"I was down in Lancashire one Saturday and came up to Euston in the evening, arriving there at ten o'clock. My wife was there with the brougham waiting for me--much to my surprise. She said, very quietly, 'I've got a note for you from Lord Shaftesbury; he's called several times to-day.' I knew what it meant--the Government wanted me to go out to the Crimea. The note read: 'Dear Rawlinson,--See me to-night if possible; if not, at eight o'clock to-morrow morning.' We drove away to Grosvenor Square at once, but Shaftesbury was dining with Palmerston. I went again at eight o'clock in the morning. He was sitting in his library. "'Well, Rawlinson,' he said, with a gloomy expression, 'we are losing our poor army in the Crimea. I've induced Palmerston to agree to a Sanitary Commission. Dr. Sutherland and Dr. Gavin will go, but I want an engineer. Will you go?' "The whole thing now comes vividly before me. When I learned afterwards that from December to March, out of an army of 32,000 men, 11,000 had died through starvation and climate--in three months more at the same rate there would have been no British Army! "'I'll go, my lord,' I said. "He embraced me like a woman. "'You shall take such powers as men never took before,' he said, and he kept his word. The Commission sailed on the following Thursday, at the end of February, landed at Constantinople on the 6th March, and the next day we went over to the great hospitals on the Asiatic side, where the men were dying at the rate of sixty and seventy a day. The wards were full of sick and dying, there was no adequate ventilation, and the area outside of the hospitals was covered with filth and the carcasses of animals. The cleansing was heavy work. On the second day of our arrival I had the upper portion of the windows broken to let ventilation into the rooms. Armenians and Greek labourers cleared away the carcasses--for the Turks would not touch them--and subsequently the hospitals were white-washed. By mid-summer our hospitals were the cleanest in Europe--so Florence Nightingale wrote home. The mortality decreased from sixty and seventy per thousand to twelve and fourteen, and went on improving. The French did nothing, although they had some palaces on the European side for their sick. They neither drained, ventilated, nor cleansed the surroundings--men, nurses, officers and doctors went down with fever--they telegraphed home for nurses and doctors; the reply was, 'there were none to spare.' _Peace was absolutely necessary!_" [Illustration: SIR ROBERT RAWLINSON. _From a Photo. by Elliott & Fry._]