She found not so much a hospital as a pest house. The rough, massive building, which was given the name of Barrack Hospital, lent to the English by the Turkish government, was originally intended for hardy, well soldiers. Of the cramped quarters given to Florence and her nurses, she writes, "Occasionally our roof is torn off, or the windows are blown in, and we are under water for the night. " Sewers were of such shoddy construction that the winds blew the foul air up the pipe of open privies into the wards where the sick lay.

Florence was later to tell the Royal Commission of 1857, "The sanitary conditions of the hospitals of Scutari were inferior in point of crowding, ventilation, drainage, cleanliness, up to the middle of March, 1855, to any civil hospital, or to the poorest homes of the worst parts of the civil population of any large town that I have ever seen. "

At the time, she wrote back home, "In the midst of this appalling horror ( we are steeped up to our necks in blood) here is good, and I can truly say, like Saint Peter, it is good for us to be here-though I doubt if St. Peter had been here, he would have said so. ..I have been well acquainted with the dwellings of the worst parts of most of the great cities in Europe, but have never been in an atmosphere which I could compare with the Barrack Hospital at night." According to another first-hand description, "There were no vessels for water or utensils of any kind ; no soap, towels or cloths, no hospital clothes; the men lying. in their uniforms stiff with gore and covered with filth to a degree and of a kind no one could write about; their persons covered with vermin, which crawled about the floors and walls of the dreadful den of dirt, pestilence, and death to which they were consigned-the sheets were of canvas, and so coarse that the wounded men begged to be left in their blankets. It was indeed impossible to put men in such a state of emaciation into these sheets. There was no bedroom furniture of any kind, and only empty beer or wine bottles for candlesticks. "

These were the conditions which faced the bleeding victims of the cruel war in the Crimea. First-aid in the field of battle was then unknown. The soldiers often spent several days on shipboard between the scene of combat and Scutari, tortured by fever, thirst and hunger, with broken bones and undressed wounds. One of the nurses writes of "their thigh and shoulder bones perfectly red from rubbing against the deck. " She continues, "How can I ever describe my first day in the hospital at Scutari. Vessels were arriving and orderlies carrying the poor fellows, who with their wounds and frost-bites had been tossing about on the Black Sea for two or three days and sometimes more. Where were they to go? Not an available bed. They were laid on the floor one after another, till the beds were emptied of those dying of cholera and every other disease. Many died immediately after being brought in-their moans would pierce the heart and the look of agony on those poor dying faces will never leave my heart. They may well be called 'the martyrs of the Crimea !' "

Another of Miss Nightingale's assistants writes, "This is a work which makes either angels or devils of men and of women, too. As for the assistants, they are all cubs, and will, while a man is breathing his last breath under the knife, lament the annoyance of being called up from their dinner by such afresh influx of wounded. ..In all our corridor, I think we have not an average of three limbs per man. ... Then come the operations. ..They are all performed in the wards. ..no time to move them; one poor fellow exhausted with hemorrhage, has his leg amputated as a last hope, and dies ten minutes after the surgeon has left, almost before the breath has left his body, it is sown up in its blanket, and carried away and buried the same day."

The patients, saturated with blood, lay on the floor with rats running over them; dead animals in every state of decay, refuse and filth from the outside polluted the air. There were no facilities for bathing ; none for eating; "the men have to tear their meat like wild beasts," Florence writes. There was no kitchen, no knives, no forks, no spoons, no cooks. Food was unsystematically prepared in thirteen huge coppers by whoever was able. The rations were sometimes cooked only half an hour. Sometimes it was four hours before they were fished out. It took three or four hours to serve the dinner to the three and four miles of patients. There was no laundry. The clothes and bed-linen of the wounded men and of those with infectious diseases were all thrown together. The most common medical materials, splints, bandages, ordinary drugs were absent. Florence wrote that there were "no scissors for cutting the men's hair, which is literally alive, no basin, no towels, no chloride of zinc. "

Florence Nightingale might have been sitting with her dogs before the great fireplace of Lea Hurst  writing checks for the work at Scutari; but she had chosen instead to remove blood-saturated shirts from dying soldiers, to wash wounds, to fight rats and dispose of them with her own hands.

Those who wished might stay at home and hem-stitch garments to send to "the poor soldiers. " Her sister Parthe might appeal for funds at the fashionable, charitable Bureau in Cavendish Square. But  Florence's philanthropy must be first-hand. "

The Lady Superintendent found at Scutari not only filth and horror, but a complete collapse of morale among the medical authorities. The orderlies were unfeeling, ignorant and irresponsible. Administration at home and in Scutari was a sorry bungle. Kinglake's simple statement tells the whole story, "The sanitary administration had broken down. "

Punch pictures a British soldier struggling for life as he lies entangled in the coils of a frightful serpent labeled "Red-Tape." It was a telling caricature of the situation. "It is a current joke here," Florence writes, "to offer a prize for the discovery of anyone willing to take responsibility."

