The idea of employing female nurses at Scutari had been mooted before the army left for the East, but was abandoned, as the Duke of Newcastle explained, because "it was not liked by the military authorities."[80] Of the military prejudice against the intrusion of women, even for the gentle office of nursing, into the rough work of war, some entertaining illustrations are happily on record. Lieutenant-Colonel Sterling, afterwards Sir Anthony Sterling, K.C.B., was on active service during the Crimean campaign, first as brigade-major, and afterwards as assistant adjutant-general to the Highland division. He was an elder brother of Carlyle's John Sterling, and himself possessed of some literary skill. "A solid, substantial man," Carlyle calls him; he was also a man who loved to stand by the ancient ways. He wrote a series of lively letters during the campaign, and in his will directed that they should be published. Nowhere, so clearly as in Sterling's _Highland Brigade in the Crimea_, have I found contemporary evidence of the prejudices against which the experiment of Mr. Herbert and Miss Nightingale had to contend. During Miss Nightingale's visit to Balaclava in 1855, some dispute arose among the nurses. "Miss---- has added herself," wrote Colonel Sterling, "to the hospital of the 42nd; and will not acknowledge the voice of the Nightingale, who has written an official letter to Lord Raglan on the subject. I suppose he will order a court-martial composed of nurses, who will administer queer justice." Our Colonel is something of a wag. He cannot help laughing at "the Nightingale," because, as he explains, he has such "a keen sense of the ridiculous." He is so pleased with his quip about the female court-martial that he returns to it in another letter. He is tickled, too, by a saying of the mess-room, that "Miss Nightingale has shaved her head to keep out vermin." One can almost hear the honest Colonel's guffaw as he wonders whether "she will wear a wig or a helmet?" Women, he supposes, imagine that "war can be made without wounds"; they will be teaching us how to fight next; and as for their ideas of nursing, why some of the ladies actually took to "scrubbing floors"! It amused him, but angered him no less. He has to admit that he believes "the Nightingale" has been of some use; but he bitterly resents her "capture" of orderlies for mere purposes of nursing, and when he is asked, "When will she go home?" answers with Christopher Sly, "Would it were done." "However," he writes, "---- (presumably Sidney Herbert) is gone; and I hope there is not to be found another Minister who will allow these absurdities." Miss Nightingale read Sir Anthony's book when it came out in 1895, and made some severe _marginalia_ upon it; remarking upon his "absolute ignorance of sanitary things," noting the "misprints as a fair index to the whole," and finally dismissing the book as "one long string of Seniority complaints." But I protest that she need not have been so