The Private Life of Florence Nightingale

by Richard Gordon

  ‘What’s the effect?’ I asked, engrossed.

  Handshear’s eyes turned to his magazine. ‘Oh, to start with the back goes black and blue, then it opens up. It’s like taking a ripe plum and bursting it in your fingers. Afterwards, it just pours blood.’

  ‘You were to see they didn’t kill him?’

  ‘That was the idea, I suppose. The army’s a little sensitive since the case of Private White at Hounslow. About ten years ago, when they could purge them with 150 lashes. He died a month later, and the vicar wouldn’t bury him.’

  ‘Despite three army doctors certifying that death was not in the remotest connected with the punishment,’ said Newbolt.

  ‘They did a post mortem – chest full of fluid, back muscles pulp, coroner’s verdict, death from flogging.’

  Newbolt snapped shut his instrument case. ‘And one of those three army doctors was –’

  ‘Dr John Hall, who sits in authority over us all in Balaclava,’ supplied Handshear. ‘I wonder if the vicar did so well in the Church?’

  ‘What did your poor fellow today do?’ asked Wiley.

  ‘Stole a blanket.’

  Newbolt stood up, pouring raki for all four of us. ‘How’s that man whose nose I stuck back?’ he asked Handshear.

  ‘It’s not sloughing. He’ll go home an Adonis. You used Liston’s method, didn’t you?’

  Always eager to join their professional talk, I said, ‘Sir Peregrine had much admiration for Mr Robert Liston.’

  ‘Liston was all cut and thrust,’ said Newbolt disparagingly. He swallowed his drink and poured another. ‘In his haste to remove one unlucky man’s leg, he whipped away his testicles with it.’

  ‘In another case,’ said Handshear, ‘Liston incidentally amputated the assistant’s fingers and an onlooker’s coat-tails. Like most of our surgical cases, the patient died later from hospital gangrene. So did the assistant. The party with the coat-tails dropped dead of fright that the knife had pierced his vitals. It was the only operation in history with a mortality of three hundred per cent.’

  ‘You gentlemen are not telling the truth,’ said Wiley severely.

  Kipping appeared with our cauldron of mutton stew.

  After dinner, I had to visit Miss Nightingale in her tiny room. It was now furnished with an unpainted deal table, where she sat every evening and much of every night with her correspondence. The starkness was eased by a French clock and an oil-lamp. I noticed she used a Turkish divin, an ornamented brass pen-holder with a portable ink-well attached. The kitchen outside now had brown curtains with bobbles, and she had somehow collected some sticks of English furniture. I saw little of her. She was always about the hospital, up to twenty hours at a stretch, meeting the constant fresh detachments of sick and wounded, apportioning them quarters, supervising her nurses.

  ‘There is a shave, Mr Darling,’ she greeted me sombrely, ‘of a terrible hurricane falling upon the army outside Sebastopol. I hope it proves as false as most others, It would be the last and bitterest pill for so many who contemplated a single summer’s hard fighting, then home.’ She picked up the copy I had written to the Penny Pioneer. ‘As usual, you’re overblown.’

  It was a testament of praise to Miss Nightingale – flowery, sentimental, as our readers loved in their cottage parlours, city attics and kitchens below stairs.

  ‘It is important to turn your finest face upon the public, and to deafen them with the sound of your own trumpet.’

  ‘Why?’ she asked bleakly.

  ‘So they will be eager soldiers, should you need to lead the invincible army of public opinion.’

  She changed the subject. ‘I have a task for you, Mr Darling. Half the hospital lies empty, because it was damaged in the fire. The thought has occurred to nobody that a hundred Turkish labourers could start work tomorrow and repair it. As I have Mr Herbert’s assurance of the Ambassador’s help to the utmost of his powers, please send a diplomatic letter about this to Lord Stratford’s palace –’ She inclined her head towards Constantinople. ‘While the British army continues bleeding to death under its windows.’

  We were interrupted by Miss Bancroft leading in Major Sillery urgently. He was redder and shinier than ever in the candlelight. ‘Miss Nightingale, an ’orrible disaster has befallen us,’ he started agitatedly. ‘The Prince – sunk with all ’ands, with all our stores, there’s a proper ’urricane blowing at sea. In the Crimea, the ’ospital tents are uprooted, the ’uts smashed, uniforms near blown from the men’s backs. I don’t know what we shall do, I honestly don’t, Miss Nightingale.’

