“They chose that as their flag in compliment to Switzerland, where the movement was started.  You see they are the same except that the colours are reversed.

“Now, according to that treaty, wherever the Red Cross goes, on sea or on land, it means peace and safety for the wounded soldiers.  In the midst of the bloodiest battle, no matter who is hurt, Turk or Russian, Japanese or Spaniard, Armenian or Arab, he is bound to be protected and cared for.  No nurse, surgeon, or ambulance bearing that Red Cross can be fired upon.  They are allowed to pass wherever they are needed.

“Before the nations joined in that treaty, the worst horror of war was the fate of a wounded soldier, falling into the hands of the enemy.  Better a thousand times to be killed in battle, than to be taken prisoner.  Think of being left, bleeding and faint, on an enemy’s field till your clothes froze to the ground, and no one merciful enough to give you a crust of bread or a drop of water.  Think of the dying piled with the dead and left to the pitiless rays of a scorching, tropic sun.  That can never happen again, thank Heaven!

“In time of peace, money and supplies are gathered and stored by each country, ready for use at the first signal of war.  To show her approval, the empress became the head of the branch in Germany.  Soon after the Franco-Prussian war began, and then her only daughter, the Grand Duchess Louise of Baden, turned all her beautiful castles into military hospitals, and went herself to superintend the work of relief.

“Your country did not join with us at first.  You were having a terrible war at home; the one in which your grandfather fought.  All this time Clara Barton was with the soldiers on their bloodiest battle-fields.  When you go home, ask your grandfather about the battles of Bull Run and Antietam, Fredericksburg and the Wilderness.  She was there.  She stood the strain of nursing in sixteen such awful places, going from cot to cot among the thousands of wounded, comforting the dying, and dragging many a man back from the very grave by her untiring, unselfish devotion.

“When the war was over, she spent four years searching for the soldiers reported missing.  Hundreds and hundreds of pitiful letters came to her, giving name, regiment, and company of some son or husband or brother, who had marched away to the wars and never returned.  These names could not be found among the lists of the killed.  They were simply reported as ‘missing’; whether dead or a deserter, no one could tell.  She had spent weeks at Andersonville the summer after the war, identifying and marking the graves there.  She marked over twelve thousand.  So when these letters came imploring her aid, she began the search, visiting the old prisons, and trenches and hospitals, until she removed from twenty thousand names the possible suspicion that the men who bore them had been deserters.