Jersey-and said so.
One time on maneuvers Billy was playing 'A Mighty Fortress Is Our God,' with music
by Johann Sebastian Bach and words by Martin Luther. It was Sunday morning. Billy and
his chaplain had gathered a congregatation of about fifty soldiers on a Carolina hillside.
An umpire appeared. There were umpires everywhere, men who said who was winning
or losing the theoretical battle, who was alive and who was dead.
The umpire had comical news. The congregation had been theoretically spotted from
the air by a theoretical enemy. They Were all theoretically dead now. The theoretical
corpses laughed and ate a hearty noontime meal.
Remembering this incident years later, Billy was struck by what a Tralfamadorian
adventure with death that had been, to be dead and to eat at the same time.
Toward the end of maneuvers., Billy was given an emergency furlough home because
his father, a barber in Ilium, New York, was shot dead by a friend while they were out
hunting deer. So it goes.
When Billy got back from his furlough., there were orders for him to go overseas. He
was needed in the headquarters company of an infantry regiment fighting in
Luxembourg. The regimental chaplain's assistant had been killed in action. So it goes.
When Billy joined the regiment, it was in the process of being destroyed by the
Germans in the famous Battle of the Bulge. Billy never even got to meet the chaplain he
was supposed to assist, was never even issued a steel helmet and combat boots. This was
in December of 1944, during the last mighty German attack of the war.
Billy survived, but he was a dazed wanderer far behind the new German lines. Three
other wanderers, not quite so dazed, allowed Billy to tag along. Two of them were scouts,
and one was an antitank gunner. They were without food or maps. Avoiding Germans
they were delivering themselves into rural silences ever more profound. They ate snow.
They went Indian file. First came the scouts, clever, graceful quiet. They had rifles.
Next came the antitank gunner, clumsy and dense, warning Germans away with a Colt
.45 automatic in one hand and a trench knife in the other.
Last came Billy Pilgrim, empty-handed, bleakly ready for death. Billy was
Preposterous-six feet and three inches tall, with a chest and shoulders like a box of
kitchen matches. He had no helmet, no overcoat, no weapon and no boots. On his feet
were cheap, low-cut civilian shoes which he had bought for his father's funeral. Billy had
lost a heel, which made him bob up-and-down, up-and-down. The involuntary dancing up
and down, up and down, made his hip joints sore.
Billy was wearing a thin field jacket, a shirt and trousers of scratchy wool, and long
underwear that was soaked with sweat. He was the only one of the four who had a beard.
It was a random, bristly beard, and some of the bristles were white, even though Billy
was only twenty-one years old. He was also going bald. Wind and cold and violent
exercise had turned his face crimson.
He didn't look like a soldier at all. He looked like a filthy flamingo.
And on the third day of wandering, somebody shot at the four from far away-shot four
times as they crossed a narrow brick road. One shot was for the scouts. The next one was
for the antitank gunner, whose name was Roland Weary.
The third bullet was for the filthy flamingo, who stopped dead center in the road when
the lethal bee buzzed past his ear. Billy stood there politely, giving the marksman another
chance. It was his addled understanding of the rules of warfare that the marksman should
be given a second chance. The next shot missed Billy's kneecaps by inches, going endon-
end, from the sound of it.
Roland Weary and the scouts were safe in a ditch, and Weary growled at Billy, 'Get
out of the road, you dumb motherfucker.' The last word was still a novelty in the speech
of white people in 1944. It was fresh and astonishing to Billy, who had never fucked
anybody-and it did its job. It woke him up and got him off the road.
'Saved your life again, you dumb bastard,' Weary said to Billy in the ditch. He had
been saving Billy's fife for days, cursing him, kicking him, slapping him, making him
move. It was absolutely necessary that cruelty be used, because Billy wouldn't do
anything to save himself. Billy wanted to quit. He was cold, hungry, embarrassed,
incompetent. He could scarcely distinguish between sleep and wakefulness now, on the
third day, found no important differences either, between walking and standing still.
He wished everybody would leave him alone. 'You guys go on without me,' he said
again and again.