  ‘It’s no good wringing your hands,’ she told him sharply. ‘We lack the fundamental necessities of medicine, and even of furnishing. With the influx which Lord Raglan writes us to expect any morning, this will otherwise cease to be a hospital and become merely a shelter for the dying. Supplies must be bought in Constantinople.’

  ‘Bought? What with?’ he asked pathetically.

  ‘The Times’ Fund. I have £30,000 from the public at my unfettered disposal.’

  ‘That would never do,’ he cried in horror.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘The army, madam, cannot accept charity.’

  The Times had been attacking the army. For an officer to take The Times’ money was like taking the enemy’s. ‘Then suggest what we do instead.’

  ‘Mr Ward may have more in his stores than he knows.’

  ‘The constant confusion about stores requires the purveyors to keep their wits about them – which some of them have not,’ she told him shortly. ‘Mr Ward’s realm should be split into three provinces – one providing food, another hospital equipment and clothing, a third keeping the daily routine going. This is a hospital of 4,000 beds. These beds should have the appropriate complement of equipment and clothing, without requisitions for separate items on countless dockets collecting the signatures and counter-signatures of busy surgeons. Let the patient shed his hospital clothing like a snake when he goes out, and receive from the quartermaster’s store what is requisite for him to become a soldier again, while the next patient succeeds to his bed and equipment.’

  ‘It can’t be done,’ said Sillery forthrightly.

  ‘It must be done. It worked in Harley Street, didn’t it, Miss Bancroft? And Scutari is but Harley Street writ large. But the matter of applying simple principles is never simple. I shall spare your feelings, Major Sillery. I shall scour the stores and request Lord Stratford to dispose of The Times’ money for me.’ He looked relieved. ‘Otherwise, I shall offer the whole £30,000 as a prize.’

  ‘For what, madam?’

  ‘For the discovery of anyone in Scutari willing to take responsibility for anything.’

  Two afternoons later, my diplomatic letter produced not Lord Stratford – who would be honestly baffled by an invitiation to visit a soldiers’ hospital – but Lady Stratford de Redcliffe. Handsome, haughty, attended by a military attaché in scarlet full dress and an official in speckless top hat and boots, she stepped from the brilliantly lacquered Embassy caique to a submissive greeting from Major Sillery and a sycophantic one from myself.

  Our visitors reached the hospital with their feet like ploughboys. Lady Stratford would not enter. Who might blame her, with the stink seeping beyond the walls? Our party passed through the Main Guard to the courtyard. She assured me that Turkish workmen could be found immediately, their wages paid by the Embassy. Then she felt sick, and left.

  I found an interpreter. I found one hundred and twenty-five reasonably robust Turks in the village and shanties. I found Captain Gordon of the Engineers to take charge. After five days, the labour force struck for higher wages.

  I pleaded. They said, ‘Yok’. That meant ‘no’, decidedly. I resolved on Miss Nightingale’s authority to confront Lord Stratford.

  Our jetty being unusable two or three times a week at that time at year, I had an uncomfortable ride on a mile of almost impassable road in an araba to the harbour at Kadekoi. It was an overdue excuse to see Const
antinople and to leave my melancholy military surroundings.

  My eye took refreshment from rich Turks in costly furs and shawls, their slippers and saddle-cloths embroidered in gold, their ladies bundled in white linen and struggling along the muddy streets in two pairs of slippers, attended by their slave women. From doorways came whiffs of burning aloes or patchouli – the smell of the Ottoman, as those of sea-coal and the wash tub among Londoners. The only part of the ladies visible being dark eyes above the yashmak, I stared so hard in mannerless curiosity of what lay confined within their clothes, that one stopped, looked quickly to see no Mussulman was in our twist of the alley, and with the painted fingertips which struggled against her enveloping drapery, for a second drew the yashmak aside. I had so startling a view of dark, mischievous, smiling beauty that I remember it today.

  I had money in my pocket. I visited the bazaar, where the goods lay in front of the counter and the shopman sat upon it, smoking the ubiquitous tchibouque. I ate heartily and toothsomely in Giuseppini’s Hotel. Then I went to see the Great Elchi.

