Page:Great Men and Famous Women Volume 6.djvu/218

 374 WORKMEN AND HEROES tion, could never have combined the heterogeneous elements which .she gathered together in one common work and labor of love." I met the other day a lady who saw something of Miss Nightingale just be- fore she went out to the East. This lady tells me that Miss Nightingale was then most graceful in appearance, tall and slight, very quiet and still. At first sight her earnest face struck one as cold ; but when she began to speak she grew very animated, and her dark eyes shone out with a peculiarly star-like bright- ness. This was the woman whose starting for the East was at once felt to be the be- ginning of better things ; but so prejudiced were many good English people against women-nurses for soldiers, that Mrs. Jameson, writing at the time, calls the scheme " an undertaking wholly new to our English customs, much at vari' ance with the usual education given to women in this country.' She, sensible woman, one in advance of her day, hoped it would succeed, but hoped rather faintly. " If it succeeds," she goes on, "it will be the true, the lasting glory of Florence Nightingale and her band of devoted assistants, that they have broken down a 'Chinese wall of prejudices,' religious, social, professional, and have es- tablished a precedent which will, indeed, multiply the good to all time." The little band of nurses crossed the Channel to Boulogne, where they found the fisherwomen eager for the honor of carrying their luggage to the railway. This display, however, seemed to Miss Nightingale to be so out of keeping with the deep gravity of her mission, that, at her wish, it was not repeated at any of the stopping-places during the route. The Vectis took the nurses across the Medi- terranean, and a terribly rough passage they had. On November 5th, the very day on which the battle of Inkermann was fought, the ship arrived at Scu- tari. Miss Nightingale and her nurses landed during the afternoon, and it was re- marked at the time that their neat black dresses formed a strong contrast to those of the usual hospital attendants. The great Barrack Hospital at Scutari, which had been lent to the British by the Turkish Government, was an enormous quadrangular building, a quarter of a mile each way, with square towers at each angle. It stood on the Asiatic shore a hundred feet above the Bosphorus. Another large hospital stood near ; the whole, at times, containing as many as four thousand men. The whole were placed under Miss Nightingale's care. The nurses were lodged in the southeast tower. The extent of corridors in the great hospital, story above story, in which the sick and wounded were at first laid on wretched palliasses, as close together as they could be placed, made her inspection and care most difficult. There were two rows of mattresses in the corridors, where two persons could hardly pass abreast between foot and foot. The mortality, when the Times first took up the cause of the sick and wounded, was enormous. In the Crimea itself there was not half the mortality in the tents, horrible as were the sufferings and privations of the men there.