The daily comforts which the nurses’ kitchen afforded received ample testimony from the witnesses before Mr. Roebuck’s Commission for inquiry into the conduct of the war. In one day sometimes thirteen gallons of chicken broth and forty gallons of arrowroot were distributed amongst the sick. At first nearly all the invalid food had to come from the private stores brought out by the Lady-in-Chief, which the charitable at home replenished as the true state of affairs became known, for not only was there a deficiency in the Government stores, but the things supplied officially were often not fit for food. It was the general testimony of witnesses before the Commission that Miss Nightingale’s services were invaluable in the hospital as well for what she did herself as for the manner in which she kept the purveyors to their duties. The method of distributing the Government stores was as erratic as the cooking. There appeared to be no regulations as to time. Things asked for in a morning were probably not forthcoming until evening, when the cooking fires in the barracks kitchen were all but out. Nothing could be obtained until various “service rules” had been observed. An official board must inspect and approve all stores before they could be distributed. One can think of nothing more exasperating to the Lady-in-Chief, in her responsible duty towards the sick, than to see exhausted men dying for want of the proper nourishment because the board of inspection had not completed its arrangements. On one recorded occasion she took the law into her own hands, and insisted that the stores should be given out, inspected or not. She could not ask under-officials to incur the penalty of martial law by fulfilling her behests, but she could brave the authorities herself and did so. The storehouse was opened on the responsibility of the Lady-in-Chief, and the goods procured for the languishing soldiery. Miss Nightingale’s defiance of red-tape made her some enemies, and the “groove-going men,” as Kinglake calls them, “uttered touching complaints, declaring that the Lady-in-Chief did not choose to give them time, and that the moment a want declared itself, she made haste to supply it herself.” “This charge,” says the same authority in an appendix note, “was so utterly without foundation as to be the opposite of truth. The Lady-in-Chief used neither to issue her stores, nor allow any others to do so, until the want of them had been evidenced by a duly signed requisition. Proof of this is complete, and has been furnished even by adversaries of the Lady-in-Chief.”