This column first appeared in the Victoria Daily Times on May 4, 1940
The Red Cross is one of the few humanitarian ideas that has ever become a reality. Above the barbarism of our times, it stands out as a great monument to the 19th century.
This is a sentence from the book called Dunant: The Story of the Red Cross, which was written two years ago by Martin Gumpert, and which has a heightened interest for us now.
The Red Cross came into being by the gigantic efforts of a man called Henri Dunant, a native of Geneva, who quite by chance found himself in the inferno of a battlefield in 1859. He had gone to a little Apenine village to see the Emperor Napoleon III about a book he had written, but the battle of Solferino had just taken place. The wounded were lying on the streets with no one to care for them. Dunant arrived at the moment two wounded prisoners, who had been found in a house, were thrown down the steps with curses.
“Stop!” he cried in anguish to the culprits. “Don’t do that! Sono fratelli! We are all brothers!”
The soldiers hesitated. They looked with surprise at this gentleman in white who seemed like a heavenly visitor.
“Sono fratelli” became a new watchword, which ran like wildfire through the little town, and a great activity began then and there. Women brought out bundles of lint. Boys carried pails of water. Dunant gave his well-filled purse to a bystander, telling him to go and buy what was needed.
Soon straw pallets lay in rows in the churches. Four Austrian doctors, one German and some Italian students appeared and began the work of mercy.
The Italian, dispatched for supplies, brought a consignment of chloroform, new then in the therapeutic world. The patricians took the wounded into their houses. The Ursuline Convent became a hospital. Henri Dunant worked for three days as if in a dream. There was no end to the misery. When one poor soul was rallied back to life, another slipped into the merciful oblivion of death.
When he came to himself, Dunant had forgotten all about his book. It passed out of the picture. At once he began his long campaign of seeing influential people, and telling them something must be done for the wounded in war.
During many years, he pursued his work of mercy, finding a response that gladdened his heart. But all the time he knew these efforts were of momentary value. At last he decided he would write his experiences in a book, and his Recollections of Solferino was published and caught public attention at once.
“Is it not possible,” he wrote in his book, “to found relief societies in peacetime to care for the wounded in war, without respect to nationality? These leagues will give assistance in every time of need, pestilence, floods, fires.”
Great was the response to his book. Newspapers, churches, universities, gave it their blessing. Charles Dickens in 1863, wrote a detailed analysis in his All the Year Round which was read by the English-speaking world. Dunant became a popular idol. “The man in white” he was called.
Florence Nightingale was the first Samaritan on the field of battle. Dunant followed at Solferino. Clara Barton was the third in this spiritual league, which brought the humanitarian movement to the country.
The house in Geneva where the Red Cross was organized is still in use. I attended a meeting of the National Council of Women in the room and saw the brass plate that records the day and date of its birth, October 1863. The red cross was chosen for the emblem in compliment to Henri Dunant’s nationality. The Swiss flag is a white cross on a red ground.
Strangely enough, evil days and misunderstandings came to Dunant, and the leadership of the work he had so gloriously founded passed into other hands. Barton had much the same experience. She, too, was dethroned and died a sadly disillusioned woman.
After the loss of his money and friends, Dunant lived in poverty. He was no longer remembered until a humane woman, Berta von Sutter, found him and restored him to the front ranks of the great Europeans of that century.
He was thin, pale and old, but the cramped hand seized the pen again, and he again sent out appeals for peace. In 1897, he addressed a warning to the world, which in the light of today sounds like an utterance of prophecy that is being fulfilled before our eyes.
He was given the Nobel Prize, but this sudden wealth, in the stiff hands of an old man who cared nothing for money, was another of life’s ironies. He stayed where he was, in his humble room and gave his prize to philanthropic societies.
If anyone ever deserved a Peace Prize, Dunant did, for it was the dream of his life that the Red Cross of the battlefields would become the Red Cross of Peace.
He died on Oct. 30, 1910, aged 85, a broken-hearted man. His testament of faith was written and the long day ended.
“I want no ceremonies,” he wrote. “I am a disciple of Christ, as in the first century — and nothing more.”
The Red Cross has been in existence 77 years. Its work for humanity goes on for poor, bleeding, maimed humanity caught in the trap of racial hatreds, greed, lust for power, ignorance and fear.
Is it enough to bind wounds and outfit the fighting men — if they are thereby merely enabled to fight again? Or is there a deeper work for this great body of unselfish people, who at this time all over the world are busy with their work of mercy?
I quote from the last paragraph in this stirring book: “The Red Cross, which heals wounds, must also prevent wounds: The Red Cross which in our desolate present remains one of the few havens of humanitarianism, will also be one of the few sources from which humanitarianism may once more water the parched and ruined earth.”