Her arrival to remedy the situation brought only scorn and ridicule from the overwrought, inefficient officials in charge. They cracked jokes about her as "The Bird. " What could a woman do in such a place ? The military officers either threw obstacles in her path or lent her as little support as possible, sarcastically retorting, "It is the Bird's duty." But they did not realize the calibre of the pioneer in petticoats who had been sent to Scutari.

With exemplary patience, Florence overcame their hostility. The Lady Superintendent with tact, but strength, soon made her impact felt as she slowly but surely became administrator of the hospital.

"The Chief" seemed to operate in every department.

First she sent to England for 200 hard scrubbing brushes for the floors. "The vermin might," she wrote, "if they had but unity of purpose, carry off the four  miles of beds on their backs and march with them into the War Office. .." Florence demanded kitchen utensils; she asked for hair mattresses. She must have carpenters to patch up the dilapidated building. The men in the hospital must have towels and toothbrushes; those who were fighting must have warm clothing.

She writes after one of her visits at the front, "Fancy working five nights out of seven in the trenches! Fancy being thirty-six hours in them at a stretch, often forty-eight hours with no food but raw salt pork, sprinkled with sugar, rum, and biscuit; ... and fancy through all this the army, preserving their  courage and patience as they have done, and being now eager to be led even into the trenches. ..When I see the camp, I wonder not that the army suffered so much, but that there is any army left at all. " .

From the hospital she writes caustically, "The state of the troops who return here is frost-bitten, semi- nude, starved, ragged. If the troops who work in the trenches are not supplied with warm clothing, Napoleon's Russian campaign will be repeated here."

Her fervid plea was answered.

British aristocrats and humble working women made bandages, shirts and socks; they turned their  houses upside down to find what Miss Nightingale  wanted. When one of the "sisters" sorted the goods that came to the wharves at Scutari, she said, "The English nobility must have emptied their wardrobes and linen stores, to send out bandages for the wounded. There was the most beautiful underclothing, and the finest cambric sheets, with merely a scissors run here and there through them, to insure their being used for no other purpose, some from the Queen's palace, with the royal monogram beautifully worked."

A representative of the Times came with a fund  to build an English Church at Pera. Florence took him for a walk through the packed wards of the hospital and pointed to her men tossing in fever and delirium. The Times Fund went, not for a church, but for blankets and medicines. Florence received  and distributed the consignments from home. "I am a kind of general dealer," she writes, "in socks, shirts, knives and forks, wooden spoons, tin pans, cabbage and carrots, operating tables, towels and soap, small pillows. "

She reorganized the kitchen. After ten days she  had two "extra diet kitchens" for those who needed  special food. The meat was boned, the gristle removed. Meals became punctual and well prepared. Soups, jellies, arrowroot mixed with port wine were discovered on special trays. She installed boilers in a Turkish house and organized a laundry. Special provision was made for the women who had come far from home to be near their husbands. Florence found the army wives, barefooted and bareheaded, living in three or four rooms in the basement of the hospital, their clothes worn out. Twenty-two babies were born in a cellar from November through December and many more during the winter. Florence helped feed and clothe some five hundred women and their babies.

When fever broke out, due to a broken drain, she found a nearby house, cleaned and furnished it and moved the women in. She sent widows back to England, employed the others and helped start a school for the children. In her later suggestions for army reform, she was to write, "When the improvements in our system which the war must suggest are discussed, let not the wife and child of the soldier be forgotten."

Her work extended from Scutari to the Crimea itself. She must, as Superintendent of Nurses, see how  the sick and wounded were faring in the actual seat of war. For weeks she rode on horseback over the bleak and rocky roads of the Crimea. It was a far cry from the pleasant canters of the Squire's daughter in the New Forest of beautiful England. No hardship or danger could sway her from her duties.

Approaching the walls of Sebastopol, one day, a sentry met the party and begged them to dismount. "Sharp firing going on here," he said, pointing to the fragments of shell lying about. "You'll attract attention, and they'll fire at you."

Miss Nightingale took temporary shelter behind a rock but soon went into the trenches themselves. The horrified sentry told her, "Madam, if anything happens, I call upon these gentlemen to witness that I did not fail to warn you of the danger."

"My good young man," she answered, "more dead and wounded have passed through my hands than I hope you will ever see in the battlefield during the  whole of your military career; believe me, I have no fear of death."

