IN PEACE AND WAR

Hawke's Bay Tribune, Volume XXIII, Issue 71, 6 March 1933, Page 4

IN PEACE AND WAR

A GREAT HUMANE SERVICE WORK OF THE RED CROSS. SERVICES TO ALL MANKIND. Possibly not one person in a hundred realises what the lied Cross is doing when it is not engaged in picking up wounded on the field of battle, or has ever paused to wonder what becomes of this vast organisation once war is ended. In declaring that the Red Cross devotes its peacetime efforts to health, we must interpret the word in its widest sense: earc of the public health. To succour those stricken by disease, accident, or disaster, is not tho sole object of the Red. Cross; it seeks also to protect their families, to watch over the child from the cradle and tho day nursery to the school and playground, to help adolescents and adults in the factory, the workshop, and even the mine. It crosses the frozen wastes to administer comfort and healing to lonely settlers in its medical outposts; it sets up dispensaries in the squalid and overcrowded quarters of large cities. In a word, it penetrates everywhere and is at the service of every class of the community. ORIGIN IN CRIMEAN HORRORS. The heroic work of Florence Nightiu- I gale in the Crimean War of 1854-56 was a light which caused men to think more humanely, after a long callous indifference to the sufferings of others for more than seven centuries since the lime of the Crusades, and was a light which evoked a feeling of responsibility for their neighbours who suffered privation and hardship through causes beyond their cognisance and control. But it was Henri Dunant who organised the present world-movement. M. Dunant had seen the horrors which followed the battle of Solferino in Italy in 1859, when thousands of men lay on the field of battle and were left to perish without doctors or nurses to relieve their sufferings. Several years were spent in continual search for men who could help him to form a voluntary organisation to deal with the sick and wounded in every country where war raged. He met the Cominauder-in-Chief of the Swiss Army, General Dufour; and tho president of Geneva Public Services; and M. Gustave Moynier. The untiring enthusiasm of the three men, the power in and around the general, the method and order behind the activity of M. Moynier, and the intense devotion of Henri Dunant resulted in a gathering of representatives from European Governments at Geneva in October, 1863, to lay down the principles of Red Cross. And nine months later tho Swiss Federal Council convoked a diplomatic conference at Geneva at which twenty-six Governments were represented. It was Florence Nightingale who drew up the instructions for the British delegates. THE GENEVA CONVENTION.

The famous Geneva Convention of . 1864 settled for all time that: 1. The wounded in time of war were to be respected. 2. Military hospitals were to be regarded as neutral. 3. The personnel a»d material of the medical sen. were accorded protection. 4. The symbol el the protection was to bo the white flag bearing a red cross. In 1907 these principles were applied to naval warfare. And henceforth the neutrality of ambulances, hospitals, and their nursing staffs was guarteed. The life—so abundant—was bound to coalesce, and within six months of the Armistice which closed tho Great War of 1914-1918 the movement took the form and shape of the League of Red Cross Societies.