Famous, too, became the words which one poor fellow sent home. "What a comfort it was to see her pass even. She would speak to one and nod and smile to as many more; but she could not do it to all, you know. We lay there by hundreds; but we could kiss her shadow as it fell, and lay our heads on the pillow again, content." "Before she came," said another soldier's letter, "there was cussin' and swearin', but after that it was holy as a church." Mr. Sidney Herbert read out these letters at a public meeting in November 1855.[154] Lord Ellesmere used Mr. Macdonald's description in the House of Lords in May 1856.[155] And Longfellow, in the following year, made a poem of it all, one of the most widely known poems, I suppose, that have ever been written:--
Lo! in that hour of misery A lady with a lamp I see Pass through the glimmering gloom, And flit from room to room. And slow, as in a dream of bliss, The speechless sufferer turns to kiss Her shadow, as it falls Upon the darkening walls.
The men idolized her. They kissed her shadow, and they saluted her as she passed down their wounded ranks. "If the Queen came for to die," said a soldier who lost a leg at the Alma, "they ought to make _her_ queen, and I think they would." Her lively sense of humour, which Mr. Osborne had discerned in talks with her in the hospital, was appreciated also by the patients. "She was wonderful," said one, "at cheering up any one who was a bit low," "She was all full of life and fun," said another, "when she talked to us, especially if a man was a bit down-hearted."[156] Who can tell what comfort was brought by the sound of a woman's gentle voice, the touch of a woman's gentle hand, to many a poor fellow racked by fever, or smarting from sores? And who can say how often her presence may have been as "a cup of strength in some great agony"? "The magic of her power over men was felt," as Kinglake has described, "in the room--the dreaded, the blood-stained room--where operations took place. There perhaps the maimed soldier, if not yet resigned to his fate, might at first be craving death rather than meet the knife of the surgeon; but, when such a one looked and saw that the honoured Lady-in-Chief was patiently standing beside him, and--with lips closely set and hands folded--decreeing herself to go through the pain of witnessing pain, he used to fall into the mood for obeying her silent command, and--finding strange support in her presence--bring himself to submit and endure."[157] And when the hour of death came, how often must the passing have been soothed by a presence which, with words of womanly comfort, may have carried the soldier's last thoughts back to home and wife, or child? A member of Parliament, well known in London Society, Mr. Augustus Stafford, went out during the recess of 1854 to Scutari, and made himself very useful to Miss Nightingale. "He says," wrote Monckton Milnes (Jan. 1855), "that Florence in the Hospital makes intelligible to him the Saints of the Middle Ages. If the soldiers were told that the roof had opened, and she had gone up palpably to Heaven, they would not be the least surprised. They quite believe she is in several places at once."[158] They were impressed by her power, no less than they were touched by her tenderness, and ascribed to the Lady-in-Chief the gifts of leadership in the field. "If she were at their head, they would be in Sebastopol in a week;" was a saying often heard in the hospital wards.