Besides her thirty-eight nurses and the chaplain, Mr. Sidney Osborne, there were her friends, Mr. and Mrs. Bracebridge, and that splendid “fag,” as he called himself, the young “Mr. Stafford,”[12] who had left the gaieties of London to fetch and carry for the Lady-in-Chief, and—to quote Mrs. Tooley, “did anything and everything which a handy and gallant gentleman could do to make himself useful to the lady whom he felt honoured to serve.” Among those who were most thoughtful in their little gifts for the wounded officers was the wife of our ambassador, Lady Stratford de Redcliffe, and her “beauteous guest,” as Kinglake calls her, Lady George Paget. But Miss Nightingale’s chief anxiety was not for the officers—they, like herself, had many influences in their favour—her thought was for the nameless rank and file, who had neither money nor rank, and were too often, as she knew, the forgotten pawns on the big chessboard. It was said “she thought only of the men;” she understood well that for their commanders her thought was less needed. “In the hearts of thousands and thousands of our people,” says Kinglake, “there was a yearning to be able to share the toil, the distress, the danger of battling for our sick and wounded troops against the sea of miseries that encompassed them on their hospital pallets; and men still remember how graciously, how simply, how naturally, if so one may speak, the ambassadress Lady Stratford de Redcliffe and her beauteous guest gave their energies and their time to the work; still remember the generous exertions of Mr. Sidney Osborne and Mr. Joscelyne Percy; still remember, too, how Mr. Stafford—I would rather call him ‘Stafford O’Brien’—the cherished yet unspoilt favourite of English society, devoted himself heart and soul to the task of helping and comforting our prostrate soldiery in the most frightful depths of their misery. “Many found themselves embarrassed when trying to choose the best direction they could for their generous impulses; and not, I think, the least praiseworthy of all the self-sacrificing enterprises which imagination devised was that of the enthusiastic young fellow who, abandoning his life of ease, pleasure, and luxury, went out, as he probably phrased it, to ‘fag’ for the Lady-in-Chief. Whether fetching and carrying for her, or writing for her letters or orders, or orally conveying her wishes to public servants or others, he, for months and months, faithfully toiled, obeying in all things her word.