The Barrack Hospital at Scutari was, said the General, in this respect just like a London hospital of sixty years ago, set down in the midst of the Crimea. There was, he said—to adapt a well-known quotation—“knowledge without authority, and authority without knowledge,” but no power to unite them in responsible effort. Therefore we must feel deep pity, not indignation, with regard to any one member of the staff; for each alone was helpless against the chaos, until Miss Nightingale, who stood outside the official muddle, yet with the friendship of a great War Minister behind her, and in her hand all the powers of wealth, hereditary influence, and personal charm, quietly cut some of the knots of red tape which were, as she saw clearly, strangling the very lives of our wounded soldiers. When I spoke of the miracle by which a woman who had been all her life fitting herself for this work, had suddenly received her world-wide opportunity, he replied: “Yes, I have often said it was as if a very perfect machine had through long years been fitted together and polished to the highest efficiency, and when, at last, it was ready for service, a hand was put forth to accept and use it.” Just as he sought to explain the awful condition of the army hospitals at the beginning of the war; so also he, as a military doctor, pointed out to me that there were even many excuses for the condition of the transport service, and the idiotic blunders of a government that sent soldiers to the freezing winters of the Crimea in clothes that would have been better suited to the hot climate of India. The army after the Peninsular War had been split up into battalions, and had, like the hospitals, lost all _centre_ of authority. England had been seething with the social troubles of our transition from the feudal order to the new competitions and miseries of a commercial and mechanical age. Machinery was causing uproar among the hand-workers. Chartist riots, bread riots, were upsetting the customary peace. Troops were sent hither and thither, scattered over the country, and allowed a certain degree of licence and slackness. The army had no administrative head. There was no one to consider the question of stores or transit, and, even when the war broke out, it was treated with John Bull’s too casual self-satisfaction as a moment of excitement and self-glorification, from which our troops were to return as victors in October, after displaying themselves for a few weeks and satisfactorily alarming the enemy. The moral of it all is ever present and needs no pressing home. Not until every man has had the training of a man in defence of his own home, and is himself responsible for the defence of his own hearth, shall we as a nation learn the humility and caution of the true courage, and realize how much, at the best, is outside human control, and how great is our responsibility in every detail for all that lies within it. CHAPTER X. “_Five were wise, and five foolish._”