A pair of faithful friends offered
themselves as personal attendants; thirty-eight nurses were
collected; and within a week of the crossing of the letters Miss
Nightingale, amid a great burst of popular enthusiasm, left for
Constantinople.
Among the numerous letters which she received on her departure
was one from Dr. Manning, who at that time was working in
comparative obscurity as a Catholic priest in Bayswater. 'God
will keep you,' he wrote, 'and my prayer for you will be that
your one object of worship, Pattern of Imitation, and source of
consolation and strength, may be the Sacred Heart of our Divine
Lord.'
To what extent Dr. Manning's prayer was answered must remain a
matter of doubt; but this much is certain: that if ever a prayer
was needed, it was needed then for Florence Nightingale. For dark
as had been the picture of the state of affairs at Scutari,
revealed to the English public in the dispatches of "The Times
Correspondent", and in a multitude of private letters, yet the
reality turned out to be darker still. What had occurred was, in
brief, the complete breakdown of our medical arrangements at the
seat of war. The origins of this awful failure were complex and
manifold; they stretched back through long years of peace and
carelessness in England; they could be traced through endless
ramifications of administrative incapacity-- from the inherent
faults of confused systems, to the petty bunglings of minor
officials, from the inevitable ignorance of Cabinet Ministers, to
the fatal exactitudes of narrow routine.
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