Trafika Europe 14 - Italian Piazza

The Animal Gazer

requirements of a good stretcher-bearer are del icacy and precision. Precision in the sense of the abi l ity to walk at an even pace, in concert with one’s partner, and to keep the stretcher as horizontal as possible. The steps to the entrance required special attention: you had to be careful to carry the stretcher headf irst when you were going up, and feetf irst when you were going down. Del icacy was needed when the stretcher was set down on the ground. And then there was a third qual ity that would come in handy for anyone equipped with it: resi l ience, i f not a certain impermeabi l ity, before human suffering. Atop the pink marble pavement of the Feestpaleis, where the wounded had been laid out, there was an uninterrupted coming and going of stretcher-bearers. When someone died, it was their job to wrap the corpse in a bedsheet and add it to the pi le that was heaped in what unti l a short time before had been the animal cages. Rembrandt had come to spend his whole day, every day, amid the moans and the howls of the suffering and the death rattle of the moribund, and he had learned that nothing is more consol ing than the possibi l ity of assisting one’s fel low man in his moment of pain. But in his case it was a brief, temporary consolation. THE ARTILLERY BARRAGE and the shots f ired by two guns mounted on an armored train were not enough to hold the forti f ied positions. The f looding of the countryside around Antwerp slowed but did not halt the enemy ’s advance. The two defensive f lanks were broken and f inal ly col lapsed, one after the other. On the night of

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