XXIV
One’s blood runs cold and then mounts high in reading of the amazing feats of strength and courage of heart shown by this little lone woman.The Outlook.
Clara Barton—her personal service and self-sacrifice are beyond praise.Philadelphia Public Record.
The sum of all human agony finds its equivalent on the battlefield.Clara Barton.
We cannot desert our poor charge of humanity, but must stay and suffer with them if need be.Clara Barton.
And if you chance to feel that the positions I occupied were rough and unseemly for awoman—I can only reply that they were rough and unseemly formen.Clara Barton.
The sooner the world learns the better that the halo of glory which surrounds a field of battle and its tortured, thirsting, starving, pain-racked victims exists only in the imagination.
Clara Barton.
Clara Barton.
Clara Barton.
Clara Barton.
When dying President Garfield murmured: “The great heart of the nation will not let a soldier die,” I prayed God to hasten the time when every wounded soldier would be sustained by that sweet assurance.Clara Barton.
My business is staunching blood, and feeding fainting men.
Clara Barton.
Clara Barton.
Clara Barton.
Clara Barton.
I am so sorry for thenecessity, so glad for theopportunity, of ministering with my own hand and strength to the dying wants of the patriot martyrs who fell for their country and mine.
Clara Barton.
Clara Barton.
Clara Barton.
Clara Barton.
I sometimes discuss the application of a compress, or a wisp ofhay under a broken limb, but not the bearing of a political movement.Clara Barton.
I make gruel, not speeches; I write letters home for wounded soldiers, not political addresses.Clara Barton.
You must never so much as think whether you like it or not, whether it is bearable or not; you must never think of anything except the need, and how to meet it.Clara Barton.
If it has been granted to me to be ever so little service to those about me, in need of my help, He alone who granted me the privilege knows how grateful I am for it.Clara Barton.
The valley of Antietam lies in Maryland. In September, 1862, on the night of the 16th, the Federals were on one ridge of the valley; the Confederates, on the opposite ridge. Somber night was hushed to stillness. Within the fog that arose from the valley and the smoke of the campfires there gleamed the stacked bayonets and the properly placed cannon which portend the fateful tomorrow. On the tomorrow Antietam was to be the harvest field, death and suffering the harvest.
In the early morning were heard the bugle notes which call to battle. The fight to death was on—possibly the fight that would unmake a nation, or make a new nation. A little lone woman had flanked the cannon at midnight and, in the early sunlight, stood beside the artillery. Terrifying the sharp crack of the musketry, deafening the boom of the cannon. The earth quaked; the sun, obscured. Over her head were shells bursting or, passing, buried themselves in thehills beyond. Her tongue was dried by the sulphurous powder smoke; her lips parched to bleeding. Such the scene of the conflict in which Clara Barton said she had the most terrible experiences of her life.
The men were falling, bleeding to death. Within that organized system for death there was no system to save life,—no surgical instrument, no bandage, no lint, no rag, no string. Clara Barton hastens to her supply wagon, and with all things needful rushes into the line of fire. There on the battlefield, with a pocket knife, she extracted a ball from the face of a wounded soldier. There, while lifting a canteen of water to quench the thirst of a soldier-lad, a minnie ball from the gun of the enemy passed harmlessly through her clothing and fatally into the body of the soldier she was trying to save.
Close beside her, faintly moaning, fair and young a soldier lay,Torn with shot and pierced with lance, bleeding slow his life away!With a stifled cry of horror, straight she turned away her head;With a sad and bitter feeling looked upon her dead.But she heard the youth’s low moaning, and his struggling breath of pain,And she raised the cooling water to his parching lips again.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.
Close beside her, faintly moaning, fair and young a soldier lay,Torn with shot and pierced with lance, bleeding slow his life away!With a stifled cry of horror, straight she turned away her head;With a sad and bitter feeling looked upon her dead.But she heard the youth’s low moaning, and his struggling breath of pain,And she raised the cooling water to his parching lips again.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.
Close beside her, faintly moaning, fair and young a soldier lay,Torn with shot and pierced with lance, bleeding slow his life away!With a stifled cry of horror, straight she turned away her head;With a sad and bitter feeling looked upon her dead.But she heard the youth’s low moaning, and his struggling breath of pain,And she raised the cooling water to his parching lips again.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.
Close beside her, faintly moaning, fair and young a soldier lay,
Torn with shot and pierced with lance, bleeding slow his life away!
With a stifled cry of horror, straight she turned away her head;
With a sad and bitter feeling looked upon her dead.
But she heard the youth’s low moaning, and his struggling breath of pain,
And she raised the cooling water to his parching lips again.
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 Soldierand am not supposed to be susceptible to fear.”
But the most gruesome of her experiences was afternightfall. 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.”