“Miss Nightingale assembled a party of 41 volunteer nurses, including ten Catholic nuns and eight sisters of mercy of the Anglican church, and took them to the Crimea. Upon her arrival at Scutari the “Lady of the Lamp” went straightway to work to bring order out of confusion, life out of the jaws of death, heaven on earth from a veritable hell. The day after her arrival they brought in the wounded survivors of the charge of the Light Brigade at Balaklava; the next day came the wounded from the bloody field of Inkerman. ‘Red tape’ insisted that all stores should be inspected ere being issued to the troops. When she found that the inspection would take three days Miss Nightingale broke down the doors and commandeered the supplies. She had soon reduced the death rate from 42 to 2 per cent. The wounded and the dying followed her with their eyes in her progress from cot to cot, as though she were an angel visitant. When, at the close of the war, a dinner was given the military and naval officers, those present voted for the one whose services would longest be remembered by posterity. There was but one name on every slip of paper--that of Florence Nightingale. “She went back to England under an assumed name, and reached her home before it was known that she had left Turkey. The queen sent for her and thanked her in person at Balmoral. Every soldier in the army contributed a day’s pay to a fund of $250,000 for their benefactor, but she gave it all to found the Florence Nightingale Training School for Nurses in London. The Geneva convention and the Red Cross Society were the eventual outcome of her labors in the east.” The difficulties which she had to contend with can never be fully appreciated at this time when women’s service as nurses in the army in most civilized countries is well established. Her biographer writing of that period says: “Miss Nightingale’s work in the Crimea was attended by ceaseless worry. She had to fight her way into full authority. She knew that she would win, but her enemies were active, and were for the moment in possession of the field. ‘There is not an official,’ she said, ‘who would not burn me like Joan of Arc, if he could, but they know that the War Office cannot turn me out because the country is with me. * * * The real grievance against us is that though subordinate to the medical chiefs in office, we are superior to them in influence, and in the chance of being heard at home.’”