Billy looked at the clock on the gas stove.
He had an hour to kill before the saucer came.
He went into the living room, swinging the bottle like a dinner bell,
turned on the television. He came slightly unstuck in time,
saw the late movie backwards, then forwards again.
It was a movie about American bombers in the Second World War
and the gallant men who flew them.
Seen backwards by Billy, the story went like this:
American planes, full of holes and wounded men and corpses,
took off backwards from an airfield in England. Over France,
a few German fighter planes flew at them backwards,
sucked bullets and shell fragments
from some of the planes and crewmen.
The bombers opened their bomb-bay doors,
exerted a miraculous magnetism which shrunk the fires,
gathered them into cylindrical steel containers,
and lifted the containers into the bellies of the planes.
The Germans below had miraculous devices of their own,
which were long steel tubes. They used them to suck
more fragments from the crewmen and planes.
When the bombers got back to their base,
the steel cylinders were taken from the racks
and shipped back to the United States of America,
where factories were operating night and day,
dismantling the cylinders,
separating the dangerous contents into minerals.
Touchingly, it was mainly women who did this work.
The minerals were then shipped to specialists in remote areas.
It was their business to put them into the ground,
to hide them cleverly,
so they would never hurt anybody ever again.
The American fliers turned in their uniforms,
became high school kids. And Hitler turned into a baby,
Billy Pilgrim supposed.
That wasn't in the movie. Billy was extrapolating.
Everybody turned into a baby, and all humanity,
without exception, conspired biologically
to produce two perfect people named Adam and Eve,
he supposed.
~ Kurt Vonnegut
from Slaughterhouse Five
with thanks to love is a place
As posted here in The Beauty we Love.
I am all for peace, war is such a waste! Take care, enjoy your day!
ReplyDeleteWhen I read Slaughterhouse Five, I was in high school in the late 50s. I guess many of my teachers and other students' parents might have had harrowing stories about WW II, but I never heard them. It was my introduction to learning about the last war through literature. Later it would be through TV shows about Korea and then finally Viet Nam. I still get tidbits about other "conflicts" and all make me shiver.
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