"What the horrors of war are," wrote Miss Nightingale on her way to the Crimea in May 1855,[189] "no one can imagine. They are not wounds, and blood, and fever, spotted and low, and dysentery, chronic and acute, and cold and heat and famine. They are intoxication, drunken brutality, demoralization and disorder on the part of the inferior; jealousies, meanness, indifference, selfish brutality on the part of the superior." Then she goes on to deplore the drunkenness she had witnessed at the Depot, and the seeming indifference of the staff to it. And yet, as her experience had shown, the men were quickly susceptible to better influences. "We have established a reading-room for convalescents, which is well attended; and the conduct of the soldiers is uniformly good. I believe that we have been the most efficient means of restoring discipline instead of destroying it, as I have been accused of. They are much more respectful to me than they are to their own officers. But it makes me cry to think that all these 6 months we might have had a trained schoolmaster, and that I was told it was quite impossible; that in the Indian army effectual and successful measures are taken to prevent intoxication and disorganization, and that here the Convalescents are brought in emphatically _dead_ drunk (for they die of it), and officers look on with composure and say to me, 'You are spoiling the brutes.' The men are so glad to read, so glad to give their money." This passage serves to introduce us to a side of Miss Nightingale's work which occupied much of her thoughts and activities during the latter portion of her sojourn in the East. Her work in tending the sick bodies of the soldiers is that which is best known, but her work in appealing to their moral and mental nature was not less admirable, and hardly less novel. A high authority, who had been through the war, said of her at the time, "She has taught officers and officials to treat the soldiers as Christian men." Not every officer needed thus to be lessoned, but Miss Nightingale's example, and the practical experiments which directly or indirectly she set on foot during the Crimean War, did much to humanize the British Army. She deserves to be remembered as the Soldiers' Friend no less than as the Ministering Angel. [189] In continuation of the letter quoted above, p. 255.