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قراءة كتاب The Life of Florence Nightingale, vol. 2 of 2
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PART V
FOR THE HEALTH OF THE ARMY IN INDIA
(1862–1865)
The question is no less an one than this: How to create a public health department for India; how to bring a higher civilization into India. What a work, what a noble task for a Government—no “inglorious period of our dominion” that, but a most glorious one! That would be creating India anew. For God places His own power, His own life-giving laws in the hands of man. He permits man to create mankind by those laws, even as He permits man to destroy mankind by neglect of those laws.—Florence Nightingale: How People may live and not die in India, 1864.
CHAPTER I
PRELIMINARY—THE LOSS OF FRIENDS
Can be through hours of gloom fulfill'd.
Matthew Arnold.
The years immediately after Sidney Herbert's death were among the busiest and most useful in Miss Nightingale's life. She was engaged during them in carrying their “joint work unfinished” into a new field. In the previous volume we saw Miss Nightingale using her position as the heroine of the Crimean War in order to become the founder of modern nursing, and to initiate reforms for the welfare of the British soldier. Among those who know, it is recognized that the services which she rendered to the British army at home were hardly greater than those which she was able to render to British India, and it was this Indian work which after Sidney Herbert's death became one of the main interests of her life. She threw herself into it, as we shall hear, with full fire, and brought to it abundant energy and resource. But first she had the memory of her friend to honour and protect; and then the hours of gloom were to be deepened by the loss of another friend hardly less dear to her.
Having finished her Paper upon Sidney Herbert, Miss Nightingale left the Burlington Hotel, never to return, and took lodgings in Hampstead (Aug.–Oct. 1861). Her mood was of deep despondency. She was inclined to shut herself off from most of her former fellow-workers. Against the outside world she double-barred her shutters. Her uncle was strictly enjoined to give no one her address; she asked that all her letters might be addressed to and from his care in London. The formula was to be that “a great and overwhelming affliction entirely precludes Miss Nightingale” from seeing or writing to anybody. “For her sake it is most earnestly to be wished,” wrote her cousin Beatrice to Mr. Chadwick (Sept. 18), “that you may come into some immediate communication with her. It is your faith that her working days are not yet over, that she may work in another field, her own being now closed against her. I cannot find that any of those who have been with her lately would share this hope, less on account of her health, than of her state of extreme discouragement.” It was a case not only, perhaps not chiefly, of personal loss, but also of public vexation; it was not only that the Minister had died, it was that his work seemed like to die also. The point of view appears in her letters to Dr. Farr:—
Sept. 10. We are grateful to you for the memorial of my dear Master which you have raised to him in the hearts of the nation.[1] Indeed it is in the hearts of the nation that he will live—not in the hearts of Ministers. There he is dead already, if indeed they have any. And before he was cold in his grave, Gladstone attends his funeral and then writes to me that he cannot pledge himself to give any assistance in carrying out his friend's reforms. The reign of intelligence at the War Office is over. The reign of muffs has begun. The only rule of conduct in the bureaucracy there and in the Horse Guards is to reverse his decision, his judgment, and (if they can do nothing more) his words.
October 2.… My poor Master has been dead two months to-day, too long a time for him not to be forgotten.… The dogs have trampled on his dead body. Alas! seven years this month I have fought the good fight with the War Office and lost it!
November 2. My dear Master has been dead three months to-day. Poor Lady Herbert goes abroad this next week with the children and shuts up Wilton, the eldest boy going to school. It is as if the earth had opened and swallowed up even the Name which filled my whole life these five years.
But there were things to be done in her friend's name, and she turned to do them. The power of the bureaucracy to resist was strong, because the new Secretary of State was a novice at his task, and Lord Herbert, by failing to carry through any radical reorganization of the War Office, had as she said, failed to put in “the mainspring to his works.” “The Commander-in-Chief rides over the learned Secretary of State as if he were straw.” But there was one hopeful and helpful factor in the case. Now that the Secretary for War was in the Commons, Lord de Grey was reappointed Under-Secretary. He was a genuine reformer. He knew the mind of his former Chief. He was most sympathetic to Lady Herbert. He was acquainted with Miss Nightingale. The power of an Under-Secretary is very small, but what he could do, he would. A letter which she received from a friend, both of Lord de Grey and of herself, gave her encouragement:—
(R. Monckton Milnes to Miss Nightingale.) October 21. I knew how irreparable a loss you and your objects in life had in Herbert's death, but I should like you to know how you will find Ld. de Grey willing to do all in his power to forward your great and wise designs. I say “in his power,” for that, you know, is extremely limited, but he may do something for you in an indirect way and, without much originality, he has considerable tact and adroitness. You won't like Sir G. Lewis, but somewhere or other you ought to do so; for in his sincere way of looking at things and in his critical and curious spirit he is by no means unlike yourself. He makes up his mind, no doubt, far better to the damnabilities of the work than you would do,—tho' one does not know what you would have been if you had been corrupted