erness. 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.

"For years she was too ill to push the work she had set for herself.
When her strength at last returned, she had to learn to walk. At last,
however, she succeeded. America signed the treaty