Even the serious physical break-down she met in the Crimea could not stop her work. The rough and fatiguing rides under the pitiless sun finally took their toll on her weakened constitution. She had withstood daily contacts with cholera and typhoid fever at Sculari, but in her travels at the front she collapsed with what the doctors pronounced the worst form of Crimean fever. News reached England  that Florence Nightingale was dying. But it seemed that her incomparable self-discipline was dominant even on her deathbed. She had work to do; she must get better. The dreaded affliction passed. The doctors urged the convalescent to sail immediately for London. Florence refused. She would not desert her post. She insisted on being taken back to Scutari. Even when she was on a stretcher, her word was law. The eight soldiers who carried her down from the sanatorium on the mountainside to the port did as they were told.

Despite this ordeal, her work in the heart of the Crimea was not over. She came back to set up two new camp hospitals and to establish a staff of nurses. On the height above Balaclava, where "The Nightingale Cross" stands today in memoriam, she spent a second winter in the bitter cold. A victim of rheumatism, tortured by sciatica, yet the report of one person was, "I have seen Miss Nightingale stand for hours at the top of a bleak, rocky mountain near the hospital, giving her instructions while the snow was falling heavily." Her bed in the humble shack was often covered with snow. "Everything, even the ink," she wrote, "freezes in our hut every night. " She rode at night down the perilous mountain roads that were rough and frozen, with no escort save the driver. Her carriage once turned over, injuring both herself and the attendant nurse. But she stayed on, demanding order and comfort, not for herself, but for her soldiers. Even after the Treaty of Peace was signed, she refused to leave until all the hospitals were closed and the  last troopship with the last sick man had gone.

Six months after her arrival at Scutari, the change was so great that Kinglake writes, "Had it been  preceded by mummery, instead of ventilation and drainage and pure water supply, it would have passed for a miracle."

The death rate in the hospital despite cholera, typhus and dysentery, was reduced from 60 per cent to 1 per cent.

Florence had not only established a systematic well organized hospital; she had at the same time , done much for what she called "the education of the British Army. "

With rare sociological grasp, she writes, "What the horrors of War are, no one can imagine. They are not wounds and blood and fever, spotted and low dysentery, chronic acute, and cold and heat and famine. They are intoxication, drunken brutality, demoralization, and disorder on the part of the inferior ; jealousies, meanness, and indifference, selfish brutality on the part of the superior. "

With the techniques of a 20th Century social worker , Florence worked to build up the men's morale. "Reading huts" were established where the men could find their favorite English magazines and books, paper, pens, envelopes and stamps. Florence wrote to England for games, maps, music and books; she conducted study classes; a cafe was built at Inkerman where the soldiers could come in from the bitter cold  for a cup of hot coffee or chocolate.

Money order offices sprang up in convenient spots so that the men might forward their pay home. "This  money," Florence wrote, "was literally so much rescued from the canteen and drunkenness."

With proper incentives, the cynical officials at home could no longer say, "The British soldier is not a remitting animal. "

In her work, Florence looked far beyond the immediate needs. Scarcely had she arrived from England  than she wrote to Mr. Herbert of her hopes for the formation of a Medical School at Scutari. "We have lost the finest opportunity for advancing the cause of medicine and erecting it into a Science which  will probably ever be afforded."

At the Barrack Hospital, in addition to her work as planner, executive and morale builder, Florence Nightingale was a nurse. She cared for 18,000 sick and wounded. She passed eight hours at a time on her knees dressing wounds. As each new patient came in, she gave orders where the sufferer was to go, what doctor was to be summoned, what nurses would attend; but she herself was "at hand" for emergency cases ; she took her place regularly in the operating room, helping the surgeon and cheering the patient. "The magic of her power over men was felt in the room-the dreaded, the blood-stained room- where operations took place." Anesthetics were seldom used. But one of her male companions wrote of Miss Nightingale, "Her nerve is equal to her good sense; she, with one of the nurses and myself, gave efficient aid at an amputation of the thigh yesterday. She was just as cool as if she had to do it herself. "

According to one of the chaplains, "She has an utter disregard of contagion. The more awful any particular case, the more certainly might her slight form be seen bending over him ., ..seldom quitting his side till death released him. "

The appreciation of the soldiers was well voiced by the man who wrote home, "We call her the Angel of the Crimea. " "If the Queen came to die," another added, "they ought to make her Queen, and I think they would."

 Florence Nightingale's ministering to the soldiers in the Barrack Hospital at Scutari was unprecedented. Her spectacular accomplishments there became known  the world over. The poet Long fellow wrote:

"Lo! in that house of misery

A Lady with a lamp I see,

Pass through the glimmering gloom,

And flit from room to room."

