along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.^124124
W. H. Auden, Poems Selected by John Fuller (London: Faber and Faber, 2000), 29. Here
only the torturer seems truly guilty, and his horse truly innocent. For an interesting reading
of Dunant’s A Memory of Solferino , which concludes by highlighting Dunant’s narrative
device of horses that, more merciful than men, try to pick their way their way through the
prostrate victims with a kind of humanitarian impartiality, see Joseph R. Slaughter,
"Humanitarian Reading", in Humanitarianism and Suffering: The Mobilization of Empathy ,
ed. Richard Ashby Wilson and Richard D. Brown (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2009), 106.