“But great would be the mistake of any chronicler fancying that the advantage our country derived from womanly aid was only an accession of nurses; for, if gifted with the power to comfort and soothe, woman also—a still higher gift—can impel, can disturb, can destroy pernicious content; and when she came to the rescue in an hour of gloom and adversity, she brought to her self-imposed task that forethought, that agile brain power, that organizing and governing faculty of which our country had need. The males at that time in England were already giving proofs of the lameness in the use of brain power, which afterwards became more distinct. Owing, possibly, to their habits of industry, applied in fixed, stated directions, they had lost that command of brain force which kindles ‘initiative,’ and with it, of course, the faculty of opportunely resorting to any very new ways of action. They proved slow to see and to meet the fresh exigencies occasioned by war, when approaching, or even by war when present; and, apparently, in the hospital problem, they must have gone on failing and failing indefinitely, if they had not undergone the propulsion of the quicker—the woman’s—brain to ‘set them going’ in time.” He then goes on to tell of the arrival at “the immense Barrack Hospital” at Scutari of Miss Nightingale and her chosen band. “If,” he says, “the generous women thus sacrificing themselves were all alike in devotion to their sacred cause, there was one of them—the Lady-in-Chief—who not only came armed with the special experience needed, but also was clearly transcendent in that subtle quality which gives to one human being a power of command over others. Of slender, delicate form, engaging, highly-bred, and in council a rapt, careful listener, so long as others were speaking; and strongly, though gently, persuasive whenever speaking herself, the Lady-in-Chief, the Lady Florence, Miss Nightingale, gave her heart to this enterprise in a spirit of absolute devotion; but her sway was not quite of the kind that many in England imagined.” No, indeed! Sentimentalists who talk as though she had been cast in the conventional mould of mere yielding amiability, do not realize what she had to do, nor with what fearless, unflinching force she went straight to her mark, not heeding what was thought of herself, overlooking the necessary wounds she must give to fools, caring only that the difficult duty should be done, the wholesale agony be lessened, the filth and disorder be swept away. Her sweetness was the sweetness of strength, not weakness, and was reserved not for the careless, the stupid, the self-satisfied, but for the men whose festering wounds and corrupting gangrene were suffered in their country’s pay, and had been increased by the heedless muddle of a careless peace-time and a criminally mismanaged transport service.