When Miss Nightingale arrived at Scutari she found a number of poor women, the wives or the widows (may be) of soldiers who had gone to the front, living in a distressing condition, literally in the holes and corners of the Barrack Hospital. These women, being detached from their husbands’ regiments, had no claim for rations and quarters. The colonel of each regiment had power to allow a certain number of women to accompany their husbands on foreign service. Each woman belonged to her regiment, and if separated, even through no choice of her own, there was no provision for her. No organisation to deal with them existed at this period, because for forty years there had been no general depôt of an English army. The widows were by degrees sent home by order of the Commandant, but the other women, many of them wives of soldiers in the hospital or of orderlies, refused to return home without their husbands. Miss Nightingale found these poor creatures, for the most part respectable women, without decent clothing--their clothes having worn out--going about bonnetless and shoeless and living as best they could. After many changes from one “hole” to another the women were housed by the authorities in three or four dark rooms in the damp basement of the hospital. The only privacy to be obtained was by hanging up rags of clothes on lines. There, by the light of a rushlight, the meals were taken, the sick attended, and there the babies were born and nourished. There were twenty-two babies born from November to December, and many more during the winter.