The Barrack Hospital was a fine handsome building, forming an immense quadrangle with a tower at each corner. An idea of its size may be gathered from the fact that each side of the quadrangle was nearly a quarter of a mile long. It was estimated that twelve thousand men could be exercised in the central court. Galleries and corridors, rising story above story, surrounded three sides of the building, and, taken continuously, were four miles in extent. The building and position were alike good, but the interior of the hospital, as Miss Nightingale soon discovered, was a scene of filth, pestilence, misery, and disorder impossible to describe. On either side the endless corridors the wounded men lay closely packed together without the commonest decencies or necessaries of life. After being disembarked at the ferry below the hospital from the vessels which brought them from the battlefields of the Crimea, the wounded men either walked or were dragged or carried up the hill to the hospital. Surgical, fever, and even cholera cases came along the road together in one long stream of suffering humanity. [Illustration: THE BARRACK HOSPITAL AT SCUTARI.] Several days had elapsed since the men left the battlefield, and the majority had not had their wounds dressed or their fractured limbs set. The agony and misery of the poor fellows in this untended and often starving state can be well imagined. And how their hearts sank when they at length reached the hospital, where at least they expected food and comfort. Alas! there was little provision of any kind for the sufferers. Nolan, in his history of the campaign, says that in these early months of the war “there were no vessels for water or utensils of any kind; no soap, towels, or cloths, no hospital clothes; the men lying in their uniforms, stiff with gore and covered with filth to a degree and of a kind no one could write about; their persons covered with vermin, which crawled about the floors and walls of the dreadful den of dirt, pestilence, and death to which they were consigned. “Medical assistance would naturally be expected by the invalid as soon as he found himself in a place of shelter, but many lay waiting for their turn until death anticipated the doctor. The medical men toiled with unwearied assiduity, but their numbers were inadequate to the work.” Invalids were set to take care of invalids and the dying nursed the dying. It was a heart-breaking experience for the Lady-in-Chief when she made her first round of the wards at Scutari. The beds were reeking with infection and the “sheets,” she relates, “were of canvas, and so coarse that the wounded men begged to be left in their blankets. It was indeed impossible to put men in such a state of emaciation into those sheets. There was no bedroom furniture of _any_ kind, and only empty beer or wine bottles for candlesticks.”