It was, on that day, a destiny decreed in the history of mankind, when an elegant gentleman stepped down from his carriage in the year 1859 and threw himself into the midst of the melee of Solferino. The man's name was Henri Dunant, and in that historic slaughter he endured hours that changed the course of his life: the successful young financier was transformed into an apostle of mercy.

Half a century has passed since then, and Dunant's name echoes in every corner of the world, for it was written for him to found the greatest world society for the service of mankind.

Dunant set out one day in haste, seeking an interview with Napoleon III, Emperor of France, who was at the head of a French army fighting in northern Italy, and he caught up with him at Solferino. On that day blood was flowing, spilled over seventy square miles of the plains of Lombardy, in one of the greatest massacres of history. King Victor Emmanuel II was at the head of an army of fifty thousand fighting men of the people of Piedmont; he had sworn to drive the Austrians out of Italy, and Louis Napoleon had come out to his aid with a hundred thousand French fighting men. As for the Austrians, they numbered a hundred and sixty thousand, commanded by the young Emperor Franz Joseph, then twenty-nine years of age.

When Dunant halted at the town of Castiglione behind the French lines, he kept watching the wounded coming back in long files, in wooden carts that jolted painfully. In the battle, which lasted fifteen hours, some forty-five thousand men fell dead, and most of them remained where they fell, with no one to care for them. The medical-service men in the armies of both sides were powerless to act, for they were not prepared for so great a number of casualties; every house and every place of worship in Castiglione became a hospital, and gangrene and tetanus spread among them frightfully.

Dunant could not bear to remain aloof. He forgot the mission for which he had come. This financier, thirty-one years of age, formed a battalion of three hundred men, soldiers and townsfolk, to rescue the wounded and care for them, and himself took command of it.

He made enemy and friend equal in his care, saying:

"We are all brothers!" That cry ran through the whole town, and it was destined to run afterwards through the whole world. And when donations began to pour in upon him, he slipped away and vanished from sight.

Dunant was the descendant of a distinguished Swiss family of the middle ranks of the people, renowned for works of piety and charity. He received his education in the best Swiss schools, and afterwards entered the service of one of the banking houses of Switzerland.

When his period of training was over, he founded a company with a capital of a million francs to erect four flour mills in Algeria. But Dunant was negligent, and failed to obtain the concession for the water power for those mills. So he sought an interview with Louis Napoleon at Solferino to obtain that concession — but he did not succeed.