Whispered low the dying soldier, pressed her hand and faintly smiled;
Was that pitying face his mother’s? Did she watch beside her child?
All his broken words with meaning her woman’s heart supplied:
With her kiss upon his forehead, “Mother!” murmured he and died.
There through the day, in that awful carnage of blood, fearless Clara Barton worked to save human lives. Did she shrink from danger? She said “I am an American Soldier and am not supposed to be susceptible to fear.”
But the most gruesome of her experiences was after nightfall. Through the night in a barn near by, she assisted the surgeons. The surgeons had no bandages, she supplied them; they had no light, she supplied the lanterns and candles until the operating tables were in a blaze of light. They had no food; she supplied the gruel made from Indian corn meal, cooked in great brass kettles. The surgeons were without adequate assistance; she assisted at the amputating tables. “Through the long starlit night,” she said, “we wrought and hoped and prayed.” When the morning came the amputated limbs made a pile so high that you had to look up to see the top, a pile of human limbs like a cord of wood.
Not only gruesome was that “cord of wood” but pathetic. In that pile the limbs were from mere boys,—innocent victims of the greed of men;—not a leg, not an arm in that pile was from “War’s Profiteers.” And with the morning came complete exhaustion. When she returned from her uncanny labors her arms were crimson with blood; her skirts, blood-soaked; her shoes, blood-sopping. In all human history did woman have such experience as had Clara Barton through that two days of human carnage—carnage on one of America’s most famous battlefields in the most infamous fratricidal war in history? Frail Clara Barton! “The most timid person on earth!” The same Clara Barton who fainted at the killing of an ox? Can it be? Let hers be the explanation: “I was always afraid of everything except when someone was to be rescued from danger or pain. Human endurance has its limits;—God gives strength and the thing that seems impossible is done.”
XXV
An Overruling Providence seemed to interpose its hand between Clara Barton and the perils of war and epidemic alike, for a high and splendid purpose. Pawtucket (R. I.) Times.
If Almighty God gives a man a cowardly pair of legs, how can help their running away with him? A. Lincoln.