Books: God & the Drains

FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE (382 pp.) Cecil Wood ham-Smith—McGraw-Hill ($4.50).

“Mama was terrified” when Flo Nightingale announced she wanted to be a nurse. In 1845, any mother would have felt the same way. Nurses were dirty, drunken, promiscuous. Florence Nightingale would change all that as she was to change many things. British army privates in their fetid barracks, smug bureaucrats in the musty War Office, viceroys in palaces were all to feel the reach of her will and missionary zeal.

In tears, Mother Nightingale had confided to a friend: “We are ducks who have hatched a wild swan.” It was no swan, as Lytton Strachey noted in his famous biographical essay, “it was an eagle.” But Strachey-could never fathom Miss Nightingale either, because he himself, a brilliant and heretical writer, put no stock in God or goodness. The best Strachey could do was to guess that Florence Nightingale was in the clutch of a demonic spirit.

Now, in an outstanding new biography based on six years of digging in old letters and documents, Mrs. Woodham-Smith reveals the real springs of Florence Nightingale’s ardor: when she was 16, “voices” assured her of a special call of God.

“No More Love.” Florence was 24 before the voices told her exactly what she must do, and 33 before she left her parents to do it. In the meantime, she seemed to live the typical life of a girl born in upper-class Victorian society. Her father was a rich dilettante, her mother a society figure. Florence, a slight, willowy girl with chestnut hair, sparkled at parties and balls, traveled on the Continent. She had a rush of eligible suitors, including young Richard Monckton Milnes, socialite, poet and philanthropist.

But secretly, Florence kept notebooks. She chided herself in them for trying “to shine in society.” She imagined herself married to Milnes, but her daydreams of marriage were of the works of philanthropy and welfare they might perform together. By candlelight, she pored over government hospital reports. “My mind is absorbed,” she wrote, “with … the sufferings of man; it besets me behind and before … All the people I see are eaten up with care or poverty or disease.”

To be ready for her mission, she stripped herself of all distracting joys, including Richard Milnes, “the man I adored.” The diary passage that sums up the renunciation: ‘Today I am 30—the age Christ began his mission. Now no more childish things. No more love. No more marriage. Now, Lord, let me think only of Thy Will, what Thou wiliest me to^do. Oh Lord Thy Will, Thy Will.”

“I Must Remember.” At 33, she took charge of a home for “Sick Gentlewomen in Distressed Circumstances.” From then on, God would not wait for Englishmen to muddle through. Despite the Colonel Blimps of the medical corps, she cleaned up the army’s medical pestholes in the Crimea. Part sanitary officer, part supply sergeant, and part saint, the

“Lady with the Lamp” became an international heroine. Queen Victoria had a special brooch struck for her, remarked: “I wish we had her at the War Office.”

Florence Nightingale assembled a war office of her own. She recruited Sidney Herbert (Secretary of War), Alexis Soyer, a dietician, Dr. Sutherland, her physician, Arthur Clough, the poet, her cousin Hilary and others. Broken in health, seemingly a hopeless invalid at death’s door, she put together 1,000 closely written Dages in six months on the condition of British hospitals in the Crimea. From her ;ick bed, she directed her associates, atacked her opponents.

Gradually, she began to win. War Office -eorganization was begun. Barracks and icspitals were redesigned, nurses’ training chpols established. She drew up the first anitary code for India, lived to see drainage and irrigation projects begun there.

Under the grueling pace, her associates collapsed and died: cousin Hilary, Clough, Soyer. When Sidney Herbert died at a critical moment, Florence Nightingale was tempted to blame God for interrupting “The Work.” But she caught herself. “I must remember,” she noted, “God is not my private secretary.”

She herself lived on, mellowed, finally came to realize the extent of her victory. The great and near-great came to her door. In 1898, she received the Aga Khan. “He was,” she wrote, “a most interesting man, but you could never teach him sanitation.” In 1906, her mind flickered and her vision failed. On Aug. 13, 1910, in the third month of her gist year, God called Florence Nightingale for the last time.

-Second cousin to John Strachey, British Secretary of State for War, who achieved fame as an advertiser of Marxism.