Long fellow's world-famous tribute is responsible for our proverbial picture of Florence Nightingale as a self-sacrificing, saintly maiden; but the fact is that she was made more of dynamite than of sweetness and light. She was a stern, rather than a swooning heroine. As Lytton Strachey says, "In the real Miss Nightingale there was more that was interesting than the legendary one; there was also less that was agreeable.

A symbol of calm assurance midst the hell of Scutari, Florence was to the agonized soldiers ( as Longfellow wrote) their only ray of hope. Well might "The speechless sufferers kiss her shadow" as she went down the long rows of cots listening to their breathing and noting their color. But to the military surgeons, the orderlies and the administrators, she seemed a dangerous, meddlesome person. She wrote with deep feeling of her wounded men. "There never came from any of them one word or one look which a gentleman would not have used ; and while paying this humble tribute to humble courtesy, the tears come into my eyes as I think how amidst scenes of loathsome disease and death there  arose above it all the innate dignity, gentleness and chivalry of the men ( for never surely was chivalry so strikingly exemplified) shining in  the midst of what must be considered as the lowest sinks of human misery, and preventing instinctively the use of one expression which could distress a gentlewoman. "

It was a different language she used when she wrote home to Sidney Herbert about the inefficiency of her co-workers. Sarcastically, vituperatively, she flayed those who she felt cared nothing for the sick. She lashed out against the lack of system and the evils of the personnel. "The Sister's Tower," her humble room, became the brain center of the Hospital. From there she wrote letters to the relatives of the men who had died, carefully relaying their last words. It was here, too, that she penned her confidential reports to Herbert in which she spared no one. From her pen the most highly respected British lords received terrible nicknames. One important individual she referred to as "a fossil of the pure Old Red Sandstone. " When Sir John Hall, Inspector-General of the Hospitals in the East, was awarded the honor of a K.C.B., Florence wrote Herbert that he did not deserve it; Hall was responsible for the wreck of the army; the honor had turned his head; the distinguished letters in his case meant, according to Florence, "Knight of the Crimean Burial-Ground."

She referred to one of the Reverend Mothers at the Hospital as "Reverend Brickbat." Florence transformed the Barrack Hospital, not by smoothing pillows and administering gruel, but by constant battling with the authorities.

When the men arrived from battle with their clothes in tatters, the "Purveyor" stood inactive insisting that "according to the rules and regulations" soldiers should bring "an adequate supply of clothing with them  to the hospital. " No, he told Florence, he couldn't unpack 27,000 shirts which lay in the storehouses. It was impossible to act "without a board." The sick and wounded lay shivering for three weeks until the Board acted. The next time the situation arose, Florence ordered a government consignment to be forcibly opened.

"I must have these things," she is reported to have said quietly. "My men are dying from lack of them." The trembling under-official stammered with the fear of court-martial. "You shall have no blame," Florence told him. "I take the entire responsibility upon myself. Open the door!" This particular door was but one of many to be opened to her.

No obstacle was too formidable for the Lady-in- Chief. When, in the already overflowing hospital, a great new contingent was expected from the battlefields, she hired workmen to rehabilitate some of the rooms. Disapproving officials insisted that the proper course for such action was an appeal to the Director General of the Army Medical Department in London, who, in turn, would apply to the Horse Guard, who would move the Ordnance, who would take it up with the Treasury, who might consent to having the remodeling done in a few months-when the need was over. On her own, Miss Nightingale hired two hundred workmen, completed the building, and paid the bill out of her own pocket. She devoted her entire personal allowance to her work in the East.

But Miss Nightingale was no wholesale spurner of rules; she insisted upon rigid discipline and respect for the regulations. One cold night, sitting by the bedside of a dying patient, she asked an orderly to bring a hot-water bottle. The orderly refused on the ground that he could do nothing for a patient without directions from a medical officer. Miss Nightingale herself found a doctor who could grant her request. In this case she was able to warm the icy feet of her  patient -legally. Criticized for her strictness, she never lost sight, however, of her real goal, that of alleviating the suffering of her soldiers. When she had to choose between a rule or the comfort of a wounded man, there was never a question as to which it should be.

There was none of the hysterical female in Miss Nightingale, understandable though it would have been midst the horrors of Scutari. She fought hard, but mostly from her desk in the Sister's Towers. She never lost her temper in public. One of her companions said, "I never heard her raise her voice. She did not need to. When a doctor or orderly questioned any of her directions, saying 'It can't be done,' her answer was a quiet, insistent, 'But it must be done.'  "Beneath her cool and calm demeanor," wrote Strachey, "lurked fierce arid passionate fires."

