The Private Life of Florence Nightingale

by Richard Gordon

  ‘I have nothing else.’

  He grunted, poured himself a glass of brandy and drank it as quickly as myself. ‘Listen, Darling – I’m a professional surgeon, like a professional soldier. I don’t give a fiddlestick’s end for the way I strike people. The only eyes I value upon my reputation are my own. I do my business here as best I can, setting and amputating limbs, suturing wounds, enucleating eyes, chopping off the tattered bits no more use to a man. Clearing out the dead as soon as they’ve chucked breathing to make room for more, seeing they go naked because we need the shirts. How do you expect me to welcome with open arms some well-bred young lady who chatters at society balls and’s thick as thieves with Mr Herbert? Everyone knows that Miss Nightingale’s a spy set on the army by the War Office.’

  ‘Be patient. You’ll see Miss Nightingale’s as much a professional as you are.’

  There was a knock, the door opened for a soldier in a stained red jacket and crumpled forage cap, his white moustached face like scratched parchment, his frail body bent with the burden of a bucket emitting steam and the smell of boiled meat.

  ‘Kipping, the plates are dirty.’

  The soldier took a rag from his pocket and began slowly wiping the grease from the tin platters. I observed that drink had added to his infirmities. ‘The hospital’s short of water,’ Newbolt explained. ‘You get a pint a day, and take your choice if you drink it, shave with it or wash your shirt in it. There’re only three fountains, so Kipping spends most of the morning queueing up.’ He lit a pair of candles in wax-encrusted bottles and asked conversationally, ‘Kipping, is that dragoon dead?’

  ‘Yes, sir. And buried.’

  ‘The cholera.’ Newbolt poured two more glasses of brandy. ‘Without the cholera we could manage. But the cases flooded from the transports before we could better equip the barracks for a hospital than whitewashing the walls. Kipping, get this gentleman a bowl, or something to eat off. Steal it if you must. I hope you’ve brought a spoon?’ he added to me, as the soldier shuffled out. ‘There’s no cutlery.’

  We drank the spirits. Newbolt poured more.

  ‘We’ve 2,000 patients here, and the likes of Kipping are each responsible for nursing a hundred of them, twenty-fours hours a day. What colonel in the field would release a good, healthy man to the Army Medical Department, who are mere civilians? The army is in the Crimea to fight, not to nurse. Valiant stupidity! Whatever your friend Mr Russell says, you can’t blame the Army Medical Department for giving the wounded short shrift, nor accuse us of creating more suffering than we’re supposed to relieve.’

  ‘Who is to blame, then?’

  ‘Lord Raglan, of course. There’s plenty of medical officers, each regiment has its pack-horse and panniers, dressings and instruments, enough medicines for six months. Ten stretchers and hospital tent, 40,000 cholera belts, medical comforts – no army ever went to war so ready for its disasters. But Raglan had the hospital beds, the ambulance waggons, everything, left behind at Varna. The generals and admirals in charge of transport are just as guilty. At Scutari, we’ve also got the Turkish Military Hospital, half an hour’s walk across the common, 1,000 beds. Just south, we’ve the General Hospital and the Sultan’s Summer Palace, officers only. But what’s the use of the finest hospital in the world, if you can’t take the patients to it?’

  The door burst open. My other two messmates were staring at me with astonishment and hostility.

  With mocking ceremoniousness, Newbolt introduced me to Dr Horace Wiley, ‘A citizen of President Franklin Pierce, come all the way from New England to perform the chloroformist’s sleight-of-hand.’

  The American was young, tall, sallow, with a short black beard. He wore white cavalry breeches, highly-polished topboots with spurs, and a bright blue frock coat with velvet collar and bright buttons, a uniform I later discovered he had invented himself. ‘Are you a medical gentleman, sir?’ he asked solemnly.

  ‘No, he’s a nursemaid,’ said the other, who was introduced as assistant staff surgeon Thomas Handshear, of Bartholomew’s, young, plump, fair, with pink shining face, always grinning. He wore a shooting jacket, a bright check waistcoat and green velvet trousers, Off duty, officers could wear what they cared and retire to such comfort as they might. Once done with the defeat of his Light Brigade, Lord Cardigan sought the champagne, the French cook and semi-circular stern saloon of his four-bedroomed, two-galleyed yacht Dryad in Balaclava Harbour.