  The Embassy was across the Golden Horn in the district of Pera. I was struck by its incongruous resemblance to the Reform Club, and was later amused to discover they had the same architect. A fiercely-moustached dragoman led me through a central glass-roofed court full of fleshy green plants, to a dazzling staircase of many-coloured marble mosaic. After keeping me waiting sufficiently to indicate my miserable lowliness, a young English secretary in frock-coat and black stock revealed an apartment the size of a ballroom, with five tall windows, two superb chandeliers and a pair of fireplaces under long mirrors, decorated by white columns each supporting a lion and dolphin embracing the Royal Arms. I walked the length of the floor eyed with increasing chilliness by our ambassador.

  Lord Stratford was the most important person in Turkey, and by his own estimation in the whole world. He had been ambassador at the Porte, on and off, since Wagram and Napoleon’s marriage. He was to have had St Petersburg, but Czar Nicholas would not have Lord Stratford. He was the cousin of Lord Canning. He was exactly the same age as Poor Old Ward.

  He now looked at me in disbelief as I stood before his gilt-encrusted desk in a room which would have taken a hundred of our casualties, my clothes worn and grubby through their repeated sponging of British soldiers’ blood, my collar frayed, my boots cracked. The Great Elchi himself sat in beautiful frockcoat and glistening linen, tall, stooping, eyes set deep under heavy brows, thick grey hair carefully parted and brushed, a broad jaw and a mouth like a crack in the ice.

  I respectfully implored his help in putting our labourers back to work.

  ‘Workmen?’ He was lost. ‘But I am not concerned with workmen.’

  I explained humbly Lady Stratford’s initiative.

  ‘I know nothing of such an unusual arrangement, nothing,’ he said, puzzled and amazed. ‘I fear that some misinterpretation or mistake has been made by those unconversant with the functions of diplomatists. But pray convey to Miss Nightingale my appreciation of her great accomplishments in the field of charity. I am convinced that much comfort may be derived by the sick and wounded from that attractive source. All those who lie in their hospital cots at Scutari will be uplifted by seeing passing among them a young lady presenting the refined manners and graciousness of London society. The privilege of these soldiers, to be ministered by Miss Nightingale, is indeed great. I hope that they express proper gratitude for such devotion by their betters, which is an expression of the patriotic spirit inspiring our nation to victory.’

  Speech was crushed from me by the weight of his condescension. The sleek young Englishman entered noiselessly, dropped a paper on the desk gently, and left obsequiously.

  ‘Your Excellency will know that Miss Nightingale has command of The Times’ Fund.’ I wished to make the most of my audience. ‘Miss Nightingale would much like Your Excellency’s help in its disposal.’

  His quizzical expression vanished. I had touched his heart. ‘I have given deep thought to the disbursement of this considerable sum,’ he told me with satisfaction. ‘This money was, of course, subscribed through public feeling being falsely aroused by The Times’ own correspondent. He wrote without troubling to seek an interview with Lord Raglan, or any senior officer. Though I doubt if he would be acceptable to such gentlemen. General Pennefather has been forthright enough to declare that he would as soon see the Devil as Mr Russell. But this money would be impossible to return to its myriad donators. Nor need it be. Nothing is seriously lacking in the Scutari Hospitals, nothing at all – so I learn from Dr Hall. Please tell Miss Nightingale that the sum could be most worthily dispensed by building an English Protestant church in sight of the Golden Horn, in the district of Pera.’

  ‘A what?’ I exclaimed.

  ‘That would be to me the culmination of my many hopes and much labour,’ he continued with dreamy self-congratulation. ‘A Protestant church! Here in Mohammedan Constantinople! What a signal indication of British prestige. It would be a monument to my mission. Miss Nightingale is, I know, sensitive to the service of God.’

  ‘Yes, Your Excellency. And Miss Nightingale believes it to include the service of man.’

  The Great Elchi’s eyes, straying heavenwards in contemplation of this criminal misappropriation of funds, turned severely upon me. ‘Exactly what position do you hold in Miss Nightingale’s retinue, Mr Darling?’

  ‘Firstly, to make a record of her work at Scutari. I am a literary gentleman, sir.’

  The eyes softened. ‘And I am a poet.’

  I congratulated him.

  ‘I have penned many verses, in such intervals I could snatch.’ His hand was already in the deadly desk drawer. ‘I shall read you some.’

