d myself taken in
our hut in the Crimea.

"I was down in Lancashire one Saturday and came up to Euston in the
evening, arriving there at ten o'clock. My wife was there with the
brougham waiting for me--much to my surprise. She said, very quietly,
'I've got a note for you from Lord Shaftesbury; he's called several
times to-day.' I knew what it meant--the Government wanted me to go out
to the Crimea. The note read: 'Dear Rawlinson,--See me to-night if
possible; if not, at eight o'clock to-morrow morning.' We drove away to
Grosvenor Square at once, but Shaftesbury was dining with Palmerston. I
went again at eight o'clock in the morning. He was sitting in his
library.

"'Well, Rawlinson,' he said, with a gloomy expression, 'we are losing
our poor army in the Crimea. I've induced Palmerston to agree to a
Sanitary Commission. Dr. Sutherland and Dr. Gavin will go, but I want an
engineer. Will you go?'

"The whole thing now comes vividly before me. When I learned afterwards
that from December to March, out of an army of 32,000 men, 11,000 had
died through starvation and climate--in three months more at the same
rate there would have been no British Army!

"'I'll go, my lord,' I said.

"He embraced me like a woman.

"'You shall take such powers as men never took before,' he said, and he
kept his word. The Commission sailed on the following Thursday, at the
end of February, landed at Constantinople on the 6th March, and the next
day we went over to the great hospitals on the Asiatic side, where the
men were dying at the rate of sixty and seventy a day. The wards were
full of sick and dying, there was no adequate ventilation, and the area
outside of the hospitals was covered with filth and the carcasses of
animals. The cleansing was heavy work. On the second day of our arrival
I had the upper portion of the windows broken to let ventilation into
the rooms. Armenians and Greek labourers cleared away the carcasses--for
the Turks would not touch them--and subsequently the hospitals were
white-washed. By mid-summer our hospitals were the cleanest in
Europe--so Florence Nightingale wrote home. The mortality decreased from
sixty and seventy per thousand to twelve and fourteen, and went on
improving. The French did nothing, although they had some palaces on the
European side for their sick. They neither drained, ventilated, nor
cleansed the surroundings--men, nurses, officers and doctors went down
with fever--they telegraphed hom