  ‘Oh, lor’! Boiled salt pork again,’ complained Handshear, sniffing the pail. ‘They’re feeding us hardly better than the men. Couldn’t Kipping pick up anything in the bazaars?’

  I offered a preserved ox tongue and claret from my luggage. Kipping, reappearing with my plate, was immediately sent for it.

  ‘I heard a shave that Dr John Hall was paying us another visit.’ Handshear poured two more drinks from the bottle. Wiley had a Puritanical outlook, except when it was inconvenient.

  ‘I doubt it,’ said Newbolt sourly. ‘When he appeared after Alma, he told London the hospital “was as good as could possibly be expected”. No man likes to see himself so flatly corrected.’

  Handshear took one of Newbolt’s cigars. ‘By the by, old fellow, there’s a damnable fuss at the end of the corridor. Big dragoon pouring blood like a steam-pump.’

  Newbolt swore. ‘Didn’t you do anything?’

  ‘But I’m off duty,’ Handshear complained. ‘Why should I miss my dinner?’

  ‘I’ll have to take the leg off,’ said Newbolt, sounding irritated. ‘Horace, can you double up as chloroformist and assistant on the artery?’

  Wiley threw back the brandy. ‘Right away.’

  ‘I’ll help,’ I offered.

  Newbolt scowled. Tucking a flat, polished wooden box under his arm, he said curtly. ‘You’ll do. Come on.’

  The Barrack Hospital – to grow as familiar to every Briton that winter as his last slumber’s nightmare – was a square round a huge parade ground. Only the western wing and half the southern could be used, the rest being damaged by fire and open to the weather. Our kitchen opened on to a first-floor landing converted into a surgery, leading directly to a corridor as wide as the nave of a church and as cold. The walls were stone, with windows looking from one side, on the other racks for the rifles of the Sultan’s troops. The lath-and-plaster ceiling was supported every ten paces by a stout arch, from each dangling a square lamp with a candle. Along each side were the sick, packed closely, all lying on the floor.

  There was a constant noise of groans, moans, coughs, gasps, swearing. ‘Are you acquainted with Professor James Simpson, of Edinburgh?’ Wiley asked me courteously as we strode behind Newbolt with his cigar, deaf to importations for succour.

  I said that I regretted not.

  ‘Professor Simpson gave the world chloroform. My friend Dr William Thomas Green Morton of Boston first of all gave the world ether. And precious little credit he got for it.’

  Wiley said he was in Scutari at his own expense, from scientific curiosity over chloroform in war surgery, for which it was tried in the Mexican War. The Crimean was a war to which any man might apply his talents or inquisitiveness. These ‘Travelling Gentlemen’ – ‘TGs’ – were officers’ brothers and friends, or tourists camping beyond gunshot range. After the savage little brush in the fog at Inkerman, the day after our arrival, a party of merchants from Manchester inspecting the dead through their eyeglasses were angrily conscripted by a colonel to dig the graves for them. There were ladies, too. Mrs Duberly, later known to everyone for her Journal Kept During the Russian War, rode old battlefields with such relish that she was called by soldiers ‘The Vulture’.

  ‘Watch your step, Mr Darling,’ said Wiley politely.

  The corridor led into a long barrack-room, round the walls a Turkish divan – a wooden shelf, upon which more men were huddled under blankets, and below which I could hear rats scampering. I slipped. I was walking through an inch of watery excrement, spilling from the Turkish privy in the corner.
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  ‘It’s the men’s own fault,’ said Newbolt. ‘They stuff the drains with rubbish. The engineers would have to pull the walls down to find the pipes. They suggest closing all the latrines to install a flushing system, which is not particularly helpful when everyone has diarrhoea. If they don’t arrive with it, they soon get it. You’ll get it yourself, Darling, most likely.’

  I set my teeth tight, trying not to retch.

  ‘And only twenty chamber-pots in the hospital,’ said Wiley gloomily.

  ‘There’s the tubs.’ Newbolt nodded towards a stinking vessel in the corner. ‘If we could get the orderlies to empty them.’

  ‘You’re unfair on Russell,’ I said angrily. ‘Things are worse than we could even imagine in London.’

  Newbolt puffed his cigar. ‘A soldier knows he’s going to suffer when he takes the shilling. What are they? The scum of the earth enlisted for drink.’

