Chapter 2 No.2

So, then, there were some things perhaps which might yet, as she put it, be "saved from the wreck." Lord de Grey had already given earnest both of his good will and of his courage. He had seen Lady Herbert and asked about her husband's intentions. She knew them generally, but referred for details to Miss Nightingale, who was thus able to be of some use in carrying through Lord Herbert's scheme for a Soldiers' Home at Aldershot. Then there was the question of the General Hospital to be built at Woolwich. The Commander-in-Chief was opposed to the scheme, and asked Sir George Lewis to cancel it.

Economy was, perhaps, behind the Minister tempting him. But Lord de Grey, who was present at the interview, stood firm. "Sir," he said, "it is impossible. Lord Herbert decided it, and the House of Commons voted it."[2] In the end, the Horse Guards and the War Office accepted the inevitable with a good grace; the order was given for the building to proceed, and Miss Nightingale's suggestion was adopted that it should be christened "The Herbert Hospital."

Lord de Grey was also influential in securing a redefinition of Captain Galton's duties at the War Office. Lady Herbert told Lord de Grey that this was one of the last official matters on which she had heard her husband speak. Miss Nightingale again supplied the details, and to her ally was committed responsibility (under the Secretary of State) for new barrack works. On some other questions Miss Nightingale had the bitterness of seeing projects abandoned which she and Lord Herbert had almost matured. "It is really melancholy now," wrote Captain Galton to her (Aug. 19), "to see the attempts made on all hands to pull down all that Sidney Herbert laboured to build up." She recounted some of the disappointments in a letter to Harriet Martineau, and that lady, whose genuine sympathy in the cause was perhaps heightened by a journalist's scent for "copy," was eager to go on the war-path. "No harm can come," she wrote to Miss Nightingale (Oct. 4), "of an attempt to shame the Horse Guards. I have consulted my editor [of the Daily News], and if I can obtain a sufficiency of clear facts, I will gladly harass the Commander-in-Chief as he was never harassed before-that is, I will write a leader against him every Saturday for as many weeks as there are heads of accusation against him and his Department. We don't want to mince matters." Miss Nightingale was to supply the powder and shot; Miss Martineau was to fire the guns. The partnership was declined by Miss Nightingale. The reason she gave was that she was no longer in the way of obtaining much inside information. But she doubtless had other reasons. There were things which she had just managed to carry through. There were other possibilities of usefulness before her. She was playing a difficult game. She did not think that her hand would be strengthened by newspaper polemics, for the form of which she would not be responsible, but the information in which would be traced back to her. Among the points which she had just managed to score was the appointment of the Commission already mentioned,[3] for extending the Barracks Inquiry to the Mediterranean stations. Headquarters tried to stop it. "And I defeated them," she had told Miss Martineau (Sept. 24), "by a trick which they were too stupid to find out." Her papers do not disclose the nature of the "trick" by which this excellent piece of work was carried through.

And there was another thing which she did in order to forward Sidney Herbert's work, though in a field outside that of their collaboration: she wrote a stirring letter (Oct. 8) on the Volunteer Movement, which he had organized in 1859. It brought her several "offers," as we have heard already[4]; and, displayed in large print on a card, must have attracted many recruits. She wrote it as one who had experience of war and its lessons; as one, too, who had worked for the Army, "seven years this very month, without the intermission of one single waking hour." She made eloquent appeal to the patriotic spirit of the British people; and she included this piece of personal feeling: "On the saddest night of all my life, two months ago, when my dear chief Sidney Herbert lay dying, and I knew that with him died much of the welfare of the British Army-he was, too, so proud, so justly proud, of his Volunteers-on that night I lay listening to the bands of the Volunteers as they came marching in successively-it had been a review-day-and I said to myself, 'The nation can never go back which is capable of such a movement as this; not the spirit of an hour; these are men who have all something to give up; all men whose time is valuable for money, which is not their god, as other nations say of us.'" I do not know if the name of Florence Nightingale be still-as it ought to be-a name of power with the people. If it is, then her letter of 1861 might well be reprinted in connection with recruiting for the Territorial Force. She laid stress upon the voluntary spirit, as opposed to compulsion. But she laid stress also on the supreme importance of efficient training: "Garibaldi's Volunteers did excellently in guerilla movements; they failed before a fourth-rate regular army."