Returning in July, 1870, from a visit to Liebig at Munich, Pasteur heard at Strasburg of the imminence of war. All his dreams of conquest over disease and death seemed to vanish. He hurried to Paris. His son, eighteen years of age, set out with the army. Every student of the Ecole Normale enlisted. Pasteur's laboratory was used to house soldiers. He himself wished to be enrolled in the National Guard, and had to be told that a half-paralyzed man could not render military service. He was obsessed with horror of wanton bloodshed and with indignation at the insolence of armed injustice. Trained to serve his country only in one way he tried, but in vain, to resume his researches. He retired to the old home town of Arbois, and sought to distract his mind from the contemplation of human baseness. Arbois was entered by the enemy in January with the usual atrocities of war. Pasteur accompanied by wife and daughter had gone in search of his son, sick at Pontarlier. The boy was restored to health and returned to his regiment the following month. During this crisis Pasteur and his friends felt, as many English scientists feel in 1917, in reference to ignorance in high places. "We are paying the penalty," he said, "of fifty years' forgetfulness of science, and of its conditions of development." Again he speaks, as Englishmen to-day very well might, of the neglect, disdain even, of the country for great intellectual men, especially in the realm of exact science. In the same strain his friend Bertin said that after the war everything would have to be rebuilt from the top to the bottom, the top especially. Pasteur recalled the period of 1792 when Lavoisier, Berthollet, Monge, Fourcroy, Guyton de Morveau, Chaptal, Clouet, and other scientists had furnished France with gunpowder, steel, cannon, fortifications, balloons, leather, and other means to repel unjust invasion. On the day after Sedan the Quaker surgeon Lister had published directions for the use of aqueous solutions of carbolic acid to destroy septic particles in wounds, and of oily solutions "to prevent putrefactive fermentation from without." He recognized that the earlier the case comes from the field the greater the prospect of success. Sédillot (the originator of the term "microbe"), at the head of an ambulance corps in Alsace, was a pioneer in the rapid transport of wounded from the field of battle. He knew the horrors of purulent infection in military hospitals, and regretted that the principles of Pasteur and Lister were not more fully applied.