2 of 4

Dunant may have been forced to drop out of school for poor performance, but he was a genius at vision and organization. That talent showed up a few years later when he chanced on a battlefield in northern Italy.

Bloody battle
The date was June 24, 1859. Dunant was on his way to see the French emperor, Napoleon III. Several years earlier, Dunant had been sent to Algeria to supervise some business interests there, but being the devout evangelical he was, he saw it as an opportunity to create economic opportunity for poor Algerians and to spread the gospel as well. His main problem on the business front was that he was Swiss, and Algeria was a colony of France. Local officials made it difficult for him to obtain the permits he needed, and so he decided to go straight to the Emperor to ask for concessions.

A tragic thing happened on the way to his imperial appointment: the bloody battle of Solferino. The Italians and the French were trying to drive Austrian forces out of occupied Italian lands. By the morning of June 25, wounded soldiers lay everywhere. An estimated 40,000 soldiers were killed or wounded that day.

On a European battlefield in the 19th-century, a wound was almost a death sentence. The armies had not yet developed efficient ways to transfer wounded soldiers to medical facilities at the rear of the operations. The warring parties considered physicians and nurses as combatants, and those who tried to bandage and care for the wounded were considered fair targets. No one would help a wounded enemy, since a bloodied soldier lying on a battlefield could be playing a trick and would just as likely stab you or shoot you if you tried to help. The result was that people bled to death, died of dehydration, or succumbed to aggressive infections that set in before medical personnel could attend to their wounds.

The horrible scene was more than Dunant could handle. Almost anyone else would have run away in horror, but this visionary genius saw the opportunity to use his organizational skills to maximize the effectiveness of limited resources. He soon had neighboring townspeople organized, had the wounded moved into homes, chapels, and even a castle, and begged material support from local nobles. Most remarkably, he persuaded people to care equally for the wounded enemy. Tutti fratelli, All are brothers, he kept telling the local volunteers. It was a concrete demonstration of a Christian vision.

The book of sorrows
After the battle, Dunant wrote a little book, A Memory of Solferino. This book publicized the horrors of war in the way that Uncle Tom's Cabin created a public awareness of the horrors of slavery. Neither war nor slavery was hidden from public view, but a writer with a conscience can make readers confront a reality they would otherwise turn away from. (The ICRC makes the full text of A Memory of Solferino available on its website.)

The reaction to A Memory of Solferino brought swift results. The first edition of the book was published in November 1862. By February 1863, enough movers and shakers had indicated an interest in concrete action that a Committee of Five convened to lay plans for action. By October of 1863, Dunant had gathered in Geneva thirty-one delegates representing sixteen nations to discuss his vision. The core of Dunant's idea was neutrality. If medical personnel on the battlefield could be considered neutral parties by both sides, the wounded could be treated and many lives saved. It was a controversial idea, but Dunant won the day.

next page... |  2 of 4

share this page

December (Web-only) 2004, Vol. 48