36 SIR WILLIAM FLOWER chap... 



Constantinople, December 28, 1854. 



Dearest Mother — . . . The transport service does not 

 seem well managed, as there are numbers of steamers waiting 

 here doing nothing, and yet they cannot get enough for the 

 exigencies of the war. They come down here full of sick from 

 Balaclava, have to wait four or five days before the sick are 

 landed, then remain doing nothing for a week or two, then 

 perhaps are filled with convalescent patients, then wait four or 

 five more days, then go back to Balaclava or England, as the 

 case may be ; they might have made a dozen journeys in the 

 time. 



I went over the hospital at Scutari yesterday. Whatever may 

 have been the sufferings and neglect of the patients there at first, 

 now the cleanliness, comfort, and almost luxury they live in 

 surpasses that of any hospital at home. It must be a Paradise 

 after the camp. I was much pleased to find a man whose leg I 

 cut off after the battle of Inkerman and to hear that he was 

 going on very well indeed. ... 



At length he got a passage on the Harbinger 

 (auxiliary screw steamer), and after a long and 

 rather rough passage landed at Southampton on the 

 5th February 1855. 



