Is this too dreadful to read about? But it was not too dreadful to happen. The poor fellows, laid down in the midst of all this horror, would wait with a soldier's patience, hoping for the doctor or surgeon who should bind up their wounds and relieve their terrible suffering. Alas! often and often death was more prompt than the doctor, and stilled the pain forever, before any human aid had been given. One of Miss Nightingale's assistants writes: "How can I ever describe my first day in the hospital at Scutari? Vessels were arriving and orderlies carrying the poor fellows, who with their wounds and frost-bites had been tossing about on the Black Sea for two or three days and sometimes more. Where were they to go? Not an available bed. They were laid on the floor one after another, till the beds were emptied of those dying of cholera and every other disease. Many died immediately after being brought in--their moans would pierce the heart--and the look of agony on those poor dying faces will never leave my heart. They may well be called 'the martyrs of the Crimea.'" Where were the doctors? They were there, doing their very best; working day and night, giving their strength and their lives freely; but there were not half, not a tenth part, enough of them; and there was no one to help them but the orderlies, who, as I have said, had had no training, and knew nothing of sickness or hospital work. The conditions grew so frightful that a kind of paralysis seemed to fall upon the minds of the workers. They felt that the task was hopeless, and they went about their duties like people in a nightmare. The strangest thing of all, to us now, seems to be that they _did not tell_. Though Mr. Russell and others wrote to England of the horrors of the hospitals, the authorities themselves were silent, or if questioned, would only reply that everything was "all right." There was no inspection that was worthy of the name. The same officers who would front death on the battlefield with a song and a laugh, shrank from meeting it in the hospital wards, the air of which was heavy with the poison of cholera and fever. "An orderly officer took the rounds of the wards every night, to see that all was in order. He was of course expected by the orderlies, and the moment he raised the latch he received the word: 'All right, your honor!' and passed on. This was hospital inspection!"[3] In fact, these orderlies too often, I fear, bore some resemblance to the old class of nurses that I described, and were in many cases rough, unfeeling, ignorant men. Sometimes it was for this reason that they drank the brandy which should have been given to their patients; but often, again, it was because they were ill themselves, or else because they were so overcome by the horrors around them that they drank just to bring forgetfulness for a time.