Clara Barton, then a war nurse and nearly forty-one years of age, was made Daughter of the Regiment on the battlefield of Antietam, in October, 1862. This was a few days after President Lincoln had reviewed the Army of the Potomac, the review occurring October third. The army at that time numbered about 145,000 men. It was towards nightfall, and the regiment was on dress parade. “She made a little speech,” says Comrade James Madison Stone, “and there was cemented a friendship begun under fire which was destined to last to the end of the lives of all the participants.” Says Captain Charles F. Walcott of the Twenty-first Regiment (afterward Brigadier-General), and the author of the history of the regiment: “Our true friend, Miss Barton, a Twenty-first woman to the backbone, was now permanently associated with the regiment and, with two four-mule covered wagons which by her untiring efforts she kept well supplied with delicacies in the way of food and articles of clothing, was a ministering angel to our sick. General Sturgis kindly ordered a detail from the regiment of drivers and assistants about her wagon. And this true, noble woman, never sparing herself nor failing in her devotion to our suffering men, always maintained her womanly dignity, and won the lasting respect and love of our officers and men.” Clara Barton’s last message to the regiment was delivered forty-five years after the Civil War, through an address and original poem, she then being eighty-nine years of age. The occasion was the annual reunion of the regiment, the date August 23, 1910; the reunion held at Worcester, Massachusetts. [Illustration: REUNION OF 21ST MASSACHUSETTS REGIMENT ] Picture taken on the occasion of the annual reunion of the Twenty-first Massachusetts Regiment Association—on August 23, 1921—Sixtieth anniversary of the day the Regiment left Worcester for the field. On Fame’s eternal camping-ground Their silent tents are spread; And Glory guards, with solemn round, The bivouac of the dead. THEODORE O’HARA. I hear the loved survivors tell How naught from death could save, ’Til every sound appears a knell And every spot a grave. ABRAHAM LINCOLN. “I never made a secret of the fact that of all the glorious regiments that marched to the music of the Union and cooled their heated brows in the shadows of the Stars and Stripes, the Twenty-first Massachusetts was peculiarly my own—nearest in my thoughts, and deepest in my love, and there are many who know that more than once my heart went down in agony under the blood-stained soil with the lifeless forms of its bravest and its best. I would divide the last half of the last loaf with any soldier in that regiment, though I had never met him.”—CLARA BARTON.