Nairobi — Five volunteers from the Kenya Red Cross Society are in Italy to join the rest of the world in celebrating the 150th anniversary of a battle that led to the establishment of the universal movement for humanitarian work and the law that regulates the conduct of war.

The Battle of Solferino, which took place in a small town in northern Italy on June 24, 1859, was one of the most savage ever seen in Europe. After a day-long fighting 6,000 men lay dead and more than 35,000 were wounded or missing.

It was a horrific bloodbath. Henry Dunant, a Swiss businessman turned idealist and perhaps the world's first citizen journalist, witnessed the carnage. He recorded the horrific bloodbath in vivid details in A Memory of Solferino, which he self-published in Geneva in 1862.

"NO QUARTER WAS GIVEN; IT WAS sheer butchery; a struggle between savage beasts, maddened with blood and fury," he writes in his book which became an instant hit in Europe and today has been published in more than 17 languages.

The Battle of Solferino was an insane, Mungiki-like war in which bloodthirsty soldiers killed "like tigers that have tasted blood".

There was even an African regiment, brought in by the French army which was fighting on the side of Italians against the army of the Austrian-Hungarian Empire, in what was a second war for Italian independence.

The Algerian sharpshooters "rushed at their enemies with African rage and Mussulman fanaticism, killing frantically."

In the next 120 years, A Memory of Solferino helped to change the rules that governed the conduct of war and led to the formation of the International Committee of the Red Cross and Red Cross Societies, the worldwide humanitarian movement that aids victims of the horrors of war, conflicts and disasters.

The Battle of Solferino was a hand-to-hand struggle. Soldiers trampled each other under foot, killing their enemies with their rifle butts, crushing skulls, ripping bellies open with sabres and bayonets.

"Even the wounded fight to the last gasp," writes Dunant. "When they have no weapon left, they seize their enemies by the throat and tear them with their teeth."

The wounded and dying were shot and bayoneted. The battle left behind thousands lying helpless on the naked ground in their own blood.

"The stillness of the night was broken by groans, by stifled sights of anguish and suffering," writes Dunant who, helped by local women, cared for the wounded and dying for three days and three nights.

Dunant also discusses in his book the need to establish national societies and a law to be adhered to by all nations, to relieve the suffering of war victims and to make wars more "humane". He proposes the creation of what later came into being as the Red Cross and the Geneva Convention of 1864.

His ideas and vision led to the signing of the Geneva Convention, the foundation of the modern humanitarian law.

The Geneva Convention was amended and expanded in 1906, 1929, 1949 and in 1977 so that today we have four Geneva Conventions and additional protocol, which give protection to the most vulnerable in times of war and internal conflicts, as well as in peacetime.

Virtually all nations subscribe to the conventions.

In 1901, Dunant was awarded the first Nobel Peace Prize, which he shared with Frédéric Passy, the French economist and pacifist. His legacy brings us back to the Kenya Red Cross Society.

In the aftermath of the violence after the December 2007 elections, the Kenya Red Cross Society carried out commendable humanitarian work in the field to alleviate the violence victims' suffering.

IT DISTRIBUTED HUNDREDS OF LORRY loads of food and provided psychosocial support to tens of thousands of victims of the violence and helped in the reconstruction of houses for them.

The society also responded to numerous other conflicts and national disasters. And two weeks ago, the Kenya National Commission on Human Rights awarded the society's secretary-general, Mr Abbas Gullet, the 2009 Utetezi (civil society) award.

The Kenya Red Cross is a child of the worldwide humanitarian movement inspired by Dunant. The society, along with 185 other Red Cross societies in other nations, owe their existence his ideas. His legacy is that individuals have the power to make a difference.