While Miss Barton was at Berne, in the villa of a friend, the Franco-Prussian War broke suddenly upon Europe. Nothing that happens in France or Germany fails to register influence at once on Switzerland. While she was there she received a call from Louise, the Grand Duchess of Baden, who, having learned of the presence there of an American woman so distinguished in war relief, invited her to go to Strassburg, which was in a state of siege, and prepare for the relief which already had become necessary and soon would be urgent. The baths were not so complete a tonic as this call to service. Yet it did not seem to her that she was strong enough to undertake this work. Only a little later she had another invitation from Dr. Louis Appia, who had been one of the movers in the Geneva Convention. This was her opportunity to witness the actual work of the organization of which she had heard: On the 15th of July, 1870, France declared war against Prussia. Within three days a band of agents from the International Committee of Geneva, headed by Dr. Louis Appia (one of the prime movers of the convention), equipped for work and _en route_ for the seat of war, stood at the door of my villa inviting me to go with them and take such part as I had taken in our own war. I had not strength to trust for that, and declined with thanks, promising to follow in my own time and way, and I did follow within a week. No shot had been fired--no man had fallen. Yet this organized, powerful commission was on its way, with its skilled agents, ready to receive, direct, and dispense the charities and accumulations which the generous sympathies of twenty-two nations, if applied to, might place at its disposal. These men had treaty power to go directly on to any field, and work unmolested in full cooperation with the military and commanders-in-chief; their supplies held sacred and their efforts recognized and seconded in every direction by either belligerent army. Not a man could lie uncared for nor unfed. I thought of the Peninsula in McClellan’s campaign, of Pittsburg Landing, Cedar Mountain, and second Bull Run, Antietam, Old Fredericksburg, with its acres of snow-covered and gun-covered glacée, and its fourth-day flag of truce; of its dead, and starving wounded, frozen to the ground, and our commission and their supplies in Washington, with no effective organization to get beyond; of the Petersburg mine, with its four thousand dead and wounded and no flag of truce, the wounded broiling in a July sun, dying and rotting where they fell. I remembered our prisons, crowded with starving men whom all the powers and pities of the world could not reach even with a bit of bread. I thought of the widows’ weeds still fresh and dark through all the land, north and south, from the pine to the palm; the shadows on the hearths and hearts over all my country. Sore, broken hearts, ruined, desolate