The Private Life of Florence Nightingale

by Richard Gordon

  The stimulation of my journey was marred by the one travelling companion whom I admired and knew little of, and the other of whom I was ashamed and knew far too much about me. I was determined to send Harriet home. She could not drown my reputation in the Mediterranean because her own was lashed to it, like a mariage républicain during the terrible noyades of Nantes. But I was troubled because she was going, through a mixture of my indifference and my exhortation, to where she would be both miserable and useless.

  During our three days in Marseilles, the nurses were taken to view the basilica of Notre-Dame-de-la-Garde, under the chaperonage of the British consul’s wife. I detached Harriet.

  ‘You want to get rid of me because of Miss Bancroft,’ she at once countered my dissuasion. We were in the open by the church, the morning cold and blustery.

  ‘I have never been alone in the same room as Miss Bancroft. Even fully clothed.’

  ‘If you want to remind me of my foolishness and humiliation, why must you be so coarse?’ she asked crossly.

  I apologized. ‘I’m inviting you to take the express back to Paris, because you are running unnecessarily into danger and discomfort, to both of which you are unsuited.’

  ‘What if you turned back now yourself? What would everyone think of you in London? Why should you give me the same shame?’

  ‘Nobody expects a pretty woman to be a heroine, no more than a swallow to play the hawk. Anyway, you’d never make a nurse in a thousand years.’

  ‘Why?’ she said sharply.

  ‘You’re too selfish.’

  ‘You are telling me that I can’t acquit myself as well as those gin-soaked harridans and dimwitted nuns? You forget, my friend, I’ve had to make my way in the world. I’m nimble and adaptable.’

  ‘But don’t you see? It’s only the gin or the veil which steels them to face a hospital’s horrors.’

  She smiled. ‘Then perhaps I shall adopt one or the other. Why shouldn’t I be with you, Tristram?’ she asked with her old sweetness. ‘I’ve no one else of my own in the world.’

  ‘There’ll be no love-making under Miss Nightingale’s rule,’ I told her severely.

  ‘We’ll see,’ said Harriet.

  We sailed on Friday, October 27. The morning brought news of a battle along the Worontzoff Road, bloody and indecisive, perhaps a defeat, hundreds of men wounded and likely to be arriving in Scutari the same moment as their unpractised nurses. I hoped it was another shave. We steamed to Malta, with the mail. The island was full of troops in transit, loafing, bored, curious, ribald, drunken. It was our first whiff of the war.

  That morning at Constantinople, the yellow jack was hauled down, we were open to visitors, and porters screaming for our baggage. I stared fascinated at the officials, turbaned and petticoated, their vests of brilliant and varied colours, their waists ringed like everyone in Turkey with weapons – long pistols, daggers, the yataghan like a sailor’s cutlass, many inlaid with silver, all brightly shining in honourable contrast to the wear and dirtiness of their garments.

  Lord Stratford de Redcliffe – ‘The Great Elchi’ to the Turks – sent the Embassy First Secretary, who went below to Miss Nightingale. Miss Bancroft shortly appeared with my instructions to go on ahead and report myself to Major Sillery, Military Commandant of the Barrack Hospital. She brought chilling news. It was no shave about the battle. It had been fought outside Sebastopol, in a valley north of Balaclava, with 500 men killed and 500 horses lost of Lord Cardigan’s Light Cavalry Brigade. The wounded were aboard the transports, and expected any hour.

  I ordered a caique, the Turkish skiff which plied the Bosphorus as the gondola the canals of Venice, varnished and painted, a floating piece of furniture more than a boat, to which I committed with distrust myself and my baggage. I distrusted even more the caidjees pulling the oars, both dressed in voluminous pantaloons and turbans, with long drooping moustaches, lean faces and sharp eyes expressing smouldering disdain for their lowly occupation, as if they would prefer to be cutting my throat with one of the bright-handled daggers tucked into their belts of rolled shawl.

  It took an hour to cross. The distance was a mile, the current flowed from the Black Sea at ten knots. The water was foam-speckled and full of jelly-fish. Above wheeled and mewed the wild Bosphorus gulls, which Byron called the ghosts of the Houris. Glanced many a light caique along the foam, I remembered from Childe Harold, the favourite work of Mr Wakley-Barlow. Once under the shelter of the high Scutari banks and out of the current, the water smoothed and the caidjees in a violent perspiration paused for breath. I noticed the jetty, which seemed made of matchwood.

