When her voice gave out she went to Washington for a rest and secured a position in the patent office. So she was at the capital when the conflict long threatening between North and South developed into civil war. Sumter was fired on. The time for sacrifice had come. In response to Lincoln’s call for volunteers Massachusetts sent men immediately, and on the historic nineteenth of April one regiment was attacked in the streets of Baltimore by a furious mob. With a good many wounded their train finally reached Washington and was met by a number of sympathetic women, Clara Barton among them. In the group of injured soldiers she recognized some of her old pupils and friends. At the infirmary she helped dress their wounds. Nothing was ready for such an emergency. Handkerchiefs gave out. Women rushed to their homes and tore up sheets for bandages. This was Clara Barton’s first experience in caring for wounded soldiers. She wanted them to have the necessities, and all the comforts possible. So she put an advertisement in a Worcester paper, asking for supplies and money for the wounded men of the sixth regiment, and stating that she would receive and give out whatever was sent. Overwhelming was the response of Massachusetts. The food and clothing filled her apartment to overflowing and she had to rent space in a warehouse. This work made a new person of the shy Clara Barton who had been a bundle of fears. This was no time to be self-conscious. Here was a great need, and she knew that she had the ability to meet it. South of Washington battles were going on. Transports left each day with provisions for the army of the Potomac, returning with a load of wounded soldiers. Clara Barton went to the docks to meet them. She moved about, bandaging here, giving medicine there, feeding those weak from the long fighting and lack of nourishment, writing letters home, sick at heart when she saw men who had lain on the damp ground for hours, whose fever had set in, for whom her restoratives and dressings and tender care were too late. If only wounds could be attended to as soon as the soldiers fell in battle, she knew that hundreds of deaths could be prevented. She must go to the front, to the very firing line, though it was against all tradition, against all army regulations, against public sentiment. For many weeks she met only rebuffs and refusals, always the same reply: “No, the battle-field is no place for a woman. It is full of danger!” True--but how great was the need of the men at the front, how great the need of each soldier’s life for the nation! Help must be brought to them when they fell. She laid her plan before her father who said, “If you believe that it is your duty, you must go to the front. You need not fear harm. Every true soldier will respect and bless you.”