  ‘But sir! You must be unconscionably busy. Your humble servant does not deserve such honour from Your Excellency’s own lips.’

  ‘Fortunately, I allotted an hour to your business,’ he assured me.

  I reported to Miss Nightingale that evening in the ‘Sisters’ Tower’, as it was becoming known. Her response was characteristic.

  ‘I have a golden rule in case of emergency. When I want a thing doing without delay, I do it myself. Mr Darling, you are to give the workmen what they ask, and engage another hundred – which will be simple with rumours of your generosity. The Times’ Fund will pay, and luckily I have money of my own. With £30,000, I shall become not a saint but a shopkeeper. You shall buy wholesale in Constantinople, and I shall establish myself in our kitchen as a general dealer in socks, shirts, knives and forks, wooden spoons, tin baths, tables and forms, cabbage and carrots, operating tables, towels and soap, small tooth combs, precipitate for destroying lice, scissors, bedpans and stump pillows. Je vais faire les choses grandement. I shall distribute the comforts which Dr Menzies dismisses as superfluous, but are in fact essential for the lives of the patients.’

  ‘On requisitions made by the surgeons, signed and countersigned, according to regulations,’ I reminded her, smiling.

  ‘Groove-going men!’ she dismissed the lot.

  It was time for her night round. We left for the familiar stench of the restless wards, with their unexpected revelations of a man dying or dead. I could not pass through them unmoved, but Miss Nightingale was never stirred by sickness, She thought only of the best practical means to make a sufferer more comfortable, to take down a dying man last wishes, to stop anothers tears or screams. She was as cool as a competent gentleman’s cook smelling the roast burning.

  ‘I can truly say, like St Peter, “It is good for us to be here,”’ she observed. ‘Though I doubt whether, if St Peter had been here, he would have said so.’

  The candles from the high ceiling were few, and gave a poor light. I took from my pocket a concertina Turkish lamp, like that Wiley had passed me for the amputation. I had bought it that afternoon in Constantinople. I fitted a candle, lit it, and handed it to her.

  ‘Most useful,’ she approved. ‘As the gales continually blow the windows in, and occasion
ally the roof off, to leave us under water for the night.’

  She raised the lamp, throwing her shadow, grotesquely huge, over the lines of men and the single, meek grey image of a slipshod night nurse. As we walked along, I remarked, ‘There was a statue of the Virgin Mary which stood in the seventeenth century before the church on an island – I’ve forgotten its name – in the Tiber at Rome. She held a lamp, which was lit every night for the sailors. She was called “The Lady with the Lamp”. It’s a good phrase. It would catch the imagination of John Bull. May I transfer it to you, in my next dispatch to the Penny Pioneer?’

  ‘I have abandoned any attempt to rein the charger of your imagination, Mr Darling.’

  ‘Perhaps I should persevere with my poetry, Miss Nightingale?’ I asked lightly. ‘Compared with the steam-engine rhythms of Lord Stratford’s stanzas this afternoon, my Virgilian verses float to the ear like thistledown.’

  ‘You would be much better advised, Mr Darling, applying your talents to advertisements for soap.’

  14

  Like every other outpost, Scutari developed an idiosyncratic life of its own. Everyone assumed a function different from what they expected to be, or started to be. Characters brightened and dimmed. All at the Barrack Hospital knew Harriet. She was the best nurse, deft with a blood-soaked, pus-stiffened dressing, or with banter and seemly titillation. Nobody knew Miss Bancroft, who had faded to a soft shadow of the sun which shone over us with daily increasing fierceness.

  Christmas was coming, however incongruously. Jostled by Turkish infidels, elbowed by death and misery, we should scrape a little celebration with the plum-pudding and custard from our tin bowls, as hungrily as any homesick Christians throughout the Empire.

  Uncle Peregrine had written expressing the widespread dismay at there being so much of everything at home, and so piteously little at the war. There seemed some invisible rusted stop-cock between the flood of British prosperity and the destitution of her army. He followed his letter with a wooden chest three feet square, sent by the fast screw steamer Himalya – as I write, still in the service of the P & 0 Line – and Messrs Grace & Co. of Constantinople, the shipping agents who handled most of the regimental baggage for the Crimea. My other uncle sent a Bible.