Apostle of Mercy

In 1859, French and Italian troops defeated an Austro-Hungarian force at the northern Italian town of Solferino. Into the battle’s aftermath, in a white summer suit, went a young man from Geneva named Jean Henri Dunant. He had not gone to Solferino on an errand of mercy. Nor was he the picture of Swiss probity. Dunant was an entrepreneur in trouble. A large farm he owned in French-ruled Algeria was teetering on the verge of bankruptcy, and he believed that the one thing that could save him was certain water rights which could be granted only by Napoleon III. He had therefore written a flattering book about the French emperor. Napoleon was leading his troops on the battlefield, and Dunant had come there to present him with the book and, he hoped, to receive his water rights in return.

Instead of finding Napoleon, who had moved on to the next battle, Dunant found 30,000 helpless, groaning, wounded soldiers. Their faces black with flies, they lay bleeding from shattered arms and legs and dying slowly of thirst. They were spread across miles of countryside, Dunant wrote, “their limbs stiffened, their bodies blotched with ghastly spots, their hands clawing at the ground, their eyes staring wildly.” The French had four veterinarians for every 1,000 horses but one doctor for every 1,000 men.

Dunant sent his coachman off for food and supplies, rounded up some other foreigners on the scene and organized them and some village women to bring water to the soldiers, make bandages and bind wounds. After a few days, he resumed his bizarre pursuit of Napoleon III but in vain. Dunant went bankrupt. It was just as well, for the book he then had time to write, “A Memory of Solferino,” is one of the most horrific accounts of war on record, all the more forceful because it is not the work of a soldier or of a war correspondent but of an astonished civilian.

The nightmare landscape he describes was covered with vultures, with injured riderless horses and with maimed soldiers calling for help in half a dozen languages. Some of these men had first been mauled by bullets, bayonets or chain shot and then run over by horse-drawn artillery pieces fleeing the scene. Dunant watched surgeons with no anesthetics saw off infected limbs and saw other doctors treat the wounded by bleeding them. From the bedside of a dying corporal, he wrote a letter to the man’s parents at 3, Rue d’Alger, Lyons. With intimate detail, he makes the reader share his horror and ends his book with two impassioned pleas: for international agreements on the treatment of wounded soldiers and for voluntary societies to help the wounded once war begins.

The first idea, which later expanded to include prisoners of war, became the Geneva Conventions with the first of its treaties approved in 1864; the second became the Red Cross, founded in 1863. And to this day, we’re still trying to answer the difficult questions raised by the existence of these two institutions. Can you really make something as cruel as war humane? Doesn’t the very idea of making agreements for its conduct encourage the age-old human delusion that battle is a noble sport, with rules of play and clear distinctions between who is on and who is off the field? Further, if war appears more humane, won’t it then also appear more tempting and legitimate?

For 150 years, Dunant’s legacy has posed such questions, and they recur as one reads Caroline Moorehead’s “Dunant’s Dream,” a work that will certainly long be the definitive history of the Red Cross. My only reservation is that at 716 pages, the book is at least 300 pages more on the subject than most people will want to read. Moorehead, a British journalist with a special interest in human rights, is a clear and lively writer, but at times the unending succession of wars and disasters, of victims cared for and missing soldiers traced, overwhelms the reader. And the author can’t provide the eccentric or flamboyant characters who might help sustain a book of this length, because almost all Red Cross leaders have been sober, prudent Geneva lawyers and businessman. The visionary and impractical Dunant, who was quickly ousted from the organization he had founded, was a rare exception.

From the 1860s until today, the Red Cross has been active in all the major European wars and disasters and in many others elsewhere. And there have been a lot of conflicts--from the Russo-Japanese War, when Red Cross workers found that each Russian officer prisoner had been given a personal servant by his captors, to the Spanish Civil War, when the first bombings of civilians in Europe produced hundreds of thousands of refugees.

Like Dunant before her, Moorehead recounts in excruciating detail the reality of war in the 19th century. To be wounded in combat was particularly horrendous before antibiotics. Infections set in rapidly; amputation was the only cure, and even when primitive anesthetics were available, surgeons didn’t always use them. One 19th century British medical administrator warned his doctors not to use chloroform: “[T]he smart of the knife is a powerful stimulant; and it is better to hear a man bawl lustily, than to see him sink silently into the grave.” For those who survived such surgeons, tobacco and alcohol were often the only pain relievers. The British felt the wounded needed port; the Italians, Marsala. In the Franco-Prussian War, Red Cross officials gave starving French prisoners biscuits and cigars; the manager of one aid post believed that a cup of hot coffee reduced the death rate among the wounded by up to 30%.

