The Red Cross is one of the most familiar of all modern images. Yet the organization which gave birth to it 130 years ago and today presides over a movement of 220 million people is in many ways almost entirely unknown.

The International Committee of the Red Cross, from its headquarters in Switzerland, monitors the laws of war; visits prisoners-of-war and political detainees; acts as go-between and negotiator during hijackings and hostage takings; campaigns to control weapons; takes relief and medical help to the victims of conflicts; traces the 'disappeared'; puts families separated by war in touch with each other and acts as custodian of the Geneva Conventions; and it does all these things silently, often in secret and without publicity.

Like a riddle, the signals it gives out are contradictory. The International Committee:

• calls itself international; yet is a private Swiss company, based in Geneva and governed by twenty-five Swiss citizens.
• prides itself on being closer to victims than any other humanitarian organization; yet does not speak for them.
• exists to help and heal the victims of war; yet does not itself lobby against war.
• has its roots in precedence and institutional memory; yet thrives on action and sometimes seems curiously uninterested in history.
• employs 'delegates' --- some eight hundred in 1997, for the most part Swiss --- who gather information about torture, 'disappearances' and summary executions that no one else has access to; yet under its mandate cannot reveal to the public or media what they know.
• fears the word 'politics'; yet is one of the shrewdest political actors of our day.
• has no enforceable authority; yet its moral power is, and always has been, considerable,

If the International Committee did not exist, no one would be able, in the 1990s, to invent it. Who today would put the power to monitor and criticize all the governments of the world in the hands of a small band of co-opted elderly Swiss lawyers and bankers? Its mandate is unique and its composition a quirk of history.

This book is not an institutional history of the Red Cross, nor of the national societies that make up its membership, nor even of the International Committee itself. Rather, it is the story of how a young speculator from Geneva called Henri Dunant had a dream and how five Swiss citizens, finding that they shared a conviction that it was the duty of states to mitigate the horrors of war, decided to found an organization that quickly became a movement larger, more varied and more influential than any other outside organized religion.

Dunant's Dream makes no attempt to be comprehensive --- South America, the war in Vietnam, the work of the Federation of the Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, the African famines are all barely touched on, and only some of the International Committee's many activities in the Second World War are covered --- but chooses from 130 years of war and natural disasters those conflicts, issues and moral dilemmas which seem to have had the most determining effect on the growth of the modern Red Cross. Given the number of national societies, it has only been possible to describe a few of them in any detail: their stories will have to stand for the others.

Dunant's Dream is a book about the people --- eccentric adventurers, moralists, visionaries and canny political manipulators --- who shaped the International Committee's identity and saw and recognized their own dreams in Dunant's creation. There is something fascinating as well as admirable about those whose lives revolve around the misfortunes of others. It is also a book about war, and what successive generations have thought could and should be done to control it and to lessen the sufferings it causes.

For the sake of simplicity, the name 'International Committee of the Red Cross' is throughout abbreviated to International Committee. Apart from official reports supplied by the International Committee already in English, the translations are all my own.

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