The  Government  at  home,  under  the  spur  of  Sidney
Herbert,  was  doing  its  best  to  remedy  the  evils.  Queen
Victoria  was  woefully  concerned  and  sent  a  feeling
message  to  the  men  which  was  read  and  posted  up
in  the  wards.  Public  opinion  was  furious  in  its  denuncia-
tion of  the  administration  which  had  failed  to  provide
against  such  a  catastrophe  and  the  Aberdeen  Ministry
was  forced  to  resign  largely  in  consequence  of  this.
But  the  fault  lay  with  no  one  ministry  and  still  less  with
any  one  minister.  The  mischief  lay  in  the  fact  that
army  administration  had  not  been  looked  into  for
forty  years,  that  more  than  half  a  dozen  separate
departments  had  to  do  with  army  matters,  that  their
various  functions  had  never  been  co-ordinated,  and
that  no  single  authority  appeared  to  be  able  to  exercise
full  control.  Within  the  ministry  there  were  two
ministers,  the  Secretary  for  War,  and  the  Secretary-at-
War  whose  functions  were  quite  disconnected,  though
Mr.  Herbert,  who  held  the  latter  post  when  the  war
started,  wisely  took  upon  himself  to  create  an  authority
of  his  own:  outside  these  ministers,  there  were
the  War  Office,  the  Horse  Guards,  the  Ordnance,
VictualHng  and  Transport  Offices,  the  Army  Medical
Department   and   the   Treasury   all   operating   inde-

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FLORENCE      NIGHTINGALE

pendently  of  one  another.  A  complicated  and  indirect
circuit  of  transmission  from  one  to  the  other  of  these
departments  existed,  but  it  took  so  long  to  work  that
it  was  useless  to  set  it  in  motion  for  emergency  purposes.
For  instance,  at  Scutari,  it  was  imperative  at  one
period  to  have  certain  hitherto  disused  and  dilapidated
wards  put  in  a  state  of  repair  in  order  to  fit  them  to
receive  a  fresh  influx  of  several  hundred  wounded.
