THE NATIONAL GEOCxRAPHIC MAGAZINE 



was a young Swiss gentleman of leisure, 

 M. Henri Dunant, like Miss Nightingale, of 

 gentle birth and some fortune (afterward 

 lost, so that his days ended in poverty). 



On June 25, 1859, Dunant came upon 

 the battlefield of Solferino, littered with 

 the dead and the wounded of the Italian, 

 French, and Austrian armies — a total, it 

 is said, of 91,243 victims, including three 

 field marshals and nine generals — the 

 bloodiest battle since Waterloo and previ- 

 ous to the holocausts of the present bat- 

 tles of Europe. 



Most of the medical corps of the 

 armies had left the field, as regulations 

 compelled them to, to accompany the re- 

 treating and pursuing armies. Dunant 

 organized bands of volunteer helpers and 

 transported the wounded to the neigh- 

 boring village of Castiglione, where he 

 housed them in hospitals and churches 

 and wherever shelter could be found. 



Afterward he wrote a book of his ex- 

 periences, the most famous book in the 

 annals of Red Cross — Un Souvenir de 

 Solferino — a vivid description of what 

 he saw and what he and others did. His 

 assistants were the civilians of the neigh- 

 borhood — women and children and some 

 men. 



He tells how the women of Castiglione 

 went about ministering to the wounded 

 without distinction of nationality, crying 

 "Tutti fratelli !" seeing all suffering men 

 as brothers, no matter under what stand- 

 ard they had fought. 



The full account of all the anguish re- 

 lieved by Florence Nightingale and Henri 

 Dunant is written nowhere, unless it be 

 in the book of the Recording Angel, of 

 the thousands of dying men made more 

 comfortable in dying and of wounded 

 and sick men saved from dying. 



THE RED CROSS SPIRIT BORN AT SOI^ERINO 



But the far-reaching consequence of 

 what these two did is being written daily 

 in the activities of the Red Cross of the 

 present. Every Red Cross nurse, and 

 ambulance driver, and canteen server, 

 and surgical-dressings maker, and knitter 

 of soldier comforts is carrying on the 

 work begun by these two in the i85o's. 



This article began with the assertion 

 that Red Cross originated in the most 

 practical way, but now note the supple- 



ment to that statement. Each of these 

 pioneers — Nightingale and Dunant — de- 

 rived a great idea from practical work 

 accomplished and service rendered in the 

 exigencies and emergencies of battlefield 

 and military hospital. 



Each was a philosopher as well as a 

 practical person, and, indeed, no greatly 

 lasting work has ever been done or ever 

 will be done without some sort of phil- 

 osophy lying behind it or underrunning 

 it or growing out of it. Each of these 

 explorers in the field of suffering planned 

 for the future on the basis of their ex- 

 perience of the needs of suffering sol- 

 diers. Each might be called an advocate 

 of preparedness. 



Miss Nightingale developed the whole 

 modern system of scientific nursing and 

 made forever impossible the atrocities 

 and inadequacies and absurdities which 

 Dickens satirized in Mrs. Gamp and 

 Betsy Brigg; to which Miss Nightingale 

 added epoch-making work in military 

 sanitation in her studies of the condition 

 of the British army in England. 



THE VISION AND THE PLAN OF DUNANT 



Henri Dunant originated the idea of 

 permanent volunteer relief societies in all 

 civilized countries, which in times of 

 peace would prepare to meet the exigen- 

 cies of war and in every way possible 

 supplement the work of the regular army 

 medical corps, which always has been and 

 always will be unable to deal with the 

 misery of war unsupported by volunteer 

 assistance. 



To organize this assistance and to cor- 

 relate it with the army sanitary corps, in 

 strict and loyal subordination to the army 

 commanders, by means of permanent so- 

 cieties, was the vision and the plan of 

 Dunant. 



The purpose of Un Souvenir de Sol- 

 ferino is twofold: First, to make clear 

 and vivid the actual horrors of war, and, 

 secondly, to suggest means by which per- 

 manent societies might be established, 

 always working under the authority and 

 with the consent of the military powers. 

 "Would it not be possible to found in all 

 the countries of Europe societies which 

 could give voluntary aid in time of war 

 to the wounded without distinction of 

 nationality?" so he writes. 



