Clara Barton: A Centenary Tribute to the World's Greatest Humanitarian / Founder of the American Red Cross Society, Author of the American Amendment to the International Red Cross Convention of Geneva, Founder of the National First Aid Association of America

by Charles Sumner Young

XXXI

Clara Barton dared the bullets on the battlefield with the abandon of a dashing cavalry leader. Pawtucket (R. I.) Times.

In Clara Barton, the world has lost a guardian angel.

Pueblo Chieftain.

Death grinned a horrible ghastly smile. John Milton.

Says Clara Barton, in one of the battles of the Civil War, “A little sibley tent had been hastily pitched for me in a slight hollow upon a hillside. How many times I fell from sheer exhaustion in the darkness and mud of that slippery hillside I have no knowledge; but at last I grasped the welcome canvas, and a well established brook which washed in on the upper side, at the opening which served as the door, met me on my entrance to the tent.”

Percy H. Epler.

Clara Barton slept on the ground, wrapped in a blanket like a soldier, but her zeal was in no way diminished by hardship.

St. Paul (Minn.) Pioneer Press.

Clara Barton gave a lifetime of glorious service to humanity—a ministering angel like a benediction of her God amid the desolate, the stricken, the hungry and despairing. Los Angeles Examiner.

Sickness, confusion and death—these are inseparable from every conflict. Clara Barton.

I can never see a poor mutilated wreck, blown to pieces with powder and lead, without wondering if visions of such an end ever floated before his mother’s mind when she washed and dressed her fair-skinned boy. Clara Barton.

When giant misery stalks to the very threshold, and raps with bloody hands on one’s door, it is almost a libel upon the good Christian term to call it charity that answers. Clara Barton.

Women should certainly have some voice in the matter of war, either affirmative or negative, and the fact that she has not this should not be made the ground to deprive her of other privileges.

Clara Barton.

“They say”:

Imagine their skirts ’mong artillery wheels,

And watch for their flutter as they flee ’cross the fields,

When the charge is rammed home and the fire belches hot;—

They never will wait for the answering shot.

They would faint at the first drop of blood in sight—

Clara Barton.