The Red Cross in Peace and War

The Red Cross in Peace and War by Clara Barton. To be called to tell in a few brief weeks the whole story of the Red Cross from its origin to the present time seems a labor scarcely less than to have lived it. It is a task that however unworthily it may now be performed is in itself not unworthy the genius of George Eliot or Macaulay. It is a story illustrating the rapid rise of the humane sentiment in the latter half of the nineteenth century. On its European side it tells of the first timid and cautious putting forth of the sentiment of humanity in war amid the rattling swords and guns of Solferino its deaths and wounds and its subsequent awful silence.. It tells of its later fertilization on the red fields of Gravelotte and Sedan beneath my own personal observation.. It was from such surroundings as these that the Red Cross has become the means by which philanthropy has been grafted onto the wild and savage stem of war.. From the first filaments spun in the heart of a solitary traveler have been drawn onward stronger and larger strands until now more than forty of the principal nations of the earth are bound together by bonds of the highest international law that must make war in the future less barbarous than it has been in the past.. It gives hope that “the very torrent tempest and whirlwind” of war itself may some day at last far off perhaps give way to the sunny and pleasant days of perpetual and universal peace. When a proposition for an absolute and common disarmament of nations made by the strongest of the rulers of Europe will not be met by cynical sneers and suggestions of Machiavelian craft.. On its American side it is a story of such immense success on the part of the American National Red Cross in some of its greatest and most difficult fields of labor that no financial report of them has ever been made because the story would have been altogether incredible. The universal opinion of ordinary business people would have been that these results could not have been obtained on the means stated and therefore something must be wrong or hidden and to save ourselves from painful suspicion it was decided rightly or wrongly that the story must remain substantially untold till its work in other fields had prepared the public mind to accept the literal truth.. But the time has come at last when the facts may properly be set forth without fear that they will be discredited or undervalued.