“There was grace—grace almost mediæval—in his simple yet romantic idea; and, if humbly, still not the less usefully he aided the sacred cause, for it was one largely, mainly dependent on the power of the lady he served; so that, when by obeying her orders he augmented her means of action, and saved her precious time, there were unnumbered sufferers deriving sure benefit from his opportune, well-applied help. By no other kind of toil, however ambitiously aimed, could he well have achieved so much good.” But there was many a disappointment, much that did not seem “good luck” by any means, and that called for great courage and endurance. The stores, which Mr. Herbert had sent out in such abundance, had gone to Varna by mistake, and the loss of the _Prince_, a ship laden with ample supplies, a fortnight after Miss Nightingale’s arrival, was a very serious matter. Warm clothing for the frost-bitten men brought in from Sebastopol was so badly needed that one nurse, writing home, told her people: “Whenever a man opens his mouth with ‘Please, ma’am, I want to speak to you,’ my heart sinks within me, for I feel sure it will end in flannel shirts.” Every one had for too long been saying “all right,” when, as a matter of fact, it was all wrong. Here once again it is best to quote Kinglake. “By shunning the irksome light,” he says, “by choosing a low standard of excellence, and by vaguely thinking ‘War’ an excuse for defects which war did not cause, men, it seems, had contrived to be satisfied with the condition of our hospitals; but the Lady-in-Chief was one who would harbour no such content, seek no such refuge from pain. Not for her was the bliss—fragile bliss—of dwelling in any false paradise. She confronted the hideous truth. Her first care was—Eve-like—to dare to know, and—still Eve-like—to force dreaded knowledge on the faltering lord of creation. Then declaring against acquiescence in horror and misery which firmness and toil might remove, she waged her ceaseless war against custom and sloth, gaining every day on the enemy, and achieving, as we saw, in December, that which to eyes less intent than her own upon actual saving of life, and actual restoration of health, seemed already the highest excellence.” But, of course, what most made the men adore her was her loving individual care for each of those for whom she felt herself responsible. There was one occasion on which she begged to be allowed to try whether she could nurse back to possible life five wounded men who were being given up as “hopeless cases,” and did actually succeed in doing so. In all that terrible confusion of suffering that surrounded her soon after her first arrival, the first duty of the doctors was to sort out from the wounded as they arrived those cases which they could help and save from those which it seemed no human surgery could help.