“In time of peace, money and supplies are gathered and stored by each country, ready for use at the first signal of war.  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 your terrible Civil 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.

“No wonder that she came to Europe completely broken down in health, so exhausted by her long, severe labors that her physician told her she must rest several years.  But hardly was she settled here in Switzerland when the Franco-Prussian war broke out, and the Red Cross sought her aid, knowing how valuable her long experience in nursing would be to them.  She could not refuse their appeals, and once more started in the wake of powder smoke, and cannon’s roar.

“But I’ll not start on that chapter of her life.  I would not know where to stop.  It was there I met her, there she nursed me back to life; then I learned to appreciate her devotion to the cause of humankind.  This second long siege against suffering made her an invalid for many years.

“The other nations wondered why America refused to join them in their humane work.  All other civilized countries were willing to lend a hand.  But Clara Barton knew that it was because the people were ignorant of its real purpose that they did not join the alliance, and she promised that she would devote the remainder of her life, if need be, to showing America that as long as she refused to sign that treaty, she was standing on a level with barbarous and heathen countries.