A few of the younger doctors struggled valiantly, but what
could they do? Unprepared, disorganised, with such help only as
they could find among the miserable band of convalescent soldiers
drafted off to tend their sick comrades, they were faced with
disease, mutilation, and death in all their most appalling forms,
crowded multitudinously about them in an ever-increasing mass.
They were like men in a shipwreck, fighting, not for safety, but
for the next moment's bare existence-- to gain, by yet another
frenzied effort, some brief respite from the waters of
destruction.
In these surroundings, those who had been long inured to scenes
of human suffering-- surgeons with a world-wide knowledge of
agonies, soldiers familiar with fields of carnage, missionaries
with remembrances of famine and of plague-- yet found a depth of
horror which they had never known before. There were moments,
there were places, in the Barrack Hospital at Scutari, where the
strongest hand was struck with trembling, and the boldest eye
would turn away its gaze.
Miss Nightingale came, and she, at any rate, in that inferno, did
not abandon hope. For one thing, she brought material succour.
Before she left London she had consulted Dr. Andrew Smith, the
head of the Army Medical Board, as to whether it would be useful
to take out stores of any kind to Scutari; and Dr.
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