The principal medical officer of
the Army, Dr. Hall, was summoned from India at a moment's notice,
and was unable to visit England before taking up his duties at
the front. And it was not until after the battle of the Alma,
when we had been at war for many months, that we acquired
hospital accommodations at Scutari for more than a thousand men.
Errors, follies, and vices on the part of individuals there
doubtless were; but, in the general reckoning, they were of small
account-- insignificant symptoms of the deep disease of the body
politic-- to the enormous calamity of administrative collapse.
Miss Nightingale arrived at Scutari-- a suburb of Constantinople,
on the Asiatic side of the Bosphorus-- on November 4th, 1854; it
was ten days after the battle of Balaclava, and the day before
the battle of Inkerman. The organisation of the hospitals, which
had already given way under the stress of the battle of the Alma,
was now to be subjected to the further pressure which these two
desperate and bloody engagements implied. Great detachments of
wounded were already beginning to pour in. The men, after
receiving such summary treatment as could be given them at the
smaller hospitals in the Crimea itself, were forthwith shipped in
batches of 200 across the Black Sea to Scutari. This voyage was
in normal times one of four days and a half; but the times were
no longer normal, and now the transit often lasted for a
fortnight or three weeks.
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