The men were falling, bleeding to death. Within that organized system for death there was no system to save life,—no surgical instrument, no bandage, no lint, no rag, no string. Clara Barton hastens to her supply wagon, and with all things needful rushes into the line of fire. There on the battlefield, with a pocket knife, she extracted a ball from the face of a wounded soldier. There, while lifting a canteen of water to quench the thirst of a soldier-lad, a minnie ball from the gun of the enemy passed harmlessly through her clothing and fatally into the body of the soldier she was trying to save. Close beside her, faintly moaning, fair and young a soldier lay, Torn with shot and pierced with lance, bleeding slow his life away! With a stifled cry of horror, straight she turned away her head; With a sad and bitter feeling looked upon her dead. But she heard the youth’s low moaning, and his struggling breath of pain, And she raised the cooling water to his parching lips again. Whispered low the dying soldier, pressed her hand and faintly smiled; Was that pitying face his mother’s? Did she watch beside her child? All his broken words with meaning her woman’s heart supplied: With her kiss upon his forehead, “Mother!” murmured he and died. There through the day, in that awful carnage of blood, fearless Clara Barton worked to save human lives. Did she shrink from danger? She said “_I am an American Soldier_ and am not supposed to be susceptible to fear.” But the most gruesome of her experiences was after nightfall. Through the night in a barn near by, she assisted the surgeons. The surgeons had no bandages, she supplied them; they had no light, she supplied the lanterns and candles until the operating tables were in a blaze of light. They had no food; she supplied the gruel made from Indian corn meal, cooked in great brass kettles. The surgeons were without adequate assistance; she assisted at the amputating tables. “Through the long starlit night,” she said, “we wrought and hoped and prayed.” When the morning came the amputated limbs made a pile so high that you had to look up to see the top, a pile of human limbs like a cord of wood.