I am sorry to say that the men that was out before I came have not had so much as a clean shirt on for 2 Mounths the people at home think that the troops out hear are well provided for I am sorry to say that they are treated worse then dogs are at home I can tell the inhabitants of old England that if the solders that are out hear could but get home again they would not get them out so easy it is not the fear of fighting it is the worse treatment that we receive.
Others wrote to the newspapers to expose the army’s poor treatment. Colonel George Bell of the 1st (Royal) Regiment drafted a letter to The Times on 28 November:
All the elements of destruction are against us, sickness & death, & nakedness, & uncertain ration of salt meat. Not a drop of Rum for two days, the only stand by to keep the soldier on his legs at all. If this fails we are done. The Communication to Balaklava impossible, knee deep all the way for 6 miles. Wheels can’t move, & the poor wretched starved baggage animals have not strength to wade through the mud without a load. Horses – cavalry, artillery, officers’ chargers & Baggage Animals die by the score every night at their peg from cold & starvation. Worse than this, the men are dropping down fearfully. I saw nine men of 1st Batt[alion] Royal Regt lying Dead in one Tent to day, and 15 more dying! All cases of Cholera … . The poor men’s backs are never dry, their one suit of rags hang in tatters about them, they go down to the Trenches at night wet to the skin, ly there in water, mud, & slush till morning, come back with cramps to a crowded Hosp[ital] Marquee tattered by the storm, ly down in a fetid atmosphere, quite enough of itself to breed contagion, & dy there in agony. This is no romance, it is my duty as a C.O. to see & Endeavour to alleviate the sufferings & privations of my humble but gallant comrades. I can’t do it, I have no power. Everything almost is wanting in this Hospital department, so badly put together from the start. No people complain so much of it as the Medical officers of Regts & many of the Staff doctors too.
At the end of his letter, which he finished the next day, Bell added a private note to the paper’s editor, inviting him to publish it and ending with the words: ‘I fear to state the real state of things here.’ A watered-down version of the letter (dated 12 December) was published in The Times on the 29th, but even that, Bell later thought, had been enough to ruin his career.17
It was through a report in The Times that the British public first became aware of the terrible conditions suffered by the wounded and the sick. On 12 October readers were startled by the news they took in over breakfast from The Times correspondent in Constantinople, Thomas Chenery, ‘that no sufficient medical preparations have been made for the proper care of the wounded’ who had been evacuated from the Crimea to the military hospital at Scutari, 500 kilometres away. ‘Not only are there not sufficient surgeons – that, it might be urged, was unavoidable – not only are there no dressers and nurses – that might be a defect of system for which no one is to blame – but what will be said when it is known that there is not even linen to make bandages for the wounded?’ An angry leader in The Times by John Delane, the paper’s editor, the next day sparked a rush of letters and donations, leading to the establishment of a Times Crimean Fund for the Relief of the Sick and Wounded by Sir Robert Peel, the son of the former Prime Minister. Many letters focused on the scandal that the army had no nurses in the Crimea – a shortcoming which various well-meaning women now proposed to remedy. Among them was Florence Nightingale, the unsalaried superintendent of the Hospital for Invalid Gentlewomen in Harley Street, a family friend of Sidney Herbert, Secretary at War. She wrote to Mrs Herbert offering to recruit a team of nurses for the East on the same day as her husband wrote to Nightingale asking her to do precisely that: the letters crossed each other in the post.
The British were far behind the French in their medical arrangements for the sick and wounded. Visitors to the French military hospitals in the Crimea and Constantinople were impressed by their cleanliness and good order. There were teams of nurses, mostly nuns recruited from the Order of St Vincent de Paul, operating under instructions from the doctors. ‘We found things here in far better condition than at Scutari,’ wrote one English visitor of the hospital in Constantinople:
