Hero Tales from History — Clara Barton, "The Angel of the Battlefield"
CLARA BARTON, “THE ANGEL OF THE BATTLEFIELD”
Miss Clara Barton, a quiet little old lady, used to tell stories of her childhood among the hills of central Massachusetts.
She remembered how she was taken to the village school for the first time, and how the teacher, a tall, kind-looking man, put her in the spelling class with the smallest children, to study such words as _dog_ and _cat_.
“I don’t spell there,” said little Clara; “I spell in _Artichoke_.
” And the small three-year-old showed her contempt for words of three letters by turning the leaves of her spelling book till she came to a page of wide three-syllable columns beginning with “Artichoke.
” The teacher had to hide his smile from the small girl who could spell such long words.
Clara was very fond of her handsome big brother.
“My brother David was very fond of horses,” she said, telling about him in later life.
“He was the ‘Buffalo Bill’ of that part of the country.
It was his delight to take me, a little girl five years old, to the field, seize a couple of beautiful young horses, and, gathering the reins of both bridles in one hand, throw me on the back of one colt, then spring upon the other himself; catching me by one foot, and bidding me ‘cling fast to the mane,’ we would go galloping away over field and fen, in and out among the other colts, in wild glee like ourselves.
“They were merry rides we took.
This was my riding school.
I never had any other, but it served me well.
To this day my seat on a saddle or on the bare back of a horse is as secure and tireless as in a rocking-chair--and far more fun!
“Sometimes, in later years, when I found myself suddenly on a strange horse in a trooper’s saddle, flying for life or liberty, I blessed my baby lessons and wild gallops among the beautiful colts.
” By the words, “riding for life on a strange horse in a trooper’s saddle,” Miss Barton referred to her life as an army nurse, when she, with the mounted soldiers, sometimes found herself in great danger when the enemy’s cavalry was close behind.
At the age of eleven, Clara had her first chance to learn to be a nurse and fit herself for her life work.
Her brother [Illustration: CLARA BARTON, “THE ANGEL OF THE BATTLEFIELD.
”] David, then a young man, fell from the ridgepole of a large barn he was helping to build.
The shock of this fall affected his mind, besides making him ill in body.
He wanted no one near him but the brave little sister he had taught “to ride like the wind.
” So Clara stayed with her big brother, day and night, for two long years.
She was thirteen when he was well again.
Miss Barton told, long afterward, of the strange feeling she had at that time: “I was again free, my work done, I wondered that my father took me to ride so much, and that my mother hoped she could make me some new clothes now--for in those two years I had not grown an inch!
“My shut-in life had made me the more bashful.
I had grown even more timid, shrinking, and sensitive in the presence of others; also I was afraid of giving trouble by making my wants known.
Instead of feeling that my freedom gave me time for play, it seemed to me like time wasted, and I looked about, anxious to find something useful to do.
” Then the family sent Clara away to school, hoping to conquer her painful shyness.
She studied so hard that, at the age of fifteen, she became a teacher.
There were not many public schools in those days, twenty-five years before the Civil War; and the few free schools were looked down on by well-to-do people as “charity” schools.
Clara Barton began with one of these schools where she had at first only six poor children to teach.
But she was such a good teacher that before long six hundred came there to be pupils under her charge.
She tried very hard to help everyone she could; at the end of eighteen years’ service as a teacher she had become almost an invalid and had lost her voice.
Still she could not bear to be idle while she had the use of her hands.
From early girlhood her handwriting had been plain and neat.
This, with her great desire to work, helped her to find a place in the Patent Office in Washington.
Clara Barton was one of the first women to hold a position in the employ of the United States government.
This gave offense to some of the men in that department.
In those days most people thought it improper for a woman to work in an office; so these men stared at the new clerk, making remarks in her hearing about “brazen, strong-minded, ‘woman’s-rights’ women,” adding that such a creature was not fit to associate with gentlemen like themselves.
Sensitive and shrinking though she was, Miss Barton kept on.
She was soon promoted to a position of trust.
It was not long before she found that some of the very men who had insulted her were “patent thieves,” guilty of selling government secrets.
Her duty to the country, rather than a wish for revenge, obliged her to report the wrongs that these ungallant “gentlemen” had done, and they were promptly dismissed from the service they had betrayed.
During the years of her humdrum life as a government clerk, Miss Barton was thrilled by the stories she read in the newspapers of the noble work of Florence Nightingale, the famous nurse in the Crimean War between Great Britain and Russia.
It was said that the English soldiers adored Nurse Nightingale almost as if she were an angel from heaven, and some of them kissed her shadow when it fell upon their pillows as she passed by.
When Fort Sumter was fired on and President Lincoln began calling for soldiers to defend the country, Clara Barton was soon found at the front, in places of great danger.
Fitting up a house or even an old barn for a hospital, she went about on the battlefields looking for wounded men, and doing all she could to relieve and help them.
She ministered to the dying, writing many a last letter to give comfort to the sorrowing ones at home.
Corresponding with newspapers in the north, she did wonders in obtaining medicines, hospital supplies, and comforts for her sick and wounded brothers in the army.
She was appointed “lady manager” of all the hospitals at the front in Virginia.
Those who knew most about her great work declared that her services to her country were wider reaching even than those of Florence Nightingale, the greatest nurse the world had yet known.
Then it was that the grateful soldiers called Clara Barton “the Angel of the Battlefield.
” During the last weeks of his life, President Lincoln sent for Miss Barton and asked her to undertake the difficult task of finding out in as many cases as possible what had become of the eighty thousand soldiers reported missing from the Union army.
At this memorable meeting the Great Heart of the White House stood face to face with one of the greatest-hearted women in the world of that day.
Clara Barton spent four years more tracing out the fate of thirty thousand missing men.
To her great joy she learned that thousands upon thousands of those who had been reported as deserters had bravely given their lives for their country.
Miss Barton then went to Europe to rest awhile and regain the health she had lost by overwork.
While there she studied the work of a Swiss who was trying to found a new society for nursing and caring for the sick and wounded soldiers of all nations.
Because it had a red cross on a white ground for badge and flag, it was named the Red Cross Society.
When war broke out between France and Prussia, Clara Barton became known as “the Angel of the Battlefields” of France.
After her return to the United States she began to organize the American Red Cross Society, which has since become the greatest power in the world for the relief of suffering.
Wherever there was a calamity or a pestilence--the great forest fire in Michigan; the earthquake at Charleston, South Carolina; yellow fever in Florida; the Johnstown flood in Pennsylvania; the Turkish massacres in Armenia--there Clara Barton, though now an old woman, was always “the first to come and the last to go.
” Though she was seventy-seven in the year of the war with Spain, she was active in sharing the hardships of the American soldiers in Cuba, nursing Roosevelt’s Rough Riders along with the rest of the sick and wounded at the front.
Though she lived to be over ninety, honored and beloved by millions for her constant labors of love and mercy, Clara Barton did not live to see, in the World War, the most wonderful carrying out of all her plans for soldiers on the field and in the hospital.
The beautiful woman known as “the World Mother,” pictured on the poster displayed to raise money and supplies for the Red Cross work in America, might well have been the portrait of Clara Barton, for no woman in all history has done more to relieve and heal the sufferings of mankind.
The millions upon millions of men, women, and children now numbered in the membership of the American Red Cross Society, by giving, knitting, rolling bandages, or buying Red Cross stamps and Christmas seals, are carrying on the work begun by the frail, sickly, bashful little girl whose yearning heart and busy hands gave her the name of the “Angel of the Battlefield.
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