The picture of their condition before her arrival is revolting in its horror. There is no finer thing in the history of this war, perhaps, than the heroism of the wounded and dying soldiers. We are told how, in the midst of their appalling privation, if they fancied a shadow on their General’s face—as well, indeed, there might be, when he saw them without the common necessaries and decencies of life, let alone a sick-room—they would seize the first possible opening for assuring him they had all they needed, and if they were questioned by him, though they were dying of cold and hunger— “No man ever used to say: ‘My Lord, you see how I am lying wet and cold, with only this one blanket to serve me for bed and covering. The doctors are wonderfully kind, but they have not the medicines, nor the wine, nor any of the comforting things they would like to be given me. If only I had another blanket, I think perhaps I might live.’ Such words would have been true to the letter.” But as for Lord Raglan, the chief whom they thus adored, “with the absolute hideous truth thus day by day spread out before him, he did not for a moment deceive himself by observing that no man complained.” Yet even cold and hunger were as nothing to the loathsome condition in which Miss Nightingale found the hospital at Scutari. There are certain kinds of filth which make life far more horrible than the brief moment of a brave death, and of filth of every sort that crowded hospital was full—filth in the air, for the stench was horrible, filth and gore as the very garment of the poor, patient, dying men. There was no washing, no clean linen. Even for bandages the shirts had to be stripped from the dead and torn up to stanch the wounds of the living. And there were other foul conditions which only the long labour of sanitary engineering could cure. The arrival day by day of more and more of the wounded has been described as an avalanche. We all know Tennyson’s “Charge of the Light Brigade”: that charge occurred at Balaclava the day before Miss Nightingale left England. And the terrible battle of Inkermann was fought the day after she arrived at Scutari. Here is a word-for-word description from Nolan’s history of the campaign, given also in Mrs. Tooley’s admirable “Life”:— “There were no vessels for water or utensils of any kind; no soap, towels, or cloths, no hospital clothes; the men lying in their uniforms, stiff with gore and covered with filth to a degree and of a kind no one could write about; their persons covered with vermin, which crawled about the floors and walls of the dreadful den of dirt, pestilence, and death to which they were consigned.