The state of the hospitals when Miss Nightingale arrived requires some description, which, however, need not be long. The treatment of the sick and wounded during the Crimean War was the subject of Departmental Inquiries, Select Committees, and Royal Commissions, which, when they had finished sitting upon the hospitals, began sitting upon each other. Enormous piles of Blue-books were accumulated, and in the course of my work I have disturbed much dust upon them. The conduct of every department and every individual concerned was the subject of charge, answer, and countercharge innumerable. Each generation deserves, no doubt, the records of mal-administration which it gets; but one generation need not be punished by having to examine in detail the records of another. Some of the details of the Crimean muddle will indeed necessarily be disinterred in the course of our story; but all that need here be collected from the heaps aforesaid are three general conclusions. The reader must remember, in the first place, that, apart from controverted particulars, it was made abundantly manifest that there was gross neglect in the service of the sick and wounded. The conflict of testimony is readily intelligible. It was easy to give an account based upon the facts of one hospital or of one time which was not applicable to another. At Scutari, for instance, the General Hospital was from the first better ordered than the Barrack Hospital. Then, again, different witnesses had different standards of what was "good" in War Hospitals; to some, anything was good if it was no worse than the standard of the Peninsular War. Of Sir George Brown, who commanded the Light Division in the Crimea, it was said: "As he was thrown into a cart on some straw when shot through the legs in Spain, he thinks the same conveyances admirable now, and hates ambulances as the invention of the Evil One."[87] Miss Nightingale had much indignant sarcasm for those who seemed content that the soldier in hospital should be placed in the condition of "former wars," instead of perceiving that he "should be treated with that degree of decency and humanity which the improved feeling of the nineteenth century demands." But the principal reason for the conflict of testimony was that the very facts of protest and inquiry put all the officials concerned upon the defensive. Any suggestion of default or defect was resented as a personal imputation. There is a curious illustration in the letter which the Head of the Army Medical Department wrote to his Principal Medical Officer in view of the Roebuck Committee. "I beg you to supply me, and that immediately"--with what? with the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth? No--"with every kind of information which you may deem likely to enable me to establish a character for it [the Department], which the public appear desirous to prove that it does not possess."[88] But though there was much conflict of evidence, the final verdict was decisive.