While this was being done she stood by: she never spared herself the sight of suffering, and her eyes—the trained eyes that had all the intuition of a born nurse—saw a glimmer of hope for five badly wounded men who were being set aside among those for whom nothing could be done. “Will you give me those five men?” she asked. She knew how much might be done by gentle and gradual feeding, and by all the intently watchful care of a good nurse, to give them just enough strength to risk the surgery that might save them. With her own hand, spoonful by spoonful, as they were able to bear it, she gave the nourishment, and by her own night-long watching and tending in the care of all those details which to a poor helpless patient may make the difference between life and death—the purifying of the air, the avoidance of draughts, the mending of the fire—she nursed her five patients back into a condition in which the risks of an operation were, to say the least of it, greatly lessened. The operation was in each case successfully performed; by all human standards it may be said that she saved the lives of all the five. She never spared herself, though she sometimes spared others. She has been known to stand for twenty hours out of the twenty-four, and at night, when she had sent her day-nurses to rest, it was she herself who watched in all the wards and silently cared for the needs of one and another. Is it any wonder that “there was worship almost in the gratitude of the prostrate sufferer, who saw her glide into his ward, and at last approach his bedside? The magic of her power over men used often to be felt in the room—the dreaded, the blood-stained room—where ‘operations’ took place. There, perhaps, the maimed soldier, if not yet resigned to his fate, might at first be craving death rather than meet the knife of the surgeon; but, when such a one looked and saw that the honoured Lady-in-Chief was patiently standing beside him, and—with lips closely set and hands folded—decreeing herself to go through the pain of witnessing pain, he used to fall into the mood for obeying her silent command, and—finding strange support in her presence—bring himself to submit and endure.”[13]