  ‘They wouldn’t care to hear you call them that.’

  ‘I never did. It was the Duke of Wellington.’

  Two rats scampered ahead, between the patients. ‘I’ve seen several men with rat-bites,’ said Wiley thoughtfully. ‘Too weak to move, I guess.’

  Newbolt laughed. ‘The rats may rid us of Miss Nightingale. Who’s ever known a lady not frightened of mice?’

  We clattered down some stone stairs. At the end of another corridor, we reached the patient.

  He was a big man. He was white, trembling, moaning on the floor, covered with a greatcoat stiff with blood and mud acquired six weeks before at the Alma. He had a sheet, rough as a sail. It was bright red with fresh blood, which ran in a slow, thick rivulet across the tiles, channelling itself into the cracks. He had no pillow, no cup, no water bottle, no attendant. Half a dozen comrades looked on listlessly, only two with the strength to prop themselves on their elbows.

  ‘Damn me,’ muttered Newbolt. He ground cigar-butt under heel, and I noticed ash mingle with the gleaming blood. ‘Horace, some light.’

  The American drew from his side pocket a Turkish lamp I had never seen before, a compact candlestick with a concertina of parchment a foot high to spare the flame the draught, topped by a handle.

  ‘You’ve got to lose your leg, old fellow,’ said Newbolt.

  The man’s lips moved. After some seconds he said, ‘I ain’t afraid.’

  ‘You won’t feel a thing,’ Wiley soothed him. ‘You’ll sleep like a babe.’

  Newbolt produced some flax from his uniform pocket, thrusting the strands through the buttonhole of my swallow-tailed coat. ‘Push your fist in the groin here, to stop the pulse of the femoral artery. You won’t funk?’

  ‘I’ve seen Sir Peregrine’s house-surgeon do it.’

  Newbolt grunted. ‘But not holding a Turkish army lantern in his other hand.’

  Out of his box came a knife with an ebony handle, edged and pointed like a bayonet, a short saw as from any carpenter’s toolbag, hooks, sponges stiff with dried blood. I grew aware of the sweet, sickly smell of chloroform, which Wiley was pouring in a thin stream from a small green bottle upon a triangle of handkerchief across the man’s face.

  Newbolt turned back his right cuff. I exclaimed, ‘Aren’t you going to screen the men from the sight?’

  ‘What with?’ His knife pierced the front of the thigh.

  He made a triangular flap of skin and flesh, impaled the tip with a hook and drew it back from the front of the thighbone. Wiley leant casually across the man’s body to take it. My spare hand held aloft our shrouded flickering candle, the other I struggled to keep tight in the groin. Newbolt showed his familiarity with operating on the floor by rolling the man over, and almost myself with him. He repeated his cut. I noticed that the blood had turned dark as port wine.

  He snatched ligatures from my lapel to tie the big artery. I could stand up. Six sharp strokes of the saw severed the thighbone, glistening in the lamplight like a pie-stem from a full-lipped mouth. The newly severed limb was slid impatiently away across the bloody tiles. Wiley looked up and said calmly, ‘He’s a dead ’un.’

  Newbolt had begun to trim the edges of his flaps like a Piccadilly butcher fat from the joint. He stopped, straightened, glared down at his knife then at the soldier’s bared face, ‘Damn, damn,’ he said. ‘Good work wasted.’ I swayed, almost fainting at a man dying under my hands. ‘You’ve a good deal of blood on your beautiful coat, Darling.’

  Newbolt threw the stained greatcoat across the corpse. A soldier barely three feet from our lamplit knot covered his face with his hands and began to weep. My weak voice asked, ‘Why did he die?’

  ‘I’ll tell you why he died,’ Newbolt said angrily. ‘Because when Mr Sidney Herbert wanted this barracks as a hospital, he was asking for a miracle. A hospital from what? Where were we to find the beds, blankets, food, medicines, even the scrubbing brushes to shift the filth? Our supplies were rotting and rusting in Varna. We needed Bono Johnny by the hundred, and in Scutari most of the Turks are dead in the cemetery. Muddle, ignorance, laziness, stupidity! All the way down from Dr Andrew Smith, sitting in his little office at 13 St James’s Place, caring for the whole army’s health with twelve clerks and £1,200 a year. It’s Mr Gladstone at the Exchequer, and all the politicians before him who’ve made a deity of cheapness. They’re part of a horrible conspiracy which ended this man’s life in pain, lying on the floor. I told you Russell was lying in The Times, because I wouldn’t see the hospital run down by some outsider who’d never walked among the blood and filth we’re accustomed to, if we’ll never be indifferent to. I told you we were overwhelmed by the cases when we’d done nothing but whitewash the walls. There was nothing else we could do. We had plenty of whitewash.’

