The disposition of Florence Nightingale lacked much of being angelic. When she encountered the stupidity of official red-tape or the brutality and indifference of army surgeons, her words blistered. She hurled invectives and she employed sarcastic nicknames, and she denounced everything and everybody who opposed her. But when she arrived in Scutari forty-two wounded men out of every hundred were dying, and when she left them her hospitals showed a death-rate of twenty-two out of every thousand. Clara Barton had a tongue less sharp than Florence Nightingale’s, but she had a will no less inflexible. Both women had soft voices, which they never raised. Men fled from the soft tones and vitriolic words of Florence Nightingale. When Clara Barton grew angry, she lowered her voice. Instead of a woman’s shrill falsetto, men heard a deep and determined tone quietly affirming that the thing was to be done in this way and in no other. Few men withstood that tone. Some readers of this book, I am sure, have been shocked to read the opinion of Dr. Bellows of the Sanitary Commission concerning the uselessness and worse of the ordinary woman nurse in war hospitals. That opinion was shared by Dorothea Dix, by Clara Barton, and to an even greater degree by Florence Nightingale. Not very long after Florence Nightingale had reached Scutari with her thirty-eight nurses, and about the time when she was having to ship some of them back, her official friends in England thought to win her eternal gratitude by sending to her forty-six additional nurses, under the personal direction of her old friend, Miss Stanley. But she refused to accept them, and sent in her resignation. She would not have these “women scampering through the wards” and upsetting all her regulations. “They are like troublesome children,” she said. Even the religious ones were given to what she called “spiritual flirtations” with the soldiers; and, as for those who had not the fear of God or the dread of hell-fire, there were drunken orderlies and dissolute officers and unmarried chaplains to be considered. I have wondered what Dorothea Dix would have said if forty-six nurses not of her selection had been suddenly dumped upon her; I think she would have gone into hysterics and shipped them all back. Clara Barton, I believe, would have set them to emptying slops and scrubbing floors till she found the few out of whom she could make nurses. She would not have written the kind of letters about them which Florence Nightingale wrote. She would have scolded a little in her diary, and have written the committee who had sent them a letter of thanks, requesting them not to send any more until she asked for them, and meantime to send her some bandages and some lemons. But she would have felt much as Florence Nightingale felt. They were both self-willed women. They needed all their will-power. It was well they had it.