  Inspecting my arrival with demoralizing apathy were a group of Turks and a few dozen British soldiers. I had my first shock. The army to myself and all Britons was a column of gorgeously attired pink-faced men marching behind a military band. These looked like beggars from the London kerbstones, ragged, dirty, bent, some with crutches, some lacking arms and legs. Another feature caught my eye. The shore which in the distance seemed picturesque grassland thick with bending and waving cypresses was a huge cemetery. It had three miles of tombs, jammed together like the houses of the London poor, some elaborate marble boxes, some like kerb-posts, the ground between rough and unkempt. The corpses arrived regularly from Constantinople by caique. I later discovered that its most beautiful monument marked the grave of a Sultan’s favourite horse.

  One man waiting was different. Tall, broad, impassive, separated from the rest, in a dark blue officer’s cloak, with short cape and high collar held by a chain, its scarlet lining flashing in the wind, on his head a dark blue forage cap with shiny peak and chinstrap. He watched without changing position or expression my scramble to the jetty, over-assisted by Turks, my shouting in English to the uncomprehending caidjees about my luggage. After some minutes, he stirred himself.

  ‘Darling?’ He was pink faced, in his thirties, gingery moustache drooping over the angles of his mouth, a scrub of beard edging cheeks and chin, his grey eyes looking at me perplexedly. He gave a casual salute, ‘I’m Newbolt.’ He jerked his head across the Bosphorus where the distant Vectis glinted in the pale sunshine, now peaceful as a basking shark. ‘I hear you’ve brought us reinforcements?’

  ‘Yes, forty nurses.’

  ‘Well, the women are becoming as scarce and as broken down as everything else in Scutari. What the devil are you doing in that galley? Sir Peregrine wrote that you were a literary gentleman.’

  I explained that I was Miss Nightingale’s secretary. I had expected from my uncle the man to greet me like a brother. Instead, he had clearly taken a dislike to me on sight. He inspected my fur-collared greatcoat, my military-looking cap, my growing pile of luggage with a glance which sneered.

  ‘Bono Johnny will take your traps up.’ His curt nod indicated the Turks. There was no baggage cart, no vehicle. I had left the borders of Europe which went on wheels, for Asia which lumbered on litters. The only horse in sight was a dead one, surrounded by a pack of dogs like wolves, who snarled and bit at the corpse and each other. ‘They’ll probably steal something for their pains. The soldiers aren’t strong enough to lift a candlestick. How are your boots?’

  He lit a cigar, not offering me one.

  The massive hospital was half a mile from the sea, two hundred feet above us, up a steep slope of scrubby heathland, now rutted wet mud broken by a few bare trees straining in the wind. Long pennants streamed from two of the towers. The landing-stage led into a village, their two or three winding lanes like cracks between walls blank of windows, everywhere the wet charred remains of fires, or rubbish which appeared established for years. Long-beaked, long-legged birds looked down at me from the roofs, their wings seeming hunched against the cold. A few turbaned faces stared at me impassively, as though the British were blown there as inevitably and inexplicably as the foul weather.

  ‘You’d a good berth, Darling. Forty dollies to yourself, all the way from London.’

  ‘Dollies! Over half were nuns, t
he rest not fit company for a gentleman.’

  ‘Scutari fits a gentleman for any company.’ He nodded shortly to a group of half dozen women beside the village. They were undeniably my compatriots, tattered, bemudded, shawls drawn close over dresses brightly coloured, even spangled. ‘I sometimes wonder if I’m working in a hospital or a whorehouse. There’s two or three hundred camp-followers in the basements. Old wives and new widows, out from home on the army transports, allowed on colonel’s discretion, you know. Their only occupations are giving birth, getting drunk and hiring themselves out.’

  ‘It’s hardly a holiday resort.’ Every step seemed to bring a new surprise.

  ‘There’s nowhere else,’ he said in his surly manner. ‘There’s been no general depot for the army since Waterloo. If the regiments didn’t feed them, they’d be dying in Chatham, as their men are in the Crimea.’

  We started squelching up the track. ‘I heard news of the battle.’

  ‘A terrible business. There’s bad blood between Lord Raglan and Lord Lucan, who commands the cavalry division. The whole army knows that. There’s worse between Lucan and Lord Cardigan of the Light Brigade. It doesn’t make for the easy transmission of orders. The story is, the ADC brought a message to attack a few Russian guns. Instead, the Light Brigade charged in the wrong direction and attacked the entire Russian army. I don’t know who’s going to do for us first, the generals or the cholera. But you wouldn’t know about the cholera,’ he said condescendingly. ‘Men went down with it like flies at Varna, because of the low-lying camp. Marching into battle at Alma, they were dying on the grass before they got there.’

