A memory of Solferino : Un souvenir de Solferino / With an introduction by John Kennedy.

  • Henry Dunant
Date:
[1947]
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: A memory of Solferino : Un souvenir de Solferino / With an introduction by John Kennedy. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    11/76
    AN UNPUBLISHED PAGE BY J. HENRY DUNANT SOLFERINO I have never claimed that I was a spectator of the battles of San Martino and Solferino. That is something of which no one can boast, for such battles as those can never be seen, but only the din of them heard. What I did see were the horrors of Solferino at the little town called Gastiglione della Pieve, near which the great battle of June 24 began. There it was that I was so over¬ come with compassion, horror, and pity that I became the “Samaritan of Solferino”, as people chose to call me, because I tried to be useful, as I tell in my book. The book I wrote was a faithful record of the horrible after- math of the battle, as I saw it, but it needed an introduction to explain its purpose. It was never intended to be an account of the great battle; what I said of that was only to be taken as a foreword, essential at the date when my book appeared. This was quite well understood. I purposely called my book “A Memory of Solferino”, not “Memories of Solferino”, because what haunted me was the memory of the terrible condition of the thousands of wounded I saw at Castiglione, brought there from the various theatres of fighting on June 24. I never claimed to be an historian, for that I was not. As an introduction I told only what everyone already knew about that famous day. This was a necessary prelude to my subject. I had no thought of writing a traveller’s tale, nor did I wish to put myself in the limelight. I tried to be as unsensational as possible, and this was recognized by General Trochu in one of the first com¬ mittee meetings at which he presided, at the Duc de Fesensac’s. That venerable survivor of the wars of the First Empire said then, in my presence: “M. Dunant has said less than the truth.” This was in the rue d’Astorg—weeks before the first general meeting of the founder members of the Committee in the rue de Londres— where M. François Bartholomy, President of the Orleans Rail¬ road, had kindly put his company’s council room at my disposal. Comte Emmanuel le Camus, Secretary-General of the Charity Organization Society, is the sole survivor of this period of small beginnings. In Cavriana, it was M. Charles Robert, an official of the Council of State whom the Emperor had taken to the war as one of his secretaries, who received me so courteously and was most sympathetic when I told him about the dreadful state of the wounded whom I had seen at Castiglione. [.Kindly communicated by M. Maurice Dunant, of Geneva.]