ng 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.

"No wonder that she came to Europe completely broken down in health, so
exhausted by her long, severe labours that her physicians told her she
must rest several years. But hardly was she settled here in Switzerland
when the Franco-Prussian war broke out, and the