LETTER: Autograph letter signed, "Florence Nightingale," to Reverend Thomas Clarke.
Nightingale to the Veterans of Balaclava
Nightingale, Florence. Autograph letter signed, to the Reverend Thomas Clarke, October 21, 1895; eleven pages on three sets of adjoining sheets, 5 x 8.
A beautifully written homage to the men who, like Nightingale herself, experienced the defining moments of their lives on the battlefields of Russia.
Forty years after the disastrous Battle of Balaclava, in which nearly half of the British Light Brigade was killed or severely wounded due to a miscommunication of orders, Reverend Thomas Clarke reached out to Nightingale to address the aging veterans. Joining notables such as Rudyard Kipling, Nightingale hoped to draw public attention to the hardships that the long-since forgotten soldiers were forced to endure in their old age, many living in poor health and poverty. Having made a name for herself during the Crimean War, devoting her life to improving conditions and caring for wounded men on the battlefields, what she saw there transformed the medical world. Famously remembered for their valor in bravely carrying out orders, despite the fact that they were marching into certain defeat, the veterans of the Light Brigade held the qualities most highly praised by Nightingale: love of their comrades, love of “God, the great Commander-in-Chief,” bravery, devotion, and discipline. She praises their actions in the face of great danger, and encourages them to do as she did, and “fight the good fight…in common home-life as well as in the field.”
In part:
You ask me to say a few words for the anniversary of the Balaclava charge to your Veterans. I am often speaking to them in my heart; but I am much overworked. And what I speak in my heart is something like this: The soldier has such good stuff in him. 1. He really ‘loves’ his comrade as himself when he himself has returned safe out of gun shot or he finds his comrade or his officer missing, he goes back to bring him off. How many have lost (or rather ‘gained’) their own lives in this way—killed or wounded. And there has been no swagger about it. 2. And when he loves his God, he really does love him…he sets his heart to obeying the orders of God, the great Commander-in-Chief…A man who resists drink is perhaps a greater hero than the heroes of that battle who stood to their (outpost) battery when the company was surprised, & grave time for Regiments to come up, which saved perhaps the face of Europe from being changed. So they now may save their village or their parish, if they stand firm, ‘rooted & grounded in love.’ At one great battle which had to be fought on the defensive & won, the men stood firm as rocks till they fell—not a man stirred. They did not fight for glory. Where would England be now but for them? And may we not say how, where will England be if her men do not stand like rocks to the right & the true & the holy & the loving? Is England better than she was for me? Let every man ask himself this question. Sometimes he forgets that one may fight the good fight—the good fight against the enemy in common home-life as well as in the field. In India a well known Commander-in-Chief, whenever there was anything hard to be done, used to say ‘Call out the Saints; for Havelock never blunders and his men are never drunk.’”
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