The Red Cross was strained to its limits during the two world wars, whose vast scale brought unforeseen needs--from typewriter keyboards in new alphabets to a system by which volunteers delivering letters to POW camps could distinguish between 2,400 French prisoners all named Jean Martin.

Despite the scale of Red Cross’ operations, its attempts to make war civilized have made little headway. Neither the Red Cross nor the Geneva Conventions has kept us from inventing increasingly horrible ways to kill and maim our enemies, from engineering bullets that tumble end over end in flight and make vastly larger wounds than those of earlier times to building antipersonnel bombs whose plastic shrapnel cannot be detected by a doctor’s X-ray equipment. And with each new war, the distinction between military and civilian targets erodes further.

In one troublingly significant omission--which Moorehead does not comment on--the Red Cross never ministered to the wounded or imprisoned victims of the numerous colonial wars, fought primarily in Africa, during Western Europe’s peacetime era of 1871-1914. (An exception was the Boer War, in which both sides were white.) These were not orderly, declared wars with well-defined front lines, with belligerents who conveniently bordered on Switzerland, but still, millions of people died in them. In its Eurocentric assumptions, the Red Cross remained a creature of its place and time.

Never do the Red Cross’ contradictions come across more clearly than during World War II. Moorehead rightly devotes many pages to the organization’s failure to protest the Nazi death camps. Although Red Cross officials knew about Auschwitz and much more and they repeatedly debated whether to speak out, more cautious voices prevailed. They worried, for example, that the Nazis would deny access to the prisoner-of-war camps, where Red Cross food parcels were helping keep hundreds of thousands of Allied POWs alive. Moorehead makes clear, however, that this wasn’t the full story. For a long time, many Swiss were convinced that Germany was going to win the war; further, key Red Cross executives had been educated in German universities and some were anti-Semites who kept quiet when Switzerland routinely turned away Jewish refugees, condemning them to almost certain death.

After the war, some potentially embarrassing documents vanished from Red Cross files. But not all of them, and here Moorehead makes an important contribution to the record, finding, for instance, an obsequious thank-you letter that Carl-Jacob Burckhardt, who later became the organization’s president, wrote to Hitler in 1936: “Magnificent hospitality and outstanding organization made it possible for me to learn of the truly magical achievements of the motorways and National Labor Service in one short week spent crossing Germany. What specially and permanently impressed itself on me was the joyous spirit of co-operation that informed everything.” More astonishing still, Max Huber, the businessman who was president of the Red Cross from 1928 to 1944, chaired the board of a Swiss company that owned a factory in Nazi-occupied France which used slave labor.

If the failure to say anything about the death camps represents one part of the Red Cross’ soul--wary neutrality at all costs--then Friedrich Born represents another. Born, a Swiss businessman and a delegate in Hungary in 1944-45, broke every rule in the book: He persuaded a reluctant Geneva to send him money and supplies, hired 500 people and hustled Jews into more than 1,000 buildings throughout Budapest, which he draped with red crosses and declared international protected territory. He frantically bribed local Fascists, issued official-looking papers granting Jews Swiss protection and shot 4,000 meters of film of Nazi death marches to show the world what was happening. He saved tens of thousands of lives.

Despite the worries they inspired back at headquarters, men like Born (and there were others) are heroes to workers in the Red Cross and in other international relief agencies, both secular and religious, that have flourished since the end of World War II. It was, after all, brave young Swiss Red Cross workers in Bosnia who, in 1992, were among the first to discover and to expose to the world, at some risk to themselves, the concentration camps maintained by the Bosnian Serbs.

It is often said that voluntary civic organizations are the lifeblood of any country trying to become a democracy. Similarly, voluntary international civic organizations are the lifeblood of a world aspiring to principles that transcend national self-interest. Starting the first of them was Dunant’s great contribution. Dunant couldn’t have imagined an age where deliberate campaigns of terror could almost overnight put hundreds of thousands of civilians in flight. But he would have been proud of the young relief workers, doctors and nurses from dozens of countries who so quickly volunteered to work in the crowded refugee camps of Albania and Macedonia.