Since her return from Hilton Head, she had been furnished no passes. Official Washington had forgotten her in her year of absence. But there came a day when Clara Barton had no difficulty in obtaining passes, and when all Washington was willing enough to have her go to the front. That was when the battle of Spotsylvania occurred, May 8, 1864. It took Washington a day or two to realize the gravity of the situation; and Clara Barton was begging and imploring the opportunity to hasten at the sound of the first gun. There was refusal and delay; then, when it was realized that more than 2700 men had been killed and more than 13,000 wounded, her passes came. General Rucker, who had been endeavoring to secure them for her, obtained them, and sent them in haste by special messenger; and Clara Barton was back on the boat, landing, as so often before, at Acquia Creek, and wading through the red mud to where the wounded were. They were everywhere; and most of all they were in wagons sunk to the hub in mud, and stalled where they could not get out, while men groaned and died and maggots crawled in their wounds. Bitterly she lamented the lost hours while she had been clamoring for passes; but now she set herself to work with such facilities as she could command, first for the relief of the wounded men in wagons: The terrible slaughter of the Wilderness and Spotsylvania turned all pitying hearts and helping hands once more to Fredericksburg [she wrote afterward]. And no one who reached it by way of Belle Plain, while this latter constituted the base of supplies for General Grant’s army, can have forgotten the peculiar geographical location, and the consequent fearful condition of the country immediately about the landing, which consisted of a narrow ridge of high land on the left bank of the river. Along the right extended the river itself. On the left, the hills towered up almost to a mountain height. The same ridge of high land was in front at a quarter of a mile distant, through which a narrow defile formed the road leading out, and on to Fredericksburg, ten miles away, thus leaving a level space or basin of an area of a fourth of a mile, directly in front of the landing. Across this small plain all transportation to and from the army must necessarily pass. The soil was red clay. The ten thousand wheels and hoofs had ground it to a powder, and a sudden rain upon the surrounding hills had converted the entire basin into one vast mortar-bed, smooth and glassy as a lake, and much the color of light brick dust. The poor, mutilated, starving sufferers of the Wilderness were pouring into Fredericksburg by thousands--all to be taken away in army wagons across ten miles of alternate hills, and hollows, stumps, roots, and mud!