Aghast and horrified had stood the world over the news of the then recent terrible massacres; of the contagious diseases that windswept Asia Minor, leaving thousands and tens of thousands dead and dying in its wake. But proud was America. Her heroine was at the Moslem Capital, the foreign representative of the one country there on guard for humanity. This, her picture of the trip to Killis, the scene of one of the many terrible massacres: “Our security, the official order, ‘Go and we protect,’—camels heavy-laden not with ivory and jewels, gold in the ingots and silk in the bales, but food and raiment for the starving, the sick, the dying. Onward toward dread Killis—the wild tribes’ knives before, the Moslem troops behind—till at length the spires of Aintab rise in view. Weary the camels and weary the men.” In fear that the means might not be at hand to do all she would, in anguish of soul Clara Barton writes to her friend Frances Willard: “My heart would grow faint and words fail to tell the people of the woes here and the needs. In the name of your God and my God, tell them not to be discouraged in the good work they have undertaken.” She was then on the site of Ancient Byzantium whose history reaches back six hundred years before the Christian Era, a city with its successor Constantinople, the rival of Athens and Rome and Jerusalem, in service to civilization. She might have said, as did the proud Roman General, “I have come, I have seen, I have conquered.” But no word then,—neither before nor since—escaped her lips. She was there, having taken her life in her hands, not thinking of self, knowing no race, no creed, no religion, no nationality; there to distribute to the needy in such a way as an American President said she only knew how. [Illustration: _Permission D. Appleton & Co._ ABDUL-HAMID 1876–1899 Some months after returning home I received through our State Department at Washington, the Sultan’s decoration of Shefacat and its accompanying diploma in Turkish. The translation is here given: “As Miss Barton, American citizen, possesses many great and distinguished qualities and as recompense is due to her, I am pleased, therefore, to accord to her the second class of my decorations of Shefacat.” CLARA BARTON (in 1897). See pages between 326–7; decoration No. 12. ] Strange and startling must have been the sensation to the Moslem as, on an eventful reunion of the Crusaders, through the open windows of [10]Red Cross headquarters there came from his foreign benefactors, in chorus, strains of sweetest music: “Home, Sweet Home,” of which the native was merely dreaming; “Sweet Land of Liberty,” of which he had only read; “Nearer My God to Thee,” which was wholly foreign to his religious teachings. It was on the patriotic Fourth at Constantinople, at the time of her carrying a message to the Turkish people, that in a poem entitled “Marmora,” of her own country Clara Barton sung: Footnote 10: