All these details point to the essential badness of the system of requisitions.  In the old days, when war was altogether a mass of formalities,—­and in peace times, when soldiers and their guardians had not enough to do, and it was made an object and employment to save the national property by hedging round all expenditure of that property with difficulties, the system of requisitions might suit the period and the parties.  Amidst the rapid action and sharp emergencies of war it is out of place.  It was found intolerable that nothing whatever could be had,—­not a dose of medicine, nor a candle, nor a sheet, nor a spoon or dish, nor a bit of soap,—­without a series of permits, and applications, and orders, and vouchers, which frittered away the precious hours, depressed the sick, worried their nurses, and wasted more of money’s worth in official time, paper, and expensive cross-purposes than could possibly have been saved by all the ostentatious vigilance of the method.  The deck-loads of vegetables at Balaklava, thrown overboard because they were rotten before they were drawn, were not the only stores wasted for want of being asked for.  When the Scutari hospitals had become healthy and comfortable, there was a thorough opening-out of all the stores which had before been made inaccessible by forms.  No more bedsteads, no more lime-juice, no more rice, no more beer, no more precious medicines were then locked away, out of the reach or the knowledge of those who were dying, or seeing others die, for want of them.

One miserable consequence of the cumbrous method was, that there was no certainty at any hour of some essential commodity not falling short.  It would have been a dismal day for the most suffering of the patients when there was not fuel enough to cook “extras,” if Miss Nightingale had not providently bought four boat-loads of wood to meet such a contingency.  It was a dreadful night in the hospital, when, as cholera patients were brought in by the score, the surgeons found there were no candles to be had.  In that disease, of all maladies, they had to tend their patients in the dark all night; and a more shocking scene can scarcely be conceived.

Every great influx of patients was terrible, whether from an epidemic or after a battle; but experience and devotedness made even this comparatively easy before the troops turned homewards.  The arrival of a transport was, perhaps, the first intimation of the earlier battles.  Then all was hurry-skurry in the hospitals; everybody was willing to help, but the effectual organization was not yet ready.

Of every hundred on board the transport, an average of ten had died since leaving the Crimea.  The names and causes of death of these men ought to be recorded; but the surgeons of the transport are wholly occupied in despatching their living charge to the hospital; and the surgeons there have enough to do in receiving them.  Attempts are made to obtain the number and names and injuries of the new patients: