[177] _Memoirs of Lady Eastlake_, vol. ii. p. 44.
Her recovery was gradual, and her weakness great. Mrs. Bracebridge described her as unable to feed herself or speak above a whisper. The extreme exhaustion was more from the previous overstrain on mind and body than from the fever, the doctors said, and they recommended complete change and rest. Mr. Sidney Herbert wrote, imploring her to come home for two months: "We are delighted," wrote her mother (July 9), "to think of you at Therapia. Oh, my love, how I trust that you will, among the numerous lessons which your life has been spent in learning, be able to perfect that most difficult one of standing and waiting." She was to be lessoned in that form of service, but not till after many more years of arduous labour, and for the present she would not hear of any return to England. The feeling of the soldiers for her touched her so deeply that she could not bear, she said, to leave them. Gradually she recovered strength. "We have a charming account," wrote her sister (Aug. 21), "from Lothian Nicholson just ordered out to Crimea, who is quite enthusiastic, dear old boy, about her good looks, which, as all her hair has been cut off, is good testimony--'her own smile,' he talks of, and says he can hardly believe she has gone through such a winter. The dear Bracebridges say that her improvement in the last week was delightful and wonderful." Already, in July, her business letters were resumed. In August she was in the full rush of work again. The doctors and her friends still besought her to take rest. But her indomitable spirit would listen to no counsels of retreat. The end of the war was not yet in sight. Even Sebastopol had not yet fallen. So long as there remained sick and wounded in the Levant to be cared for, she was resolved to remain also. A soldier was told that the Lady-in-Chief would probably be sent home. "But how will they _pairt_ with her," he said, "what'll they do without her? they set all their hopes on she." There were nurses, too, naturally anxious to rejoin their families or friends at home, who said that, if she went, they would go. The presence of Miss Nightingale, with her lofty ideals and inspiring self-devotion, was the attraction which kept many of these women at their posts. Some had already died. Mrs. Elizabeth Drake, one of the nurses whom Miss Nightingale had taken with her to the Crimea, died on August 9 of low fever at Balaclava. "I cannot tell you," wrote Miss Nightingale to the Master of St. John's House (Aug. 16, 1855), "what I felt when I heard of her death, unexpected alike by all. Her two physicians thought her going on well, and I expected her in every convoy that came down from Balaclava, as she was coming to me to recruit. I have lost in her the best of all the women here. Once I proposed to her to go home, but she scouted the idea entirely and said her health was better here than in England. I feel like a criminal in having robbed you of one so truly to be loved and honoured. It seemed as if it pleased God to remove from the work those who have been most useful to it. His will be done!" Nurse Drake's body was brought to Scutari, and Miss Nightingale erected a small marble cross over it in the cemetery. It was no time, when members of the rank-and-file were falling at the post of duty, for the chief to listen to counsels of medical prudence. Nor, indeed, at any time did Miss Nightingale harbour even a passing thought of what would have seemed to her an act of military desertion. She remained till the end of the war came, and till the last transport had sailed; working indefatigably as ever, and in some respects in new spheres of usefulness, both in the Crimea and at Scutari; to what good effect we shall hear in later chapters, but at great cost to her own comfort and bodily strength. She had been appointed, as she used to say, to a subsidiary post in the Queen's Army[178]; the humblest post, it might be, but still a post of duty. The men had dared and suffered; and Florence Nightingale was resolved to show that a woman too had strength to suffer and endure.