A sentimental writer of the era said of Miss Nightingale's lovely face: "The soul's glory shines through every feature so exultingly. Nothing can be sweeter than her smile. It is like a sunny day in summer." Conversely, nothing was more awesome than her frown. The small firm mouth we see in her portraits, with the tightly closed lips is more symbolic of Florence Nightingale's nature than the "sunny" Pollyanna smile. The "soul's glory" may have shone through her features, but the light in her steady, clear grey-blue eyes revealed a willful determination.

The objective of the Lady-in-Chief of the Crimea was fortunately not that of popularity. She wanted results and she got them. Much of her precious time and energy had to go to solve power and personality conflicts in the administration. She wrote, "There is  not an official who would not burn me like Joan of Arc if he could." Florence had no persecution complex. She spoke the truth. Far from being the "most loved woman of her period, " as our Sunday School texts declare, she was at the height of her great work, bitterly hated. When she and her nurses were inspecting the hospitals in the Crimea itself, Sir John Hall ordered that no rations of any kind be supplied her ; he would literally starve her into submission. Florence wrote at the time, "During the greater part of the day I have been without food, except necessarily a little brandy and water." Her own foresight alone saved her; she had brought enough food with her to feed herself and the twenty-four nurses during the ten-day trip.

Most of the conflicts were due to the fact that she was a woman. She got things done, but the military officers sulked; a female was usurping their power. She circumvented the red-tape and got supplies; they labeled her as officious. She had the meat boned; she fed the starving and clothed the naked; they said she was coddling the brutes with "preposterous luxuries." Life in Scutari was a constant struggle to retain her authority despite jealousy and piqued male egos.

Not only her sex, but her religion was used as a weapon against her. They were trying "to root her out of the Crimea," she wrote home, "due to sectarian differences." A similar complaint re-echoed from England. The great body of English people had only gratitude for her work, yet as she grappled with disease, suffering and death, a certain element of small-minded British society, far removed from the realities of war, attacked her on religious ground. The old bogeys that had accompanied her appointment reappeared; they said she had become a Roman Catholic. Clergymen warned their flocks against subscribing money for the soldiers in the East "if it was to pass through Popish hands. " Others said she had gone to the East to convert soldiers to High Church views. Mrs. Herbert's assurance that Miss Nightingale was somewhat Low Church had no effect. For then the public criticized her not for her "Catholicism," but because she was one of England's detested non-conformists - a Unitarian.

Yet, despite the friction the Lady-in-Chief caused, she succeeded in keeping the Home Government behind her all during her stay at Scutari. "Reverend Brickbat" and Dr. Hall might challenge her status, but at each crisis the authorities at home dispatched orders placing her status beyond question. "Miss Nightingale is recognized by Her Majesty's Government as the General Superintendent of the female nursing establishment of the Military Hospitals of the Army." The Queen made repeated inquiries as to her welfare, writing a letter stating her concern for Miss Nightingale and the "poor, noble, wounded and sick men. " The message was posted on the walls of the Hospital and did much to allay criticism.

When the War Department reimbursed her for the building she had constructed with her own money, "The Nightingale Power" was undeniable. Sidney Herbert, too, had only praise for her initiative. "This is not," he wrote, "a moment for stickling at forms, but for facilitating the rapid and easy transaction of business. There is much mischief done to the public service in the stickling for precedence. "

Kinglake sums up her impact as he writes, " Among the males at Scutari, was no one with resolute will ...the will of the woman, Florence Nightingale, was stronger, and flew straighter to its end; what she sought fiercely was, not simply to fulfill codes of duty, but overcoming all obstacles, to save the prostrate soldiery; to turn into a well-ordered hospital the appalling hell of the vast barrack wards and corridors. Power passed to one who could wield it--'the Lady-in-Chief. "

Lytton Strachey, in a similar vein, writes of our sometimes acrid angel: "It was not by gentle sweetness and womanly self-abnegation that she had brought order out of chaos in the Scutari Hospitals, that, from her own resources, she had clothed the British Army, that she had spread her dominion over the serried and reluctant powers of the official world ; it was by strict method, by stern discipline, by rigid attention to detail, by ceaseless labor, by the fixed determination of an indomitable will. "

There is nothing irreverent in a realistic portrayal of the world's "most noble woman." The picture of the Angel of the Crimea, with her scrub brush and her charts and graphs is a more tangible idol for modern womanhood than Santa Filomena with her lily, palm and javelin.

Florence Nightingale was no plaster saint. A Lady with a Lamp of course; but behind that lamp was also a Lady with a Will.