  ‘On the contrary, I know a deal about the cholera,’ I corrected him. ‘I wrote of Miss Nightingale among its victims in London.’

  ‘Miss Nightingale!’ His anger flamed out. ‘Why all this fuss? Why is Miss Nightingale sailing among us? Why this female package? Why you yourself, whatever you’re supposed to be doing decorating it? That blackguard in The Times, I suppose. All Russell did was to exaggerate and comfort the enemy. They can read English in St Petersburg, you know. Things aren’t perfect here, but we do our duty. In the Peninsula, at Waterloo, the wounded were left to die, at best thrown in a cart, or given their chance with the amputation knife on a farmhouse floor. For the first time in human history, we’re taking proper care of our sick and wounded. No wonder the system creaks a bit. So did the Great Britain on her maiden voyage.’

  I refused a reply. I was angry myself. Admittedly, nobody cares for criticism, and it was intolerable seeing it embodied in forty females. But we had been advertised as the ‘Angel Band’ of saviours, and it was equally intolerable being told to go to Hell.

  We reached in silence the long esplanade fronting the hospital, followed by a curious band of soldiers, Turks and children. I stopped to admire the rainswept view. The hospital was on a point, the Sea of Marmara on one side, the headland hiding the humps of the Princess Islands, the windy funnel of the Bosphorus and Constantinople on the other. ‘I hope your ladies have brought their water colours,’ said Newbolt.

  There were slim-pillared kiosks, and a huddle of primitive huts from wood and canvas thrown roughly together, like English cowhouses. Newbolt explained in his taciturn way that they were sly-grog shops and stews. ‘Your soldier is an animal who can do without neither a drink nor a woman, sick or well. Your Greek or Jew appear to provide them, as surely as the lice in the soldiers’ shirts. About a third of the army has the clap or the syph. Some of the men would put their prick where I wouldn’t stick the ferrule of my umbrella. This is called the “Main Guard”,’ Newbolt explained as we approached the huge barrack gate, muddied to the knees. ‘The place isn’t a hospital. It’s a sizeable village joined together. Parts I haven’t visited, nor with luck ever expect to. You’re messing with me, by the by. It won’t be what you’re used to, none of the muffins and bohea of your literary salons.’

  ‘You don’t care for literary persons?’

  ‘I’m not acquainted with any. It’s just that I imagine them all effeminate, conceited, quarrelsome and sickly.’

  We were interrupted by the appearance through the Main Guard of a clergyman in billowing surplice, followed by a coffin under a flapping pall upon the shoulders of four military bearers, then a dozen marching soldiers and a handful of hat-holding civilians. The discouraging procession turned towards the cemetery, just beyond a row of huts guy-roped against the wind, and a verandahed house or two flying the Union Jack, suitable for nabobs.

  ‘A sight you’ll soon no more notice than the milkman’s cart at home,’ Newbolt told me. ‘There’s more dead than living in Scutari.’ In the gateway, wider and deeper than Trinity at Cambridge, the smell was so offensive I instinctively held my nose. It was the stench of Cholera Court, into which the whole British army had been marched, even the London swells of Guards officers, who would as little enter a slum as be seen carrying a parcel in Bond Street. My gesture afforded Newbolt satisfaction, ‘The sewers run just under the floors, and most are blocked. The prevailing wind blows air up the open privies, which are scattered about everywhere – Turkish fashion, crouch to it. Ladylike nostrils must get used to our perfume.’

  Inside the gate stood Major Sillery, fat and red-faced, in dark blue undress uniform and forage cap. ‘So, the Female Nursing Establishment has arrived,’ he exclaimed as Newbolt introduced me. ‘All preparations have been made for your reception, and I assure you that everything is perfectly in order.’

  He had a voice of plushy respect edged sharply with self-justification, like a Jermyn Street grocer defending an over-ripe cheese. I shortly discovered that Major Sillery had been promoted from the ranks, and in moments of emotion dropped his ‘h’s’.

  ‘Though I must confess, Mr Darling, I have no notion why you should be sent out here at all. I had nothing to do with the medical stores left at Varna,’ he continued mysteriously. ‘My responsibilities lie within these four walls, which are enough to test the talents of a simple soldier.’

