Slaughterhouse-five, Or The Children's Crusade A Duty-dance with Death

All this happened, more or less. The war parts are true, anyway. There was a struggle to write about the destruction of Dresden, a city I saw burned to the ground as a young prisoner of war. For years, the words wouldn't come. When I tried to call my old war buddy, Bernard V. O'Hare, to remember, his wife Mary grew cold and angry. “You were just babies then!” she said. “But you're not going to write it that way, are you? You'll pretend you were men instead of babies, and you'll be played in the movies by Frank Sinatra and John Wayne… and war will look just wonderful.” So I gave her my word: there would be no part for John Wayne. I would call it *The Children's Crusade*. This story is a failure, and had to be. It is so short and jumbled and jangled because there is nothing intelligent to say about a massacre. Everything is supposed to be very quiet, except for the birds. And what do the birds say? All there is to say about a massacre, things like “Poo-tee-weet?”

Listen: Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time. He is a funny-looking optometrist from Ilium, New York, who has been thrown through the full arc of his life, from his birth to his death and all the moments in between. He goes to sleep a senile widower and awakens on his wedding day. He walks through a door in 1955 and comes out another one in 1941. He is spastic in time, with no control over where he is going next, a man in a constant state of stage fright. He says he was first unstuck during the war, long before he was kidnapped by a flying saucer from the planet Tralfamadore. There, he was displayed naked in a zoo and mated with a movie star named Montana Wildhack. It was the Tralfamadorians who explained it all to him: all moments, past, present, and future, have always existed and always will. They can look at all of time the way one might look at a stretch of the Rocky Mountains. When a Tralfamadorian sees a corpse, he thinks only that the person is in bad condition in that particular moment, but is just fine in plenty of other moments. So he simply shrugs and says what they say about dead people, which is, “So it goes.”

The war finds Billy as a chaplain's assistant, a powerless figure of fun. During the Battle of the Bulge, he is lost behind German lines, a filthy flamingo in cheap civilian shoes, tagging along with two scouts and a brutish antitank gunner named Roland Weary. Weary is a stupid, fat, and mean boy who fancies himself, along with the scouts, one of the “Three Musketeers,” saving Billy's life again and again. In truth, he only torments Billy, kicking and cursing him to keep him moving. “You guys go on without me,” Billy says, again and again, wishing only to be left alone. After the scouts ditch them, Weary beats Billy senseless in a frozen creekbed, only to be interrupted by five German soldiers and a police dog. Weary is captured, and his fine combat boots are taken from him. In the days that follow, locked in a crowded boxcar, his feet turn to gangrene. As he dies, he tells everyone who will listen that Billy Pilgrim is the one who killed him. A small, vicious car thief named Paul Lazzaro promises to avenge him. So it goes.

The journey by train is a slow crawl across Germany, a coffin on wheels where men excrete into their helmets and the living nestle like spoons with the dead. On the ninth day, a hobo dies, his last words an insistence that “This ain't bad.” So it goes. When the doors are finally opened, the survivors emerge into a prison camp, a sea of dying Russians. There they are met by a miracle: a compound of fifty middle-aged English officers, clean and ruddy and strong, who have been prisoners since the start of the war. They sing “Hail, Hail, the Gang's All Here” as they welcome the skeletal Americans into a shed transformed into a banquet hall, with glowing stoves, fresh-baked bread, and golden soup. That night, they stage a musical version of *Cinderella*. Billy, delirious with morphine in the camp hospital, watches as one of the ugly stepsisters, a man in drag, laments, “Goodness me, the clock has struck - Alackday, and fuck my luck.”

From the camp, the Americans are sent to Dresden, an open city, a place of untouched beauty. “It's Oz,” someone whispers, seeing the intricate, enchanted skyline. Their new home is a slaughterhouse, Schlachthof-fünf. They are put to work in a factory that makes enriched malt syrup for pregnant women. The work is easy, and the city is peaceful. Sirens wail every day, but the bombers are always bound for someplace else. The men secretly spoon the syrup, a sweet, smoky taste of life. A high school teacher named Edgar Derby, a good and gentle man, is elected their leader. He is forty-four years old and has a son fighting in the Pacific. He is filled with a mournful, patriotic dignity. He will not survive the war.

On the night of February 13, 1945, the sirens howl, but this time they are for Dresden. The Americans and their guards take shelter in a deep meat locker, hollowed out of living rock beneath the slaughterhouse. Above them, they hear the sounds of giant footsteps as sticks of high-explosive bombs walk across the city. Then comes the fire. When they emerge the next day, the sun is an angry pinhead in a black sky. Dresden is gone. It is like the moon, a landscape of minerals and low, graceful curves of stone. There are to be no moon men at all. The guards, in their shock, look like a silent barbershop quartet. Small logs litter the ground, which turn out to be the charred remains of people caught in the fire-storm. So it goes.

For days, the prisoners become corpse miners, digging into the ruins to retrieve the dead. At first, the shelters they uncover are like wax museums, but soon the bodies liquefy, and the stink is like roses and mustard gas. The work is ended with flamethrowers. In the midst of this, Edgar Derby is found with a teapot he took from the ruins. He is arrested for plundering, given a trial, and executed by a firing squad. So it goes. When the war finally ends, Billy and the others emerge from their captivity. The trees are leafing out. A wagon stands abandoned, drawn by two horses with bleeding mouths and broken hooves. As Billy watches the suffering animals, he weeps for the first time in the war. A bird says to him, “Poo-tee-weet?”

Years later, Billy is the sole survivor of a plane crash. His wife, Valencia, dies in a car accident while rushing to his side. So it goes. In the hospital, he lies next to a historian writing about the very air raid he survived, a man who insists the bombing of Dresden “had to be done.” It is after this crash that Billy begins to tell his story to the world, writing letters to the newspaper and appearing on talk radio, trying to explain the truths he learned on Tralfamadore. His children think he is senile. “Father, Father, Father,” his daughter says, “what are we going to do with you?” But Billy knows what will happen. He has seen his own death, an assassination in 1976 at the hands of an aging Paul Lazzaro, fulfilling his promise to Roland Weary.

Billy is not afraid. He knows that death is just a bad moment, that he will always be alive in the past: as a boy at the Grand Canyon, terrified of falling in; as a young optometrist proposing to his large, unlovely wife; as a prisoner watching Cinderella's silver boots gleam under a golden throne. He will always be in the zoo on Tralfamadore, nestled with Montana Wildhack and their child, safe under a geodesic dome. He has been given a secret for surviving the traumas of his life: to ignore the awful times and concentrate on the good ones.

And so, the story ends where it began, with a man trying to make sense of a massacre. I have told my sons that they are not to take part in massacres, and that the news of massacres of enemies is not to fill them with satisfaction or glee. When I went back to Dresden, years after the war, the city looked a lot like Dayton, Ohio. The German taxi driver who showed us the old slaughterhouse had lost his mother in the fire. So it goes. He sent a Christmas card that wished for a world of peace and freedom, “if the accident will.” In the end, after all the destruction, after all the attempts to explain and justify, there is only the quiet of the aftermath. And the birds. And the question one of them asks of Billy Pilgrim. *Poo-tee-weet?*