Immediate and practical difficulties were also great. There was no accommodation in the hospitals at Scutari available for additional female nurses. "The 46," wrote Mr. Bracebridge to Mr. Smith (Dec. 18), "have fallen on us like a cloud of locusts. Where to house them, feed them, place them, is difficult; how to care for them, not to be imagined." The Principal Medical Officer flatly refused to have any more, and Miss Nightingale herself felt that she could not manage any more:--
"I have toiled my way," she wrote (Dec. 15), "into the confidence of the Medical Men. I have, by incessant vigilance, day and night, introduced something like system into the disorderly operations of these women. And the plan may be said to have succeeded in some measure, _as it stands_.... But to have women scampering about the wards of a Military Hospital all day long, which they would do, did an increased number relax the discipline and increase their leisure, would be as improper as absurd."
And there was a further objection. A considerable number of the second party were Roman Catholics, and Miss Stanley herself (as Miss Nightingale well knew) was on the verge of joining the Roman Communion. How much this factor in the case added to the force of Miss Nightingale's objections, we shall learn in a later chapter. Mr. Herbert thought, I suppose, that the additional nurses would be welcome to her because they came under the escort of a friend. But so strongly did Miss Nightingale feel on the subject, that Miss Stanley's part in the affair rankled the more. It was in the house of her friends, she felt, that she had been wounded. Their personal relations were further embittered by the case of a nurse whom Miss Nightingale (with the concurrence of the other authorities) felt obliged to dismiss, but whom Miss Stanley believed to be ill-used. Miss Nightingale's friendship with Mr. and Mrs. Herbert was in no way impaired. They had confessed themselves in the wrong; and so she was deeply touched, as she wrote, by their kindness and generosity. But between her and Miss Stanley the breach was never healed. Their later lives took different directions, and they did not meet again.
Miss Nightingale's resentment was perfectly justified. Her remonstrances to Mr. Herbert were necessary. His well-intentioned action was calculated to undermine her authority, and to aggravate her difficulties; and, in both of these ways, to imperil the success of their joint experiment. Her handling of the crisis which had burst upon her was, perhaps, in relation to the subordinates unfortunate. Miss Stanley was accompanied by Dr. Meyer, a medical man, and Mr. Jocelyne Percy, who had gone out (as Mrs. Herbert wrote to Mrs. Bracebridge) devoted to Miss Nightingale, "saying he would be her footman, etc."[105] "We picked out," added Mrs. Herbert plaintively, "the two men in England who, we thought, would help Flo most," and they returned sad and sore at their cold reception. Miss Nightingale, acting on advice she received on the spot, asked them to sign notes of their conversation with her;[106] this rankled with them, and Mr. Percy made a grievance of it in England. Mrs. Herbert, in reporting all this to Mrs. Bracebridge (Jan. 7, 1855), made the final reflection: "Perhaps it is wholesome for us to be reminded that Flo is _still a mortal_, which we were beginning to doubt." Mortals have to deal with entanglements as best they may on the spur of the moment; and those at a distance hardly made enough allowance for the difficulties with which Miss Nightingale was suddenly confronted, for the danger which Mr. Herbert's dispatch of unsolicited reinforcements involved, and, therefore, for the importance which she attached to having all the conditions defined in black and white.