They were simply reported as 'missing'; whether dead or a deserter, no one could tell.

She had spent weeks at Andersonville the summer after the war, identifying and marking the graves there.

She marked over twelve thousand.

So when these letters came imploring her aid, she began the search, visiting the old prisons, and trenches and hospitals, until she removed from twenty thousand names the possible suspicion that the men who bore them had been deserters.
"No wonder that she came to Europe completely broken down in health, so exhausted by her long, severe labours that her physicians told her she must rest several years.

But hardly was she settled here in Switzerland when the Franco-Prussian war broke out, and the Red Cross sought her aid, knowing how valuable her long experience in nursing would be to them.