Miss Nightingale's initiative was further useful in extracting needed articles which were contained in the Government store, but yet had not been forthcoming, either because nobody else had asked for them, or because somebody had not been lucky enough to hit upon the right moment for asking. The system in force was most ingeniously contrived to bring about such a state of things. Articles were only supplied to the hospitals by the Purveyor on the requisition of a medical officer. The medical officers were overburdened with work, and perhaps omitted to send in a requisition. Or they sent in a requisition, and the form was returned, marked "None in store." The articles may subsequently have been obtained or have arrived from England, but no note was kept in the Purveying Department of unfulfilled requisitions, and unless the medical officers requisitioned again, the articles were not supplied. The Commissioners found that from this cause patients were sometimes left without beds, though there were bedsteads in store at the time. Happily Miss Nightingale had laid in a good many at Marseilles. II There was another sphere in which Miss Nightingale came to the rescue of the sick and wounded from the blunders of official administration. She clothed them, 50,000 shirts in all having been issued from her store. The history of this private clothing department is curious. The regulations of the War Office assumed that every soldier brought with him into hospital an adequate kit, and it was no part of the Purveyor's duty to supply such a thing as a shirt. But three of the four generals of division in the Crimea had decided not to disembark the men's knapsacks. Sebastopol, it was confidently expected, would fall in a few days' time, and the men were to march light. In most cases they never saw their knapsacks again.[120] Hence the sick and wounded who arrived at Scutari immediately after the Battle of the Alma were destitute of all clothing except what was on their persons, and that was in many cases fit only for the furnace. No regulation existed whereby, if the soldier had for military reasons been deprived of his kit, the deficiency could be made good. The supply of a change of linen for the sick and wounded while in hospital, and of clean shirts to wear when invalided home or returned to the front, was perhaps a better allocation of benevolent funds than a supply of altar-cloths for a new church at Pera. At any rate Miss Nightingale thought so; and thus she and her coadjutors were in some measure the clothiers as well as the purveyors of the wounded soldiers. [120] For a reference to this matter by Miss Nightingale, see below, p. 224. III