Recipes From Disaster - Part 4
Finding that Raglan was elsewhere engaged, the Nightingale party decided that having come so far they should at least have a look at Sevastopol. Flo's progress was becoming something of a triumph - as they passed the camps, the soldiers came out of their tents and 'cheered her to the echo with three times three'. Arriving at a mortar battery, Alexis got her to perch on the centre mortar. Clearly carried away on a wave of sentiment and adulation, he declaimed 'Gentlemen, behold this amiable lady, sitting fearlessly upon the terrible instrument of war! Behold the heroic daughter of England, the soldiers' friend.' There were cheers all round - flowers were picked and presented to the amiable lady - even the Russians acknowledged the occasion by lobbing over a desultory shell. Then the celebrities cantered back to Balaklava to end a full day. Russell, in a letter to his editor John Delane, misrepresented Alexis' tribute as 'Voila! The Child of Peace had her breech on the breech of the Son of War.' What a great red-top tabloid hack he would have made!
But the next morning, when Flo and Alexis began their tour of the Balaklava hospitals, the mood and atmosphere suffered a dramatic change for the worse. In the General Hospital, under the feeble supervision of Miss Weare, anarchy reigned. The nurses were routinely rebellious,and controls were non-existent, even for attractive and costly commodities. The kitchens were unclean and deficient in facilities and implements, particularly at the Sanatorium where they were located outside the building, roofless with walls of baked mud. Only the Castle, the new hutted hospital on the heights, was well managed by Mrs Shaw Stewart. However she was conceived by Dr Hall the Chief Medical Officer to be a Nightingale supporter, and therefore everything was done to make her life a misery, including refusal to do anything about her kitchens, which were woefully inadequate.
During the hospital visits Alexis distributed recipes to the kitchens, and in the case of the Sanatorium, he sketched a design for a proper kitchen and handed it to the doctors. Everywhere he found a shortage of proper kitchen utensils, and he had requisitions forwarded to the Commissariat accordingly.
Flo was preparing for a monumental battle with Hall when tragically she fell seriously ill with 'Crimean fever' and had herself to be hospitalised in a hut at the Castle Hospital. A fuller account is related in
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