It was beside her father’s death-bed that Clara Barton consecrated herself to work at the battle-front. She talked the whole problem over with him. She told him what she had seen in the hospitals at Washington, and that was none too encouraging. But the thing that distressed her most of all was the shocking loss of life and increase of suffering due to the transportation of soldiers from the battle-field to the base hospitals in Washington. She saw more of this later, but she had seen enough of it already to be appalled by the conditions that existed. After Fredericksburg she wrote about it in these terms: I went to the 1st Division, 9th Corps Hospital; found eight officers of the 57th lying on the floor with a blanket under them, none over; had had some crackers once that day. About two hundred left of the regiment. Went to the Old National Hotel, found some hundreds (perhaps four hundred) Western men sadly wounded, all on the floors; had nothing to eat. I carried a basket of crackers, and gave two apiece as far as they went and some pails of coffee; they had had no food that day and there was none for them. I saw them again at ten o’clock at night; they had had nothing to eat; a great number of them were to undergo amputation sometime, but no surgeons yet; they had not dippers for one in ten. I saw no straw in any hospital, and no mattresses, and the men lay so thick that gangrene was setting in, and in nearly every hospital there has been set apart an _erysipelas_ ward. There is not room in the city to receive the wounded, and those that arrived yesterday mostly were left lying in the wagons all night at the mercy of the drivers. It rained very hard, many died in the wagons, and their companions, where they had sufficient strength, had raised up and thrown them out into the street. I saw them lying there early this morning; they had been wounded two and three days previous, had been brought from the front, and after all this lay still another night without care, or food, or shelter, many doubtless famished after arriving in Fredericksburg. The city is full of houses, and this morning broad parlors were thrown open and displayed to the view of the rebel occupants the bodies of the dead Union soldiers lying beside the wagons in which they perished. Only those most slightly wounded have been taken on to Washington; the roads are fearful and it is worth the life of a wounded man to move him over them. A common ambulance is scarce sufficient to get through. We passed them this morning four miles out of town, full of wounded, with the tongue broken or wheels crushed in the middle of a hill, in mud from one to two feet deep; what was to be done with the moaning, suffering occupants God only knew.