disposition of the troops in his province, and above all his popularity and influence with the native population, prevented upper India from rising.
In spite of a fiery temper---he had been seen hurrying out of church to belabor a disobedient servant---he was one of the band of Indian administrators who possessed deep sympathy with the native races. He was disgusted by the mass executions which followed the suppression of the Mutiny, and he repeatedly protested against the severities of certain military authorities. Miss Nightingale wrote to M. Mohl on January 1, 1864: "His love of and trust in the native races---his fear and distrust of the British Military authorities are sad and remarkable because so true---at least I can vouch for cause for the latter. With great simplicity he implies that the natives are much more capable of civilisation---even of sanitary civilisation---than our Army authorities in India. He looks upon our occupation as a conquest and we as camped out all over India, having hitherto attempted little but Martial Law over the conquered country. You must not betray him. For I received a hint from Head Quarters to tell him to be more conciliatory with our Army." When his appointment as Viceroy was announced, her delight knew no bounds. "There is no more fervent joy, there are no stronger good wishes than those of one of the humblest of your servants," she wrote.
It seemed that a golden age must be about to dawn, and even Lord Stanley allowed himself to be optimistic. "Sir J. Lawrence's appointment is a great step gained," he wrote to Miss Nightingale on December 1, 1863. "I believe now there will be little difficulty in India."
He went on to make a remarkable suggestion, the more remarkable coming from a man with his regard for official etiquette. The new Viceroy must be instructed in the Indian sanitary question; he wished him to learn, not from any official, but from Miss Nightingale. With a lifetime spent in India behind him, the Viceroy was to come to be taught by an invalid lady who had never been to India in her life. "The plans are, in the main, yours," wrote Lord Stanley. "No one can explain them better; you have been in frequent correspondence with him.... Your position in respect of this whole subject is so peculiar that advice from you will come with greater weight than from anyone else."
Sir John Lawrence had only a week before he sailed, but he called on December 4, 1863. The interview, wrote Miss Nightingale, was one never to be forgotten. The Viceroy remained with her for several hours, the Indian Sanitary Report was discussed in detail, and he declared himself "heart and soul for Sanitary Reform." At last it seemed that the mountain that was India was being moved.
In January, 1864, assisted by Dr. Sutherland, Dr. Farr, and the celebrated civil engineer, Sir Robert Rawlinson, Miss Nightingale prepared her Suggestions in regard to Sanitary Works required for the Improvement of Indian Stations. It was the first sanitary code for India, the starting-point from which, she hoped, great new projects, bringing health and prosperity to millions, would be developed.
Once more hope faded. The Suggestions were sent to the War Office, but nothing happened. The Barrack and Hospital Improvement Commission inexplicably came to a standstill on Indian work. In April Miss Nightingale discovered the truth: the War Office and the India Office had fallen out. The India office did not intend to have action proposed to it by the War Office, and the Suggestions had been pigeon-holed.
At this stage Lord Stanley became annoyed. It was seven months since the Commission, of which he was chairman, had reported, and nothing had been done. He considered that a reflection had been cast on his work. He went to see Sir Charles Wood and promised to support him in case of any criticism in the House and Sir Charles Wood then accepted the Suggestions. The conflict in dignity between the War Office and the India Office was solved by a phrase on the title-page; though the Indian Sanitary Commission had been a War Office Commission, the title-page stated that the Suggestions had been "prepared by the said Commission in accordance with letters from the Secretary of State for India in Council."
As soon as the Suggestions were officially approved, Miss Nightingale had copies printed at her own expense, which she sent out to Sir John Lawrence. Delay continued in the official issue. The War Office and the India Office fell into an argument as to the number of copies to be printed; and a further two months passed before the official edition was ready. By this time Sir John Lawrence was having Miss Nightingale's advance text reprinted in India, and she wrote to Douglas Galton: "It might be as well to hurry your copies for the India Office who will otherwise receive them first from India."
Once more she was the mainspring of the work. No toil was so wearisome that she shrank from it, no detail too small to receive her attention. Across two continents her burning zeal infused Sir John Lawrence with new strength. Sir Bartle Frere, at this time Governor of Bombay, told her, "Men used to say that they always knew when the Viceroy had received a letter from Florence Nightingale; it was like the ringing of a bell to call for Sanitary progress." Her hand was everywhere. She had drawn up the instructions to the Presidency Commissions and widened their scope, so that they were not only to "supervise the gradual introduction of sanitary improvements in Barracks, Hospitals and Stations" but also to improve the sanitary condition of "Towns in proximity to Stations." The Suggestions, the code by which the Commissions worked, were written by her; the report of the Commission itself was her work. Lying in her bed in London, she held the threads of a network which covered all India.
Again hope ran high. "I sing for joy every day," she wrote in June, 1864, "at Sir John Lawrence's Government." In October, 1864 in the full flood of optimism she wrote to him: "I feel it a kind of presumption in me to write to you---and a kind of wonder at your permitting it. I always feel you are the greatest figure in history and yours the greatest work in history in modern times. . . . You are conquering India anew by civilisation, taking possession of the Empire for the first time by knowledge instead of the sword."
It was a lyric rapture which, alas, bore little relation to reality. While the machinery of the Sanitary Commissions was being set up, all went well; President, Secretary, and Commissioners were appointed and coached in their duties, information was collected, and schemes formulated on paper. And then---nothing happened. The machinery was there ---but it did not operate.
The truth was that Sir John Lawrence was not altogether successful in the office of Viceroy, which he had accepted solely from a sense of public duty. The personal courage and military genius which had saved the Punjab were not qualities which shone in the committee room. He had a violent temper, a rough manner, strong prejudices, a want of tact. The difficulties which faced him were appalling. Financially and administratively India was in fearful disorder. The year 1859-60 had shown a deficit of over forty million pounds sterling. The enormous increase in military expenditure, due to the Mutiny, seemed likely to increase and become an intolerable burden, since the extreme antagonism between Europeans and Indians prevented retrenchment.
It became known that he was on bad terms with his Council. The native population was distrustful. In June, 1864 he described the feeling of hopelessness which overcame him when an attempt to improve the sanitation of Calcutta was construed by the Bengalis as an attack on the Hindoo religion. Miss Nightingale herself found the Indian mentality difficult to deal with. "Nothing can give you any idea," she wrote to Harriet Martineau in 1862, "of the horrors of the disclosures as to the state of the stations which these Indians make themselves while declaring themselves to be 100 years before England."
Delay succeeded delay; 1864 passed into 1865, and still nothing substantial had been done in India. Once more she was in despair. It was the old weary story of guerilla warfare, the odd point here, the odd point there, snatched from the India Office or the War Office at the cost of infinite toil. But where was the plan? The plan, the constructive campaign, had once more faded away.