  ‘I don’t think that Miss Nightingale is concerned with Varna, sir. Only the immediate problems here.’

  ‘I had nothing to do with Varna,’ he said vigorously. ‘It all appertained to the Bombay. She should have brought two thousand beds and other items back to Scutari, but the lighters were needed to embark the Heavy Cavalry for the Crimea, then the weather turned stormy and the captain had to sail without our stores. So you see, Mr Darling, no one’s really to blame, no one at all.’

  Newbolt lit another cigar, looking bored. I inquired about Miss Nightingale’s accommodation. ‘I’ve lodged the whole party in the northwest tower,’ Major Sillery explained with satisfaction. ‘There’s a large kitchen, with several rooms above. I’m sure the ladies will be well suited. I am a simple soldier, who can but do his best. They shouldn’t have come at all, you know,’ he repeated plaintively. ‘They’ll only be in the way.’

  Newbolt asked for a pair of field-glasses from a near-by officer. ‘Two caiques have arrived at the landing-stage,’ he announced ‘Both loaded with femininity.’

  Within an hour, Miss Nightingale and Miss Bancroft had struggled up the muddy track, heading the first half-dozen nurses in their laughable uniforms, bedaubed, frightened, huddling together like ugly ducklings. We were led to the north-west tower by Major Sillery. The kitchen was five yards square, half a dozen windows through walls a yard and a half thick overlooking the Sea of Marmara and the Bosphorus, facing the dome and minarets of the Selemye mosque. In the middle was the body of the white-whiskered Russian General Chekanoff, who died in Scutari seven days after falling prisoner with three bayonet thrusts and two musket balls in his sixty-five-year-old body.

  11

  ‘A whet-cup, a coup d’avant,’ said Newbolt, relish lightening his usual dourness. ‘A custom stolen from our enemies, as spoils of war. The Russian understandably needs a strong glass of aquavite before stomaching his oily fish.’ He thrust two anonymous bottles at me. ‘Raki? A sort of Turkish absinthe, whic
h smells like perfumed gin. Or Turkish brandy, whose composition confounds chemical analysis?’

  ‘Brandy.’

  He poured half a tumblerful. I gulped it down. It tasted like an essence of burnt logs, and had the effect of a shell exploding in a horse. Newbolt looked at me with more respect.

  ‘It’s not the hock and soda water you literary gentlemen are used to.’

  ‘This elaborate display of scorn is growing tedious. The only writing I do is scandal for the Penny Pioneer. I cadge it off housemaids for a shilling, and from their mistresses by indulging their jealousy. Its greatest reward is the perfectly agreeable one of eating lobsters and champagne at someone’s expense.’

  It was five o’clock the same afternoon, nearing dinner time. I was in the opposite tower of the barracks, sharing with three doctors the accommodation enjoyed by the forty-two women. Our kitchen was used only as a messroom. The walls were whitewashed brick, the floors, like all in the barracks, of cracked tiles and greasy boards, perforated with stopped-up rat holes. The door was invisible under engravings of society ladies from the Illustrated London News, which lay in worn copies on the floor. There were two hard chairs and a pair of upturned packing-cases, whose cheering contents from home were scattered about the long, rough table – stone jars and tins of food, chocolate, tea, tobacco, pairs of thick woollen gloves, straw everywhere. Three greasy tin plates and a bare hambone were piled upon Guthries’ Commentaries on Surgery, which was issued to all medical officers as the only text on military surgery written in English – fifty years ago, during the Peninsular War.

  Like everywhere else in the hospital, the mess smelt of sewage. The one window was closed against the wind. I noticed that the cockroaches lived undisturbed, and doubtless kept company with bedbugs and lice.

  ‘I don’t know what to make of you, Darling,’ Newbolt said despairingly, as though I were a patient with some mysterious but fatal illness. He had thrown off his cloak, and wore the dark blue undress frock coat, with plain blue trousers. He thrust more faggots into the square, iron stove, its angled pipe running through the window. Fuel was scarce, as Miss Nightingale shortly discovered, from learning the orderlies had chopped up the operating tables for firewood. Warm for the first time, I took off my fur-collared greatcoat. ‘Good God, do you always dress like that? I had my usual silk-braided swallow-tailed coat, stiff collar and white stock, My pepper-and-salt trousers were stiff with mud, my boots split. ‘Or are you to be married tonight?’