Weary was as new to war as Billy. He was a replacement, too. As a part of a gun crew,
he had helped to fire one shot in anger-from a 57-millimeter antitank gun. The gun made
a ripping sound like the opening of a zipper on the fly of God Almighty. The gun lapped
up snow and vegetation with a blowtorch feet long. The flame left a black arrow on the
ground, showing the Germans exactly where the gun was hidden. The shot was a miss.
What had been missed was a Tiger tank. It swiveled its 88-millimeter snout around
sniffingly, saw the arrow on the ground. It fired. It killed everybody on the gun crew but
Weary. So it goes.
Roland Weary was only eighteen, was at the end of an unhappy childhood spent
mostly in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He had been unpopular in Pittsburgh. He had been
unpopular because he was stupid and fat and mean, and smelled like bacon no matter how
much he washed. He was always being ditched in Pittsburgh by people who did not want
him with them.
It made Weary sick to be ditched. When Weary was ditched, le would find somebody
who was even more unpopular than himself, and he would horse around with that person
for a while, pretending to be friendly. And then he would find some pretext for beating
the shit out of him.
It was a pattern. It was a crazy, sexy, murderous relationship Weary entered into with
people he eventually beat up. He told hem about his father's collection of guns and
swords and torture instruments and leg irons and so on. Weary's father, who was a
plumber, actually did collect such things, and his collection was insured for four thousand
dollars. He wasn't alone. He belonged to a big club composed of people who collected
things like that.
Weary's father once gave Weary's mother a Spanish thumbscrew in - working
condition-for a kitchen paperweight. Another time he gave her a table lamp whose base
was a model one foot high of the famous 'Iron Maiden of Nuremburg.' The real Iron
Maiden was a medieval torture instrument, a sort of boiler which was shaped like a
woman on the outside-and lined with spikes. The front of the woman was composed of
two hinged doors. The idea was to put a criminal inside and then close the doors slowly.
There were two special spikes where his eyes would be. There was a drain in the bottom
to let out all the blood.
So it goes.
Weary had told Billy Pilgrim about the Iron Maiden, about the drain in the bottom-and
what that was for. He had talked to Billy about dum-dums. He told him about his father's
Derringer pistol, which could be carried in a vest pocket, which was yet capable of
making a hole in a man 'which a bull bat could fly through without touching either wing.'
Weary scornfully bet Billy one time that he didn't even know what a blood gutter was.
Billy guessed that it was the drain in the bottom of the Iron Maiden, but that was wrong.
A blood gutter, Billy learned, was the shallow groove in the side of the blade of a sword
or bayonet.
Weary told Billy about neat tortures he'd read about or seen in the movies or heard on
the radio-about other neat tortures he himself had invented. One of the inventions was
sticking a dentist's drill into a guy's ear. He asked Billy what he thought the worst form of
execution was. Billy had no opinion. The correct answer turned out to be this: 'You stake
a guy out on an anthill in the desert-see? He's face upward, and you put honey all over his
balls and pecker, and you cut off his eyelids so he has to stare at the sun till he dies.' So it
goes.
Now, lying in the ditch with Billy and the scouts after having been shot at, Weary
made Billy take a very close look at his trench knife. It wasn't government issue. It was a
present from his father. It had a ten-inch blade that was triangular 'in 'cross section. Its
grip consisted of brass knuckles, was a chain of rings through which Weary slipped his
stubby fingers. The rings weren't simple. They bristled with spikes.
Weary laid the spikes along Billy's cheek, roweled the cheek with savagely
affectionate restraint. 'How'd you-like to be hit with this-hm? Hmmmmmmmmm?' he
wanted to know.
'I wouldn't,' said Billy.
'Know why the blade's triangular?'
'No.'
'Makes a wound that won't close up.'
'Oh.'
'Makes a three-sided hole in a guy. You stick an ordinary knife in a guy-makes a slit.
Right? A slit closes right up. Right?
'Right.'
'Shit. What do you know? What the hell they teach you in college?'
'I wasn't there very long.' said Billy, which was true. He had had only six months of
college and the college hadn't been a regular college, either. It had been the night school
of the Ilium School of Optometry.
"Joe College,' said Weary scathingly.
