The difficulties of being saintly:
Florence Nightingale 1820-1910
Tides of 1856 Crimean War
The military authorities angered by the interference of the Times, refused to admit that anything was wrong. The departments hastened to justify themselves.
When the emergency had passed, opposition to Miss Nightingale again arose. Admiration and gratitude disappeared and she was so victimised by petty jealousies and treacheries that she was miserably depressed and in the end obsessed with a sense of failure.
The high spirit and faith which had sustained her through the first months faded and she learned the powers of official intrigues.
We have to deal with men whose only object is to keep themselves out of blame.
Dr. John Hall was revengeful, powerful and a master of the confidential reports.
"Dr. Hall is dead against me. He descends to every meanness to make my position more difficult."
She was perpetually tormented by official spite. It was the defeat of justice by power.
Inertia was great, entrenched bureaucratic obstruction powerful.
She appealed to the sympathetic quarters of the war office.
But the Hall and Fitz party openly declared to root her out of Crimea.
And at last, on March 16,1856, a dispatch establishing her position in terms far beyond anything of which she had ever dreamed reached the Crimea.