  He turned abruptly, and started putting back his instruments, still bloodstained. He ended in a low voice, ‘Horace, get an orderly to sew him in his blanket. Don’t forget to save his shirt.’

  I walked back with Newbolt in silence. As we passed in the dim light, the men again called piteously for attention. Newbolt hunched his shoulders. His time would be wasted, scattered among so many in useless fragments. ‘That wasn’t bad, Darling. For a Fop.’

  I have since been complimented by prime ministers and presidents, but never so richly, nor so needfully.

  I was impatient to leave the melancholy wards and corridors for our living quarters. There I discovered Handshear sitting on one side of the stove with the brandy bottle, roaring with laughter, Harriet in her nurse’s uniform and Scutari sash on the other.

  ‘What are you doing, prowling like a tabby cat?’ I asked shortly, irritated by seeing her in the company of another man.

  ‘She came with a message from The Bird,’ Handshear answered for her. ‘“The Bird” – good name for Miss Nightingale, eh?’

  ‘Why wasn’t she chaperoned?’ asked Newbolt, refilling his tumbler.

  ‘I had one of the smelly old nurses, but she went down to the basement once she heard about a canteen selling gin. Won’t you introduce me to this gentleman?’ Harriet asked primly.

  ‘You must return to your quarters,’ Newbolt ordered.

  ‘Oh, don’t pitch into us like that, Bob,’ Handshear complained to his senior. ‘Let Miss Catchpole stay awhile. We don’t see dollies like her every afternoon. By the by, we’ve eaten the tongue,’ he added to me. ‘It was delicious.’

  ‘Poo, what quarters!’ Harriet wrinkled her nose. ‘Fourteen of us nurses in one little room, ten nuns in another. Can you imagine it? Not even civilized beds, just those horrid hard divans. Only one little bowl between us to wash our faces in. I’m used to better things than that, I’ll have everybody know,’ she said grandly.

  ‘Sleep here,’ Handshear invited. ‘That’s what hospitals have nurses for, isn’t it?’

  ‘Shut your gob,’ she told him sharply. He fell into disconcerted silence. Wiley entered, and went straight to the cold bucket of salt pork.

  ‘What about our dinner?’ he asked gloomily, tipping the last of the bottle of brandy into a glass.

/>   ‘Tom’s got a Cheddar cheese,’ said Newbolt. ‘He’s been eating it in his bedroom in secret.’

  We gathered chocolate, Bath Olivers, a jar of mixed pickles and a tin of Donkin and Hall’s stew, which we spooned up cold. It reminded me of illicit feasts in the freezing dormitories of Rugby – which trained me admirably for Scutari. Harriet sat on Wiley’s knee, with the excuse of never before meeting an American gentleman. We drank my claret and opened another bottle of brandy. She asked Wiley to give us a song from home. The New Englander intoned I Come from Alabama lugubriously and repeatedly.

  Even Newbolt’s sarcasm seemed to melt in the warmth of her vivacity. Towards midnight, he repeated that Harriet must return to the north-east tower and that he would escort her, as he mistrusted the three of us. She remembered ‘The Bird’s’ message – I must report at ten in the morning. To Miss Bancroft, she told me archly, playing her fingers under my chin.

  I went to bed in the dark, we were so short of candles. I was conscious of meeting a man too sensitive for his profession. Without his shell of hostility, Dr Newbolt would have appeared as freakish as a skinned tortoise.

  12

  I woke the next morning in the dimness, with a headache, wondering where I was. Kipping shortly appeared with half a cup of hot water for shaving. A tin bowl of tea with bread and jam made my breakfast. I was alone in the mess-room when Newbolt strode in.

  ‘Look –’ He took me by the shoulders and pushed me to the window. ‘There’s a cargo of trouble.’

  He passed a pair of field-glasses. Two ships had anchored overnight off the point, one a paddle-boat, the other a screw steamer, both flying the white Ensign.