Billy shrugged.
'There's more to life than what you read in books.' said Weary. 'You'll find that out.'
Billy made no reply to this, either, there in the ditch, since he didn't want the
conversation to go on any longer than necessary. He was dimly tempted to say, though,
that he knew a thing or two about gore. Billy, after all, had contemplated torture and
hideous wounds at the beginning and the end of nearly every day of his childhood. Billy
had an extremely gruesome crucifix hanging on the wall of his little bedroom in Ilium. A
military surgeon would have admired the clinical fidelity of the artist's rendition of all
Christ's wounds-the spear wound, the thorn wounds, the holes that were made by the iron
spikes. Billy's Christ died horribly. He was pitiful.
So it goes.
Billy wasn't a Catholic, even though he grew up with a ghastly crucifix on the wall.
His father had no religion. His mother was a substitute organist for several churches
around town. She took Billy with her whenever she played, taught him to play a little,
too. She said she was going to join a church as soon as she decided which one was right.
She never did decide. She did develop a terrific hankering for a crucifix, though. And
she bought one from a Sante Fé gift shop during a trip the little family made out West
during the Great Depression. Like so many Americans, she was trying to construct a life
that made sense from things she found in gift shops.
And the crucifix went up on the wall of Billy Pilgrim.
The two scouts, loving the walnut stocks of their rifles in the ditch, whispered that it
was time to move out again. Ten minutes had gone by without anybody's coming to see if
they were hit or not, to finish them off. Whoever had shot was evidently far away and all
alone.
And the four crawled out of the ditch without drawing any more fire. They crawled
into a forest like the big, unlucky mammals they were. Then they stood up and began to
walk quickly. The forest was dark and cold. The pines were planted in ranks and files.
There was no undergrowth. Four inches of unmarked snow blanketed the ground. The
Americans had no choice but to leave trails in the show as unambiguous as diagrams in a
book on ballroom dancing-step, slide, rest-step, slide,-rest.
'Close it up and keep it closed!' Roland Weary warned Billy Pilgrim as they moved out.
Weary looked like Tweedledum or Tweedledee, all bundled up for battle. He was short
and thick.
He had every piece of equipment he had ever been issued, every present he'd received
from home: helmet, helmet liner, wool cap, scarf, gloves, cotton undershirt, woolen
undershirt, wool shirt, sweater, blouse, jacket, overcoat, cotton underpants, woolen
underpants, woolen trousers, cotton socks, woolen socks, combat boots, gas mask,
canteen, mess kit, first-aid kit, trench knife, blanket, shelter-half , raincoat, bulletproof
Bible, a pamphlet entitled 'Know Your Enemy,' another pamphlet entitled 'Why We
Fight' and another pamphlet of German phrases rendered in English phonetics,, which
would enable Weary to ask Germans questions such as 'Where is your headquarters?' and
'How many howitzers have you?' Or to tell them, 'Surrender. Your situation is hopeless,'
and so on.
Weary had a block of balsa wood which was supposed to be a foxhole pillow. He had a
prophylactic kit containing two tough condoms 'For the Prevention of Disease Only!' He
had a whistle he wasn't going to show anybody until he got promoted to corporal. He had
a dirty picture of a woman attempting sexual intercourse with a Shetland pony. He had
made Billy Pilgrim admire that picture several times.
The woman and the pony were posed before velvet draperies which were fringed with
deedlee-balls. They were flanked by Doric columns. In front of one column was a potted
palm. The Picture that Weary had was a print of the first dirty photograph in history. The
word photography was first used in 1839, and it was in that year, too, that Louis J. M.
Daguerre revealed to the French Academy that an image formed on a silvered metal plate
covered with a thin film of silver iodide could be developed in the presence of mercury
vapor.
In 1841, only two years later, an assistant to Daguerre, André Le Fèvre, was arrested in
the Tuileries Gardens for attempting to sell a gentleman a picture of the woman and the
pony. That was where Weary bought his picture,, too-in the Tuileries. Le Fèvre argued
that the picture was fine art, and that his intention was to make Greek mythology come
alive. He said that columns and the potted palm proved that.
